Smart But Dumb
I never ceased to be amazed at the ability of intelligent people to say stupid things - so I took the following article by Seumas Milne in my stride though it does have to be said that the Guardian writer is talking drivel.
Because Labour's links with the trade unions - in their present form - are highly undemocratic and unrepresentative since the majority of ordinary union members don't support the Labour Party - and don't share the political views of their union leaders.
I think it's completely daft to say that 'Whatever the Labour leader does to "reform" the link, it will never satisfy his tormentors' - as if this is some kind of game when it's about doing the right thing and allowing individual members to speak for themselves.
I recently posted the following extract from a YouGov which confirms what everyone already knows - including Seamus Milne - that a minority of union members support the Labour Party and that the position is even more stark in Scotland where the SNP has been the most popular party in recent years.
So, if politics is about being truthful and honest - as well as advocating strongly held views - then the Labour Party should put its own house in order since that's the best way to turn up the heat on the funding arrangements of other parties, especially the Tories.
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
Labour's links with the unions are its greatest asset
The TUC speaks for mainstream Britain. The sooner Miliband digs himself out of this hole, the better for his party
By Seamus Milne
‘The policies backed by the TUC this week reflect public opinion and fill a gap in the opposition left by Labour's timidity.'
Photograph: Matt Cardy/Getty Images
You'd hardly know from the way it's reported, but the Trades Union Congress this week is by far the most representative of the political conferences taking place this month. The press has been full of its standard Alice in Wonderland routine of union "barons" and "bosses" and their "crippling" and "sinister" threats. But more than any of the main parties' stage-managed jamborees, the union conference actually looks and sounds like Britain.
In a country where 60% of the population regard themselves as working class, the unions give a voice to the majority largely missing from the political mainstream. And the things they're talking about are the things that matter for most of Britain: falling living standards in a country where George Osborne claims to have won the economic argument; the explosion of payday loans and rampant job insecurity; the desperate shortage of affordable housing and scandal of privatised social care.
Instead of the professional mannequins who will dominate the party conferences, it's the people at the sharp end who've been having their say: construction workers who have just won a battle against union blacklisting on the Crossrail project; outsourced council care workers on zero-hours contracts penalised if they spend more than 15 minutes with each client; North Sea oil workers who opt for Norwegian rigs to avoid the low-paid, deregulated British sector.
And the policies backed by the TUC this week – from public ownership of rail and progressive taxation to a crash housebuilding programme and strong rights at work – both reflect public opinion and fill a gap in the opposition left by Labour's timidity.
So when Ed Miliband yesterday defended six million trade unionists from David Cameron's slur that they are a "threat to our economy" and promised legislation to crack down on zero-hours contracts, he was connecting with mainstream Britain. But that was inevitably drowned out by the backwash of a week's fevered controversy about Labour's links with the unions.
It was clear from the moment of Miliband's leadership election victorycourtesy of tens of thousands of trade unionists' votes in 2010 that the union card would be played mercilessly against him – as a leader in the pocket of union "paymasters" – by the Conservatives and their media friends.
Never mind that real union influence on Labour policy remains marginal (how else can you explain the party's barely hedged commitment to Osborne's 2015-16 spending limits and 1% public sector pay cap?), or that union cash is far and away the cleanest and most accountable in British politics.
The pressure on Miliband to pick a fight with the unions, including from Labour's Blairite rump, was unrelenting. So when a local row erupted about supposed union vote-rigging in the parliamentary selection in Falkirk, the Labour leader obliged. What had taken place was "hateful", he declared. Unite officials were duly suspended, the police called in and Miliband announced plans for trade unionists to sign up individually rather than as part of a collective affiliation with the party.
But Falkirk was not what it seemed. The police dropped the case. Labour's internal report was flimsy, and didn't bear a moment's legal scrutiny. So last week the party was forced to exonerate Unite and reinstate its officials. But Miliband has stuck to his scheme – and with it the prospect of losing 90% of the party's affiliation income, as few union levy-payers have shown much enthusiasm for joining Labour as individuals.
To emphasise the point, the GMB general union announced it would be cutting its annual fees by over £1m. The dire financial implications for Labour – without any deal on spending caps with the Conservatives – are clear enough. The expectation is that Miliband is hoping to bring in state funding after the election to compensate, with all that would mean in terms of entrenching existing political structures.
But it's very far from being all about money. The union-Labour relationship is first and foremost a collective political one – and collectivism is in trade unionism's DNA. Getting more of the three million shop workers, nurses, lorry drivers and others who pay the political levy involved would be a boon for Labour, but if it were in place of the collective relationship, that link would quickly unravel.
Which is of course exactly what the Tories and their media allies want – Murdoch's Times yesterday demanded Miliband end the union "grip" on all levels of the party. Whatever the Labour leader does to "reform" the link, it will never satisfy his tormentors. The only way to face them down is to champion the relationship with the largest democratic organisations in the country and turn his fire on the Tories' corporate and City backers, who are of course under no obligation to opt in or out of anything.
Miliband's self-inflicted wound now threatens to dominate Labour politics until the special conference he's called next spring. That would be a calamitous own goal in the runup to an election. There are multiple compromises that could be reached which would combine greater individual rights for affiliated union members while maintaining the unions' collective role (two of the largest unions, Unison and the GMB, both already have a Labour opt-in element for their members). There's no reason why a basic agreement couldn't be reached in the next few weeks. The alternative could be eventual rupture.
It would certainly help in the meantime if Labour's leaders were to embrace some of the policies proposed by the new TUC general secretary Frances O'Grady on Monday: full employment and a cast-iron jobs guarantee for the young, for instance, a million new council and affordable homes, fair pay agreements negotiated by new wages councils, an end to health, social care and education privatisation, and national childcare and employment rights.
Last month Miliband again showed that he is prepared to take decisions which challenge genuinely powerful and vested interests when he played a key role in the defeat of David Cameron over the prime minister's rush to war against Syria. But as the hostility in Bournemouth today to what O'Grady called "a vanilla version of austerity" demonstrated, he's yet to convince Labour's prepared for the scale of change that the new economic model he's called for demands. He could start to do that at Labour's own conference in Brighton later this month. As he said himself yesterday, the stakes could not be higher.
You'd hardly know from the way it's reported, but the Trades Union Congress this week is by far the most representative of the political conferences taking place this month. The press has been full of its standard Alice in Wonderland routine of union "barons" and "bosses" and their "crippling" and "sinister" threats. But more than any of the main parties' stage-managed jamborees, the union conference actually looks and sounds like Britain.
In a country where 60% of the population regard themselves as working class, the unions give a voice to the majority largely missing from the political mainstream. And the things they're talking about are the things that matter for most of Britain: falling living standards in a country where George Osborne claims to have won the economic argument; the explosion of payday loans and rampant job insecurity; the desperate shortage of affordable housing and scandal of privatised social care.
Instead of the professional mannequins who will dominate the party conferences, it's the people at the sharp end who've been having their say: construction workers who have just won a battle against union blacklisting on the Crossrail project; outsourced council care workers on zero-hours contracts penalised if they spend more than 15 minutes with each client; North Sea oil workers who opt for Norwegian rigs to avoid the low-paid, deregulated British sector.
And the policies backed by the TUC this week – from public ownership of rail and progressive taxation to a crash housebuilding programme and strong rights at work – both reflect public opinion and fill a gap in the opposition left by Labour's timidity.
So when Ed Miliband yesterday defended six million trade unionists from David Cameron's slur that they are a "threat to our economy" and promised legislation to crack down on zero-hours contracts, he was connecting with mainstream Britain. But that was inevitably drowned out by the backwash of a week's fevered controversy about Labour's links with the unions.
It was clear from the moment of Miliband's leadership election victorycourtesy of tens of thousands of trade unionists' votes in 2010 that the union card would be played mercilessly against him – as a leader in the pocket of union "paymasters" – by the Conservatives and their media friends.
Never mind that real union influence on Labour policy remains marginal (how else can you explain the party's barely hedged commitment to Osborne's 2015-16 spending limits and 1% public sector pay cap?), or that union cash is far and away the cleanest and most accountable in British politics.
The pressure on Miliband to pick a fight with the unions, including from Labour's Blairite rump, was unrelenting. So when a local row erupted about supposed union vote-rigging in the parliamentary selection in Falkirk, the Labour leader obliged. What had taken place was "hateful", he declared. Unite officials were duly suspended, the police called in and Miliband announced plans for trade unionists to sign up individually rather than as part of a collective affiliation with the party.
But Falkirk was not what it seemed. The police dropped the case. Labour's internal report was flimsy, and didn't bear a moment's legal scrutiny. So last week the party was forced to exonerate Unite and reinstate its officials. But Miliband has stuck to his scheme – and with it the prospect of losing 90% of the party's affiliation income, as few union levy-payers have shown much enthusiasm for joining Labour as individuals.
To emphasise the point, the GMB general union announced it would be cutting its annual fees by over £1m. The dire financial implications for Labour – without any deal on spending caps with the Conservatives – are clear enough. The expectation is that Miliband is hoping to bring in state funding after the election to compensate, with all that would mean in terms of entrenching existing political structures.
But it's very far from being all about money. The union-Labour relationship is first and foremost a collective political one – and collectivism is in trade unionism's DNA. Getting more of the three million shop workers, nurses, lorry drivers and others who pay the political levy involved would be a boon for Labour, but if it were in place of the collective relationship, that link would quickly unravel.
Which is of course exactly what the Tories and their media allies want – Murdoch's Times yesterday demanded Miliband end the union "grip" on all levels of the party. Whatever the Labour leader does to "reform" the link, it will never satisfy his tormentors. The only way to face them down is to champion the relationship with the largest democratic organisations in the country and turn his fire on the Tories' corporate and City backers, who are of course under no obligation to opt in or out of anything.
Miliband's self-inflicted wound now threatens to dominate Labour politics until the special conference he's called next spring. That would be a calamitous own goal in the runup to an election. There are multiple compromises that could be reached which would combine greater individual rights for affiliated union members while maintaining the unions' collective role (two of the largest unions, Unison and the GMB, both already have a Labour opt-in element for their members). There's no reason why a basic agreement couldn't be reached in the next few weeks. The alternative could be eventual rupture.
It would certainly help in the meantime if Labour's leaders were to embrace some of the policies proposed by the new TUC general secretary Frances O'Grady on Monday: full employment and a cast-iron jobs guarantee for the young, for instance, a million new council and affordable homes, fair pay agreements negotiated by new wages councils, an end to health, social care and education privatisation, and national childcare and employment rights.
Last month Miliband again showed that he is prepared to take decisions which challenge genuinely powerful and vested interests when he played a key role in the defeat of David Cameron over the prime minister's rush to war against Syria. But as the hostility in Bournemouth today to what O'Grady called "a vanilla version of austerity" demonstrated, he's yet to convince Labour's prepared for the scale of change that the new economic model he's called for demands. He could start to do that at Labour's own conference in Brighton later this month. As he said himself yesterday, the stakes could not be higher.
