Labour Unions
The fall out from Labour's vote rigging scandal in Falkirk continues apace with more and more commentators joining the debate - which feels like vindication to me because I've been banging on for years about the undemocratic role that union bosses like Len McCluskey play inside the Labour Party.
Here's an offering from Philip Collins in the Times which makes a number of killer arguments - including the suggestion that trade union members (who pay the political levy) should simply be treated as 'full' party members - because that would prevent the Bubs (Britain's union bosses) from using them as cannon fodder during election and selection contests.
Now that sounds like a great idea if you ask me, because it would stop union bosses like Len McCluskey from claiming that they represent the political views of all of Unite's levy paying members - which is clearly ludicrous since Unite members will have a wide range of views about party politics (unlike Unite which only has eyes for Labour, of course).
An added bonus would be the fact that union members would have to think about paying the political levy and their support for Labour or otherwise - and as many have no idea they are paying such a levy in the first place - I suspect we would witness a much need 'sea change' in Labour/union relations.
Miliband must defeat Labour's union barons
By Philip Collins
Could it look any worse for Ed – losing control of his party to a public sector union that demands an end to cuts?
Who is the next person in the following sequence and why does it matter? Thomas Johnston, Alfred Balfour, William Baxter, Dennis Canavan, Eric Joyce. It matters because the identity of the next Labour MP for what is now the constituency of Falkirk has become a grave test of Ed Miliband’s leadership.
There are two huge obstacles in the way of Mr Miliband becoming Prime Minister and they are dramatised together in the obscure shenanigans in Falkirk. The first is that he has not persuaded the electorate that he cuts it as a leader. The second is that he is not trusted with the public finances or thought to understand the need for fiscal discipline. If the evil ghosts of Tory central office were themselves drafting the script to show Labour at its worst they could do no better than to portray Mr Miliband losing control of his party to a public sector union that demands there be no more cuts.
It is all very well for Mr Miliband to say, as he often has, that he is not the sort of leader who wishes to pick a fight with his party. He seems, though, not to have realised that his party, or at least that section of it that gave him his victory over his brother, is picking a fight with him. This is not an arcane internal dispute. It is a toxic story for Labour and Mr Miliband has to stamp on it at once. Focus groups now talk about the Labour Party as if new Labour were a mirage. The image they offer of Labour is the pre-Blair default setting of an assembly of losers.
The resignation yesterday of Tom Watson, MP, from the Shadow Cabinet was a small gift to the good people. It was dispiriting that, according to Mr Watson, Mr Miliband at first refused to accept his resignation. Mr Watson should never have been close to the Shadow Cabinet in the first place. He is too divisive a figure, too closely associated with Len McCluskey, the general secretary of Unite, with whom he once shared a flat. Whenever a dog barked in the night of Labour politics, one thought always occurred: Mr Watson, I presume.
The fake jocularity of Mr Watson’s resignation letter (the written equivalent of a Mickey Mouse tie) was an attempt to pretend he wants to spend more time at music festivals but the reference to Falkirk suggests that Mr Watson finally sensed that the walls were coming in on activities that every Labour activist knows about but few have been prepared to voice. However, the control that Unite exercises over parliamentary selections will not cease just because Mr Watson no longer has to spend his Tuesday morning in Shadow Cabinet listening to Stephen Twigg not quite being in favour of free schools.
The leak of the Unite strategy document from January 2012 has given their game away. Unite’s plan is to counter-attack its own party, to make it more class-bound, more expressly left-wing. It is a strategy of the most monumental electoral stupidity, as if the only thing that forced 37 per cent of the nation to vote Tory in 2010 was the absence of a wildly left-wing alternative. The plan will proceed, as in Falkirk, by fixing the selections for Unite candidates.
The specious Unite defence of its conduct is that it wishes to see more working-class people in Parliament. In truth, Unite operates an ideological test as well as a class identity test. I doubt today’s equivalent of Ernest Bevin would pass the ideological examination. There would be no place for Alan Milburn or Alan Johnson, working-class men who don’t think in the straight line required.
The truth is that those who wield power without intelligence do not want free-thinking original working-class people, of whom I am sure there are plenty who do need to be brought through the system. They want people who will understand that trade union sponsorship comes at the price of complete loyalty. Above even the desire to defend every perk and privilege of the public sector or to install an aimless form of class politics, what they most want is to be in charge. Like most control freaks, what they do with the power is by no means the whole point. It’s not enough for them to tell Labour what to do. They want to be there, in control.
Mr Miliband will not stop this just by his belated action in ordering an investigation into Falkirk and preventing unions from paying in bulk for members. He needs to escalate the row and he needs to win. Ever since the Osborne Judgment of 1909, there has been an argument about the political levy that trade unions charge their members to fund the Labour Party. It is safe to say that Unite does not exactly rush to advertise the political levy. Labour has always wanted the political levy to be paid until people make a conscious choice to opt out. Successive Tory governments have said that members really ought to be forced to opt in.
A Labour leader confident of ruling his own party — and a Labour leader who does not have that confidence will never command the country — should make trade unionists who tick the box full individual members of the party, each with a vote in leadership elections. That would break the power of the big barons, because affiliation fees would then come from individual Labour party members, not the union. The threat to withdraw the fees would no longer be meaningful.
The consequence of not acting is dismal. Labour cannot win an election projecting this sense of itself. And the Unite control of candidates is filling up the green benches with clones of Alfred Balfour, Labour MP in what is now Falkirk from 1945 to 1959. During his first eight years as an MP, Balfour did not utter a word. When he finally broke his silence he said simply: “People get up here from time to time and keep us here for hours on end, and I have said what’s the use of inflicting another torture upon the House?” In the further six years he served, he never spoke again. A similar period of silence on Unite’s part would be appreciated. It’s time for Ed Miliband to speak.
