Politically Dishonest

I listened to Ed Miliband set out his stall at the TUC yesterday for reforming Labour's relations with the trade unions and while I agreed with much of what the Labour leader had to say - there is no getting away from the fact that Ed's big speech was politically dishonest.

Because if he had made the same speech 3 years ago during the 2010 Labour leadership election - there is no way that Ed would have won the support of the 'big three' trade unions - GMB, Unite and Unison - whose votes effectively handed Ed the Labour crown.

Ed's passionate case for transforming Labour's affiliated trade union members into 'real' members is that - in future - union members must decide on an individual basis whether or not to donate their own money to the Labour Party.

In effect, turning Labour into a One Member One Vote Party - by ending the ridiculous claims of Britain's union bosses (the Bubs) to speak for ordinary union members on matters of party politics and which party, if any, union members actually support.

Now Ed would never dared to have said this back in 2010 in his pitch to become Labour leader - which depended crucially on the votes of trade union activists - yet at the TUC you could have been forgiven for thinking that this was Ed's older brother, David, speaking.

Interestingly, a YouGov poll was also released the other day which confirms that less than half of UK union members (45%) would vote for the Labour Party - and it stands to reason that this figure would be substantially less in Scotland once support for the SNP is factored into the equation.

So, in my view, while Ed Miliband is doing the right thing - he's doing it for all the wrong reasons.

If you ask me it's a bit like that old Morecambe & Wise sketch in which Eric grabs Andre Previn - the famous music conductor - by the scruff of his neck and insists "I'm playing all the right notes, but not necessarily in the right order!"   

Most members of trade unions affiliated to the Labour Party would NOT vote Labour if a general election were held this week, according to a YouGov analysis on the eve of Ed Miliband’s speech to the Trades Union Congress

On behalf of Channel 4 News, we have aggregated data from YouGov polls conducted since June 30. Together, we collected the voting intentions of 2,380 members of affiliated unions. Labour enjoys a massive lead. Excluding those who say ‘don’t know’ and ‘would not vote’, voting intentions are:

While union members divide fairly evenly on the current system by which unions finance the Labour Party, there is strong support for Ed Miliband’s proposed reforms. We asked:

Q. Ed Miliband wants to change how the unions donate funds to Labour. In the future the party will only accept affiliation fees from individual union members who positively decide to donate a part of their union membership fee to the Labour Party. They will then become individual members of the party. This will replace the current system where unions decide centrally how many of their levy-paying members to affiliate to the Labour Party. Do you support or oppose the changes Ed Miliband is proposing?

Fully 60% of members of affiliated unions support this as ‘a sensible way to make Labour more democratic’, while another 10% think Miliband ‘should go further and scrap all links with the trade unions’. Just 20% reject Miliband’s proposal on the grounds that ‘it will deprive the unions of influence they ought to continue to have’.

As for the two formal ways in which the trade unions influence Labour nationally:

• 61% of members of affiliated unions want the voting power of the unions at Labour’s national conference to be either reduced (39%) or abolished completely (22%)
• Just 22% of members of affiliated unions want union members to continue to have one-third of the vote in the electoral college that elects Labour’s leader. The most popular option is for an electoral college that divides 50-50 between Labour MPs and individual party members (including ‘trade union’ members who join the party under Miliband’s reforms). 15% want party members alone to choose party leaders, while 10% would give the power back to MPs, who used to elected party leaders until the system was changed in 1981.

These findings suggest that Ed Miliband’s reforms command the support of most members of affiliated unions – but that, given the level of support for Labour among these union members, one major reason why only a minority of union members support the present arrangements is because only a minority of them support Labour.

Image: Getty