Unrepresentative Minorities
The problem with this latest piece of nonsense writing from Seumas Milne is that he equates stronger links with the unions with the tiny number of trade unions members who share his own (i.e. Seumas Milne's) unrepresentative and old-fashioned political views.
Now people like Seumas and Bob Crow are perfectly entitled to their view of the world and the way things ought to be run, but let's stop pretending that this is shared by any more than a tiny fraction of ordinary union members - members of the RMT and every other union for that matter vote in just the same way as the rest of the population.
So in Scotland, for example, the majority of trade unions members support the SNP - the Labour Party having lost prime position many years ago.
And though Seumas and Bob Crow don't like to admit so, the fact of life is that lots of trade union members in England vote UKIP and it makes little sense to pretend otherwise - unless you're in favour of trade unions operation undemocratically, of course.
The word for what this is all about is 'vanguardism' which in plain language means that small, unrepresentative groups work together - normally in a highly organised and ideological way - to influence and control much larger groups or organisations.
For example, trade unions or political parties.
We need a counterweight to City and corporate power
Any further weakening of Labour's links with the unions will only deepen the crisis of representation in the political system
By Seumas Milne
‘Nothing short of the exemplary arrest of a few union leaders would satisfy some of Ed Miliband’s tormentors.' Illustration by Matt Kenyon Photograph: Guardian
Our political system is increasingly in the grip of corrupt corporate power. Whether it's the food industry dictating public health policy, school academy chains stuffing the pockets of directors' relatives, or the revolving-door appointments of politicians and civil servants to companies they previously favoured with contracts, it's the banks and corporations that call the shots in Whitehall and Westminster.
Most of David Cameron's Conservative party funding comes from the City. Former New Labour ministers, such as Alan Milburn – the ex-health secretary advising a venture capital firm involved in NHS privatisation, as well as both government and opposition – have won lucrative private sector contracts on the back of their years in office.
Meanwhile, the political parties outside parliament have drastically shrunk and are largely treated as a distraction from the serious business of power-broking and electoral marketing by the political elite. It's scarcely surprising that the public regard the whole carry-on as very little to do with them, or that there was such a strong reaction to the comedian Russell Brand's rejection of voting for parties whose differences were so "insignificant".
Since his election as Labour leader in 2010, Ed Miliband has gingerly tried to shift the terms of political trade and caused establishment apoplexy with his attacks on predatory capitalism and his plan to freeze energy prices. The Times reports corporate executives complaining that while Labour's Ed Balls and Chuka Umunna are "well regarded in corporate circles" and have been "heavily courted", they do not have "sufficient clout" to rein in Miliband.
That is the context of the permanent onslaught on Labour's links with the trade unions, the only force still connected to mainstream politics which sits outside the corporate merry-go-round and gives political access to working class people. That's why the media keeps up its Orwellian denunciation of elected union leaders as "bosses" and "barons", while company bosses are described as "business leaders" – and why every strike is treated as tantamount to high treason.
It's also why the only media and Westminster test of Miliband's Labour reforms is whether they cut union influence enough. At the moment they're not entirely sure, perhaps partly because most reporting of the issue is so wildly inaccurate. In any case, nothing short of the exemplary arrest of a few union leaders would satisfy some of Miliband's tormentors.
The reality is that the Labour leader was panicked into demanding sweeping changes to the union link by false allegations of rigging by the Unite union at the Falkirk parliamentary selection last summer. As the party's leaked internal report demonstrates, even the flaky evidence it provided did not back up those claims. What had in fact happened was that Unite had recruited several dozen industrial workers to the local party to help select a candidate who would break the monopoly of the existing parliamentary elite.
Miliband's reforms have avoided the more extreme options championed by Blairite diehards. But they risk failing in the Labour leader's aim of" letting people back into politics", quite apart from the threat to the party's income. True, the collective union link is maintained and MPs will lose their disproportionate voice in leadership elections.
But by setting up a new double hurdle for union political levy payers to keep the voting rights they already have, the danger is that fewer people will end up having a say than before. Just under 200,000 union levy-payers voted in Labour's 2010 leadership election, out of a total of around 323,000, many of them the shopworkers, bus drivers, nurses and building workers Miliband says he wants to get involved in politics.
Labour will now be lucky to get that number next time, which will probably be fewer than 10% of the 2.7 million currently eligible to vote. There will certainly be many fewer taking part in the London mayoral selection contest. Add to that the fact that the Labour leadership resisted giving the new "affiliated supporters" a say in parliamentary selections – where the future shape of the Commons is decided – and the conservatism of the reforms is clear.
They could be improved over the next five years, or instead lay the ground for the disintegration of the link if Labour were to lose the general election. Miliband has set himself the goal of increasing participation. But people will only take part if they see it makes a difference, and years of erosion of party democracy and New Labour neoliberalism have left many trade unionists ready to break the link themselves.
The paradox is that the more people walk away from the political parties, the more they are dominated by professional politicians, corporate interests and political insider dealing. What happens in the mainstream parties matters because they are the ones running the political system.
That point has even penetrated the moribund Tory grassroots, which have started to kick back against the Westminster elite by deselecting two MPs in a week. The real test for a Labour party revival will be whether Miliband is bold enough to throw his weight behind the kind of policies that would attract alienated voters, from a mass council housebuilding programme to universal childcare and 21st century rights at work.
That needs a stronger union voice and working class voice in politics, not a further hollowing out of Labour's organisation. The more the political elite is sealed off from any kind of political and social counterweight, the more control will be exercised by a City and corporate oligarchy.
The language of politics is often ridiculous, frequently rude and occasionally offensive - so I agreed with Ed Miliband's demand for the 'right to reply' to the nasty article in the Daily Mail which claimed that his father (Ralph) 'hated Britain'.
Ralph Miliband may have been an 'unreconstructed' Marxist - but to say that he hated the country where he lived and worked for years, where he brought up his family - was stupid beyond belief.
I'm pretty sure Ralph Miliband loved his country as much as the next man or woman - though where I parted company with him was over his support for 'vanguardism' - the notion that a political elite of enlightened workers was the vehicle for achieving social change.
As a Communist Party member myself for some time - along with diverse political figures such as Denis Healey and Jimmy Reid - I gradually came to the conclusion that this elitist approach to politics was completely dishonest - in a modern democracy, at least, where everyone has the right to vote and have their views heard
So I had little time for old-fashioned 'Stalinists' like Ralph Miliband who were wedded to Marxist dogma and shibboleths like the 'dictatorship of the proletariat' - which must sound like crazy notion to any reasonable and fair minded person in the year 2013.
Yet trade unions in the UK are still run along these lines - dominated, as they are, by Labour Party members in every senior rank instead of reflecting the much more diverse views and politics of the ordinary union members - that union leaders claim to represent.
Which is why the collectivist culture of trade unions is increasingly unworkable in a world of One Member One Vote (OMOV) and multi-party politics - where no single party can command a majority share of the popular vote.
Ed Miliband says he is committed to transforming the Labour Party's links with the trade unions - but for this to happen the vanguards (which would have included his late father, Ralph) have to be told the game is up.
Len and his chums don't just want any old Unite member to succeed - they want someone who will do their bidding and take directions from the union hierarchy - otherwise they'll be out on their ear as well.
By Martin Kettle
On the face of it, the fraught selection of a Labour candidate in Falkirk may seem a pretty minor issue on which to hang such portentous words. Labour simply needs a candidate to replace Eric Joyce MP in 2015. As often happens in such contests, there is a battle about who gets the nod. Egos are at stake. Noses are out of joint. But the Labour party has acted swiftly to deal with alleged abuses. End of story, so Labour would have you believe.
Many will also say: so what? In some respects, many will have a point. A disreputable selection battle in a safe Labour seat in central Scotland is not exactly a unique event. Unions have always cracked the whip at such times, often pretty blatantly. Scottish Labour politics were never exactly a byword for Athenian democracy. And if Scotland votes for independence next year, Falkirk's new MP in 2015 will probably have to withdraw a year later anyway.
Don't forget too that all political parties have their little local difficulties from time to time. All occasionally choose candidates by processes that would not win the approval of John Stuart Mill. All have MPs whose behaviour embarrasses the leader at Westminster for some reason or another. The Conservatives have Nadine Dorries. The Lib Dems have Mike Hancock. Labour has Eric Joyce. And after 2015 Labour may have Joyce's successor.
But it used to be much worse not so many years ago. In the 1980s Labour had a famous handful of Marxist entryist MPs from the Militant Tendency. But they were some of the most boring men in British politics, and Labour survived even that. In the 1970s, there were far more Labour rotten boroughs than there are today – not just in some union seats of left and right but in Irish Catholic seats. Even a few Soviet agents got in on the act too.
The Times made great play today of a story that 13 other Labour constituencies are in "special measures" – Labourspeak for control from party HQ – along with Falkirk. That's true, but none of them is there for the same reason as Falkirk. Almost all the others are seats with large Asian populations in which various forms of political skulduggery have been alleged. Many of them have been in special measures for at least eight years. The striking thing is that it hasn't made any discernible difference to Labour's wider standing.
The difference with Falkirk is that the alleged skulduggery is not in the local grassroots but appears to be nationally orchestrated by the leadership of Unite, which is by far Labour's largest affiliated union and biggest paymaster, and one of Miliband's key backers in 2010. As many as 150 Unite members are said in some accounts – Labour has not released the figures – to have been signed up to Labour in Falkirk and paid for by a single cheque from the union. So far, Falkirk is the only confirmed case. Yet if Falkirk, why not elsewhere?
Unite officials are not exactly discreet about their broad strategy. Dave Quayle, chair of Unite's political committee, said a year agothat Unite had two options in its relationship with Labour: "Disaffiliate, or campaign to change the way the relationship between the union and the party worked." For 2015, Quayle said, "we want a firmly class-based and leftwing general election campaign". The aim was "to shift the balance in the party away from middle-class academics and professionals towards people who've actually represented workers and fought the boss". Meanwhile Len McCluskey wrote in the Guardian in May that Unite's aim was to recruit members and then encourage them to endorse union-supported candidates in selections.
None of this is illegal. Most of it is not against Labour's rules either, though the buying of memberships undoubtedly should be. And none of it, at a certain rather general level, is unworthy. Labour is an unpleasantly centralist party. It is dominated by young middle-class career politicians. It ought to be a more open, more democratic and a more broadly based participative party than it has become.
But there are three massive problems with what Unite is trying to do. The first is that it annoys the hell out of almost everyone else in the Labour party. It's not just the other unions who resent Unite's excessive influence – garnered from a series of union mergers. It is also ordinary members, who feel pushed to one side if they are not part of the McCluskey hegemon. If Labour life seems inert these days, part of the explanation lies in the fact that Unite is too big to stop but too weak to win an open argument.
The second big problem is that it is indisputably a direct challenge to Miliband. The overbearing glee with which David Cameron laid into the Labour leader over McCluskey and Unite at prime minister's questions today shows a Tory party that thinks it has found a winning issue in Miliband's weakness. Miliband's personal ratings as a leader are already poor. His standing as a potential prime minister is fragile. If he is now also widely seen to have bent the knee to Unite, Miliband could be toast in 2015. But this is also why Falkirk may actually be an opportunity, not an embarrassment. If he can turn the tables on McCluskey, Miliband's leadership image could be transformed for the better.
But the third and overwhelming problem with the Unite strategy is simply that it is suicidal. A Labour party campaigning on an old industrial class-based agenda, with extra powers for unions that are in other respects withering across British life, led by quisling politicians manipulated by union officials who in some cases are old Stalinists, in pursuit of a state-owned economy that would not work and would not be popular, may appeal to a few romantics. But it is an utterly bankrupt strategy.
Britain has changed even if Unite has not. The electorate won't vote for it. They will turn their backs on it, and look elsewhere. It will force Labour back into a few post-industrial ghettos, on to the political margins, leaving the party powerless and its former voters angry, twin victims of a process of mutual abandonment. All the clever political fixers in the world won't be able to mend the Labour party if that happens. Which is why Falkirk really matters, in spite of all.
By Seumas Milne
‘Nothing short of the exemplary arrest of a few union leaders would satisfy some of Ed Miliband’s tormentors.' Illustration by Matt Kenyon Photograph: Guardian
Our political system is increasingly in the grip of corrupt corporate power. Whether it's the food industry dictating public health policy, school academy chains stuffing the pockets of directors' relatives, or the revolving-door appointments of politicians and civil servants to companies they previously favoured with contracts, it's the banks and corporations that call the shots in Whitehall and Westminster.
Most of David Cameron's Conservative party funding comes from the City. Former New Labour ministers, such as Alan Milburn – the ex-health secretary advising a venture capital firm involved in NHS privatisation, as well as both government and opposition – have won lucrative private sector contracts on the back of their years in office.
Meanwhile, the political parties outside parliament have drastically shrunk and are largely treated as a distraction from the serious business of power-broking and electoral marketing by the political elite. It's scarcely surprising that the public regard the whole carry-on as very little to do with them, or that there was such a strong reaction to the comedian Russell Brand's rejection of voting for parties whose differences were so "insignificant".
Since his election as Labour leader in 2010, Ed Miliband has gingerly tried to shift the terms of political trade and caused establishment apoplexy with his attacks on predatory capitalism and his plan to freeze energy prices. The Times reports corporate executives complaining that while Labour's Ed Balls and Chuka Umunna are "well regarded in corporate circles" and have been "heavily courted", they do not have "sufficient clout" to rein in Miliband.
That is the context of the permanent onslaught on Labour's links with the trade unions, the only force still connected to mainstream politics which sits outside the corporate merry-go-round and gives political access to working class people. That's why the media keeps up its Orwellian denunciation of elected union leaders as "bosses" and "barons", while company bosses are described as "business leaders" – and why every strike is treated as tantamount to high treason.
It's also why the only media and Westminster test of Miliband's Labour reforms is whether they cut union influence enough. At the moment they're not entirely sure, perhaps partly because most reporting of the issue is so wildly inaccurate. In any case, nothing short of the exemplary arrest of a few union leaders would satisfy some of Miliband's tormentors.
The reality is that the Labour leader was panicked into demanding sweeping changes to the union link by false allegations of rigging by the Unite union at the Falkirk parliamentary selection last summer. As the party's leaked internal report demonstrates, even the flaky evidence it provided did not back up those claims. What had in fact happened was that Unite had recruited several dozen industrial workers to the local party to help select a candidate who would break the monopoly of the existing parliamentary elite.
Miliband's reforms have avoided the more extreme options championed by Blairite diehards. But they risk failing in the Labour leader's aim of" letting people back into politics", quite apart from the threat to the party's income. True, the collective union link is maintained and MPs will lose their disproportionate voice in leadership elections.
But by setting up a new double hurdle for union political levy payers to keep the voting rights they already have, the danger is that fewer people will end up having a say than before. Just under 200,000 union levy-payers voted in Labour's 2010 leadership election, out of a total of around 323,000, many of them the shopworkers, bus drivers, nurses and building workers Miliband says he wants to get involved in politics.
Labour will now be lucky to get that number next time, which will probably be fewer than 10% of the 2.7 million currently eligible to vote. There will certainly be many fewer taking part in the London mayoral selection contest. Add to that the fact that the Labour leadership resisted giving the new "affiliated supporters" a say in parliamentary selections – where the future shape of the Commons is decided – and the conservatism of the reforms is clear.
They could be improved over the next five years, or instead lay the ground for the disintegration of the link if Labour were to lose the general election. Miliband has set himself the goal of increasing participation. But people will only take part if they see it makes a difference, and years of erosion of party democracy and New Labour neoliberalism have left many trade unionists ready to break the link themselves.
The paradox is that the more people walk away from the political parties, the more they are dominated by professional politicians, corporate interests and political insider dealing. What happens in the mainstream parties matters because they are the ones running the political system.
That point has even penetrated the moribund Tory grassroots, which have started to kick back against the Westminster elite by deselecting two MPs in a week. The real test for a Labour party revival will be whether Miliband is bold enough to throw his weight behind the kind of policies that would attract alienated voters, from a mass council housebuilding programme to universal childcare and 21st century rights at work.
That needs a stronger union voice and working class voice in politics, not a further hollowing out of Labour's organisation. The more the political elite is sealed off from any kind of political and social counterweight, the more control will be exercised by a City and corporate oligarchy.
Political Elites (2 October 2014)
The language of politics is often ridiculous, frequently rude and occasionally offensive - so I agreed with Ed Miliband's demand for the 'right to reply' to the nasty article in the Daily Mail which claimed that his father (Ralph) 'hated Britain'.
Ralph Miliband may have been an 'unreconstructed' Marxist - but to say that he hated the country where he lived and worked for years, where he brought up his family - was stupid beyond belief.
I'm pretty sure Ralph Miliband loved his country as much as the next man or woman - though where I parted company with him was over his support for 'vanguardism' - the notion that a political elite of enlightened workers was the vehicle for achieving social change.
As a Communist Party member myself for some time - along with diverse political figures such as Denis Healey and Jimmy Reid - I gradually came to the conclusion that this elitist approach to politics was completely dishonest - in a modern democracy, at least, where everyone has the right to vote and have their views heard
So I had little time for old-fashioned 'Stalinists' like Ralph Miliband who were wedded to Marxist dogma and shibboleths like the 'dictatorship of the proletariat' - which must sound like crazy notion to any reasonable and fair minded person in the year 2013.
Yet trade unions in the UK are still run along these lines - dominated, as they are, by Labour Party members in every senior rank instead of reflecting the much more diverse views and politics of the ordinary union members - that union leaders claim to represent.
Which is why the collectivist culture of trade unions is increasingly unworkable in a world of One Member One Vote (OMOV) and multi-party politics - where no single party can command a majority share of the popular vote.
Ed Miliband says he is committed to transforming the Labour Party's links with the trade unions - but for this to happen the vanguards (which would have included his late father, Ralph) have to be told the game is up.
Vanguardism (4 July 2013)
Here's an interesting article by Martin Kettle writing in the Guardian - which makes the case that the scandal over vote rigging in Falkirk really matters - even though it seems relatively trivial.
I agree and the reason it matters so much is that the selection process is not about getting more working class Labour MPs - instead the aim is to ensure the selection of people who agree with the politics of Len McCluskey and the small band of union officials who run Unite.
Len and his chums don't just want any old Unite member to succeed - they want someone who will do their bidding and take directions from the union hierarchy - otherwise they'll be out on their ear as well.
Now this would not be so much of a problem if Unite reflected in a proper sense, the wider political views of ordinary union members - but it does not do that of course since the most senior figures in Unite are all cut from the same 'left wing' cloth.
Yet in Len McCluskey's eyes this is quite OK because Len and others see themselves as part of an 'elite' political vanguard which doesn't need to reflect the views of ordinary Unite members - because the leaders know what's best for ordinary Unite members.
To be fair to Len he was elected as the boss of Unite in a democratic ballot - but on a tiny turnout of members, if I remember correctly. So while he has a mandate of sorts - the key thing is to use it wisely, in a way that commands support from the members who did not vote for you (the vast majority) - as well as those that did.
In other words, being elected to a leadership position democratically is quite different to behaving in a democratic and inclusive way - once you get the top job - and if you need an example to illustrate the point, then look no further than ex-President Morsi of Egypt.
Falkirk may seem minor, but for Labour it really matters
The Unite union's tactics in the selection of parliamentary candidates are a direct challenge to Ed Miliband's leadership
By Martin Kettle
Len McCluskey, the Unite general secretary votes at the TUC Congress in central London, in 2011. 'The overbearing glee with which David Cameron laid into the Labour leader over McCluskey and Unite at prime minister's questions shows a Tory party that thinks it has found a winning issue in Miliband's weakness.'
Three years ago, trade union votes made Ed Miliband's leadership. Today trade union votes confront Miliband with a defining moment of his tenure. Voter recruitment by Unite challenges Labour's democratic credentials and Miliband's authority. If he mishandles the issue, Miliband may even find that the union power that made him is now the union power that also breaks him.
On the face of it, the fraught selection of a Labour candidate in Falkirk may seem a pretty minor issue on which to hang such portentous words. Labour simply needs a candidate to replace Eric Joyce MP in 2015. As often happens in such contests, there is a battle about who gets the nod. Egos are at stake. Noses are out of joint. But the Labour party has acted swiftly to deal with alleged abuses. End of story, so Labour would have you believe.
Many will also say: so what? In some respects, many will have a point. A disreputable selection battle in a safe Labour seat in central Scotland is not exactly a unique event. Unions have always cracked the whip at such times, often pretty blatantly. Scottish Labour politics were never exactly a byword for Athenian democracy. And if Scotland votes for independence next year, Falkirk's new MP in 2015 will probably have to withdraw a year later anyway.
Don't forget too that all political parties have their little local difficulties from time to time. All occasionally choose candidates by processes that would not win the approval of John Stuart Mill. All have MPs whose behaviour embarrasses the leader at Westminster for some reason or another. The Conservatives have Nadine Dorries. The Lib Dems have Mike Hancock. Labour has Eric Joyce. And after 2015 Labour may have Joyce's successor.
But it used to be much worse not so many years ago. In the 1980s Labour had a famous handful of Marxist entryist MPs from the Militant Tendency. But they were some of the most boring men in British politics, and Labour survived even that. In the 1970s, there were far more Labour rotten boroughs than there are today – not just in some union seats of left and right but in Irish Catholic seats. Even a few Soviet agents got in on the act too.
The Times made great play today of a story that 13 other Labour constituencies are in "special measures" – Labourspeak for control from party HQ – along with Falkirk. That's true, but none of them is there for the same reason as Falkirk. Almost all the others are seats with large Asian populations in which various forms of political skulduggery have been alleged. Many of them have been in special measures for at least eight years. The striking thing is that it hasn't made any discernible difference to Labour's wider standing.
The difference with Falkirk is that the alleged skulduggery is not in the local grassroots but appears to be nationally orchestrated by the leadership of Unite, which is by far Labour's largest affiliated union and biggest paymaster, and one of Miliband's key backers in 2010. As many as 150 Unite members are said in some accounts – Labour has not released the figures – to have been signed up to Labour in Falkirk and paid for by a single cheque from the union. So far, Falkirk is the only confirmed case. Yet if Falkirk, why not elsewhere?
Unite officials are not exactly discreet about their broad strategy. Dave Quayle, chair of Unite's political committee, said a year agothat Unite had two options in its relationship with Labour: "Disaffiliate, or campaign to change the way the relationship between the union and the party worked." For 2015, Quayle said, "we want a firmly class-based and leftwing general election campaign". The aim was "to shift the balance in the party away from middle-class academics and professionals towards people who've actually represented workers and fought the boss". Meanwhile Len McCluskey wrote in the Guardian in May that Unite's aim was to recruit members and then encourage them to endorse union-supported candidates in selections.
None of this is illegal. Most of it is not against Labour's rules either, though the buying of memberships undoubtedly should be. And none of it, at a certain rather general level, is unworthy. Labour is an unpleasantly centralist party. It is dominated by young middle-class career politicians. It ought to be a more open, more democratic and a more broadly based participative party than it has become.
But there are three massive problems with what Unite is trying to do. The first is that it annoys the hell out of almost everyone else in the Labour party. It's not just the other unions who resent Unite's excessive influence – garnered from a series of union mergers. It is also ordinary members, who feel pushed to one side if they are not part of the McCluskey hegemon. If Labour life seems inert these days, part of the explanation lies in the fact that Unite is too big to stop but too weak to win an open argument.
The second big problem is that it is indisputably a direct challenge to Miliband. The overbearing glee with which David Cameron laid into the Labour leader over McCluskey and Unite at prime minister's questions today shows a Tory party that thinks it has found a winning issue in Miliband's weakness. Miliband's personal ratings as a leader are already poor. His standing as a potential prime minister is fragile. If he is now also widely seen to have bent the knee to Unite, Miliband could be toast in 2015. But this is also why Falkirk may actually be an opportunity, not an embarrassment. If he can turn the tables on McCluskey, Miliband's leadership image could be transformed for the better.
But the third and overwhelming problem with the Unite strategy is simply that it is suicidal. A Labour party campaigning on an old industrial class-based agenda, with extra powers for unions that are in other respects withering across British life, led by quisling politicians manipulated by union officials who in some cases are old Stalinists, in pursuit of a state-owned economy that would not work and would not be popular, may appeal to a few romantics. But it is an utterly bankrupt strategy.
Britain has changed even if Unite has not. The electorate won't vote for it. They will turn their backs on it, and look elsewhere. It will force Labour back into a few post-industrial ghettos, on to the political margins, leaving the party powerless and its former voters angry, twin victims of a process of mutual abandonment. All the clever political fixers in the world won't be able to mend the Labour party if that happens. Which is why Falkirk really matters, in spite of all.
