Controlling Hand

I was flicking through an old diary the other day - the one I kept back in 1999 during the last months of my time as Unison 's Head of Local Government in Scotland.

I came across the following entry from April which featured an old Unison colleague - Jim Devine - who went on to become the Labour MP for Livingston, of course. 

Wednesday 19 May 1999 

"At around 3pm I met a UNISON colleague, Jim Devine for a drink and to have a chat about a number of ongoing work issues. Jim told me that he had not seen the article from the Sunday Herald, but suspected it had been leaked by UNISON via a senior politician. He said that in the run up to the STUC Matt Smith had been contacted by Gordon Brown, Labour’s campaigns supremo during the elections, demanding that I be restrained."

The background to this diary entry is that just weeks before I had resigned from the Labour Party over a number of issues - including the UK Labour Government's decision to stick with the widely discredited Private Finance Initiative (PFI).

Now my resignation became something of a public affair - at least for a short time - as it took place in the run-up to the inaugural elections to the Scottish Parliament and in an otherwise dull campaign it was news that a senior union official felt it was time to part company with Labour.

But what made me laugh on re-reading my diary is the interest shown in what I was doing by such a senior Labour figure as Gordon Brown - who was, of course, Chancellor of the Exchequer at that time.

My Unison colleagues, Jim and Matt, were both Labour Party members as well - along with just about every other full-time union official I could name - either then or now.

Which brings me to my key point - many people believe that the trade unions call the shots and have too much influence inside the Labour Party - but this is looking at things through the wrong end of the telescope.

The real problem is that the Labour Party controls the big affiliated unions - GMB, Unison and Unite - because all of their senior officials and most of their branch activists are all Labour Party members.

So, they are not - particularly in Scotland - representative of ordinary union members, the majority of whom vote for political parties other than Labour. 

Yet for the most part the trade unions are run in the interests of the Labour Party and - as the fight for equal pay has shown - not in the interests of ordinary members.