Thick and fast

by Sophie Katz

The asinine media in Britain believe Miliband has made a compromise in his TUC speech with union leaders and backed away from the frontal battle he had previously announced against the unions. As usual they miss the point. Looking for a Kinnock style attack on the Militant they were surprised by Miliband’s tone. Indeed Miliband won praise from both Len McClusky and Tony Blair. But why have the leaders from both wings of the Labour Party reacted to Miliband’s proposals so positively?

Fear.

Both Blair and McClusky know that turning union members into Labour Party members wholesale is a fantasy. Most activists in those unions that still have them are now at best semi-detached from Labour. Other members hold on to their union membership as a purely defensive reaction to the employer’s onslaught and are as likely as not to vote UKIP or abstain as to vote Labour, let alone join the LP. As part of the argument, Paul Kenny of the GMB has just tried the experiment. The results in the GMB should have been sobering. But the gambler is always sure that their fortune comes from the next throw of the dice. The memory fades that it did not arrive with the last.

Now the disaggregating of union and Labour Party funds has begun, where will it lead? Clegg has already begun to chase the prey. He naturally argues that unions should designate their members in terms of their support for any of the different parties and divide up the appropriate amount of loot from the union’s political fund accordingly. Others argue that the Labour Party has immensely more to win electorally by cutting all links with the unions. Already Miliband’s review has been expanded to embrace reviewing union over-representation inside the Electoral College as it votes for the leader. (A position that would have meant that the other Miliband would now lead the Party.) Where local party structures are deemed to be ‘unrepresentative’ as they decide on their candidate for Parliament, then there are to be ‘primaries’, thereby diluting the influence of the handful of activists left within the party and strengthening national and media impact over choice of Labour candidate.

Inside all this kafuffle and confusion (for example leftist MP John McDonnell told us that Miliband had fallen in a hole with Falkirk but now at last the union leaders had stopped him digging) there is a deeply significant shift in basic class politics in Britain.

Leave aside the decades that Labour’s Parliamentary leadership relied on the trade union, deeply undemocratic and unrepresentative, leadership block vote, defending it to the hilt in order to deliver itself from the mass and much more representative Labour Party constituency membership, also full of active trade unionists – in conference after conference. Forget the creeping monetisation that threatens all British politics and already strangles the US political system and which has created greatest corruption in the ranks of Labour MPs that has ever been seen. The focus of the Miliband leadership, when it comes to the reform of his political party, is to break down all remaining union influence, both inside and above the local constituency organisation, and replace it by a model where a national leadership speaks directly over the heads of all intervening structures to individual citizen members and a wider group of ‘supporters’ where necessary. Labour MPs are to be chosen by national office in alliance, where necessary, with ‘the people.’ (The ‘people’ is a slippery concept. The ‘people’ who are organised and expressing themselves is one thing – the ‘people’ invited to a town hall beauty parade to decide a Labour candidate is another.) Affiliation to the LP is already a one-way street. It is now to become dog’s lead.

Where is the collective, class principle manifest in western late capitalist society? Where does the dispersed, atomised, disorganised working class of this time and this place still represent itself? The trade unions are deeply imperfect. But defeats and internal struggle and new waves of activists and long-term experience of a failed Labour Government and now the greatest crisis of western capitalism since the 19^th century has changed much. Today the trade union movement (most of it) stands out as a defensive line and what remains of the expression of the interests of the working class. Its weaknesses are manifest. But its necessity and value is remains basic. Union members in Britain still earn, on average £6 per hour more than non-unionised labour.

What does Blair fear? He fears that the drive he undertook for the LP to become a fully-fledged US style Democratic Party is held back by the drag chains of the unions. Not a great thinker he has nevertheless ‘discovered’ that demography in the US can build a permanent majority for the Democrats in the US. He believes that is made up of an alliance between a section of ‘progressive’ capital (Apple, Google etc) and demographic blocks (Latinos, Blue Collars, Afro-Americans etc) that simply bypass the traditional base of Republicanism. What is his Obama style message to the Democratic alliance at the base? Defend the system with us, overseas and at home, and in due course you’ll get your snouts into the American dream trough too. The UK version of this also depends on the complete overthrow of class, and class interest as a separate cause. And Blair had difficulty finding a secure section of Capital to help create his alliance when in power. Nevertheless, with high hopes for small business coupled with hysteria about the Shoreditch roundabout, he and his acolytes still press their case in the LP. (Note Miliband’s speech and its section on regional banks ‘that will be created only for the purpose of providing’ goodies for small businesses.) Any step to force unions back unshackles the LP and is a step forward into Blair’s rosy future and is to be welcomed. Otherwise the LP is tied to an isolated, minority interest group, inimical to business and far from the vehicle needed to drive forward his projected alliance.

And McCluskey? He believes that without a direct line of influence into the LP the unions are finished. There is a lot of fuzzy thinking accompanying this idea. Some stems from the semi-religious worship afforded to the traditional so-called ‘unity’ of the British labour movement. This is a ‘unity’ that has helped to diminish the impact and power of the British unions in comparison with virtually all of its numerically smaller (divided) union movements in continental Europe over the last 30 years. It is a ‘unity’ that left the NUM abandoned in the Miner’s strike, the printers at Wapping, etc etc. This ‘unity’ has never been more than code for the only official unity that ever existed in the British trade union movement, the ‘unity’ between trade union leaders and the top leadership of the Labour Party.

More sharp edged and pragmatically, McCluskey and others like him believe that their ability (as they see it) to influence the Labour Party is their great selling point! Without this influence unions would be seen as entirely useless at a time when everybody knows it takes governmental action to halt the effects of globalisation. This is a version of the union movement as a powerful lobby, an interest group in society. And the connection with LP is a potential ‘direct line’ into government! That is what Miliband must be made to see, according to McClusky. At all costs, compromises and concessions, we must, it is argued, maintain this conduit! The alternative in this version of the world is that unions are ‘giving up’ politics. Unions then ‘just’ become a way of workers combining to defend their economic interests. And McCluskey sincerely believes (because he and others like him were elected General Secretaries) that so long as the link to the LP is there, why, now we have the right GSs – we can use the bloc vote to turn the LP left. And that is the only way to turn society left.

This has been the prevailing mantra in the left of the British TU movement since 1945. It has never, never worked. Even when the unions had 12 million members it never worked.  And as the LP has dismantled Clause 4, the power of Conference, the local ability to select MPs, the role of the National Executive, and put more time-servers, sons and daughters of the middle classes, rich lawyers, public school boys and girls, corrupt self seeking petty criminals, into Parliament the link, the connection, the conduit to the unions has become an attenuated sewage pipe with a one way valve.

The unions should call their own special conference in March. The LP is chucking them (as unions) out. It is scared of and ashamed by their collective voice – even if it is rarely raised. The title of the union conference might be ‘How should the unions do politics now.’