Tories love to taunt the Labour Party by saying that it is in hock to the Trade Unions. A more complicated version of this is to say that Labour is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Unions. But the people making these taunts know that they are not true. It is true that about 87% of Labour's funding does come from the Trade Unions (source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/may/25/labour-party-donors-unions). But Ed Miliband refused to back the strike action taken by four Unions in June this year, and reiterated that refusal in his speech to the TUC Congress yesterday, a position that was greeted by boos and heckling.
So given that the Unions are overwhelmingly Labour's main source of funding, why won't the leader of that party do exactly what they want, and why do they put up with it and go on funding the Party ?
The answers come if you consider their alternative. They are free to withdraw funding and therefore bankrupt and destroy Labour, and set up their own new Party whose policies would be under their complete control. The problem is, no one would vote for it, and they know this. Labour may not give the Unions everything they want, but they are a viable political party with a network of activists, historical roots and a base of support in the country, which can and have been translated into becoming the Government. Ed Miliband, or any Labour leader, may appear to hold a weak hand because of Labour's financial dependence on the Unions; but on the other hand he knows, and the Union leaders know, that the Labour Party is the best offer they are ever going to get in terms of meaningful access to power, and that effectively the Unions have nowhere else to go.
This explains what is otherwise a puzzle: why the Unions would go on supporting a Labour leader they were primarily responsible for installing who does not support them on strikes over what they regard as critical issues for their membership; and why they would go on funding the Party of which he is a head.
Nobody may wish for a unions-only party. But what I would do in the unions' place is a lot more ruthless: I would relentlessly make threats to Ed, "hold his feet to the fire", and make it abundantly, continuously clear who holds the purse strings. There was a time when NuLab thought it could survive on donations from pop stars, sports promoters and various corrupt millionaires; no longer because they've disappeared due to scandals. Were I the TUC though, I wouldn't start my own party but put in my own *candidates*: with a BAN on all public schoolboys! Ultimatum to Ed: You allow in X, Y, Z candidates: or we defund you. END OF. The Left needs to be as ruthless as the Right. Don't say the worm never turns for that is what women do all the time and finally abandon their abusive partners.
ReplyDeleteThere's a lot of truth in what you say. My object in the blog is to describe what the process is between the Unions and the Labour Party, not whether it is a good thing or should be altered in my opinion.
ReplyDeleteEd and the Labour front bench are refusing to back the strikes, those previous and those promised, because their calculation is it will lose them votes among vital swing voters. They're probably right.
My actual opinion is that Ed and the front bench should have backed the strikes in June, and should back the upcoming strikes in November. Why ? Because the Unions have no choice but to strike, to register their anger in a concrete way. The Government is refusing to negotiate meaningfully because their calculation is in the end the Unions can't do anything about what they are proposing.