Workers linking arms or carrying banners aloft, marching to the Methodist Central Hall in Westminster, demanding their rights. It is both the dream and the nightmare of the Labour movement. And Ed Miliband has to decide whether he is going to live in it or wake up from it.
The notion of solidarity between workers, united in common struggle, is more than a romantic ideal for the Left. It is also an organising principle. The unions founded the Labour Party and still provide its funds and its activists. So for a Labour leader to see unions invigorated and ready to fight the Government must instil confidence, a feeling that they have troops behind them.
Why, then, is it also a nightmare? Because Labour leaders seek to be Prime Minister and govern in the common interest. And they know that strikes of the kind we saw yesterday are a blow to both. They are an assertion of sectional interest and an attempt to undermine the right of governments to govern. As a result they have often done great political damage to Labour both in office and out of it.
Stuck uncomfortably between supporting a strike organised by its own supporters, and opposing it because it is unpopular and wrong, Labour leaders have often ended up looking shifty and indecisive. This has been the case ever since Ramsay MacDonald endured a General Strike he thought a gross error. Neil Kinnock’s disastrous experience with the miners’ strike — inevitably and reluctantly forced to accept that Arthur Scargill rather than he was setting the Left’s agenda — is still fairly fresh in the mind for Labour’s current leadership.
How, then, is Ed Miliband coping with the dilemma he faces? For it is certainly a dilemma. The proposals being put forward by the Government were designed by a Labour peer, and Mr Miliband is aware that they, or something very much like them, would have had to be Labour’s policy too. And yet, here is real anger by teachers, fire brigade workers, and public sector staff looking to the party for support. It is hard to turn them down.
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So far, he has taken a middle position. He has called the strikes wrong, but always takes care to add “because negotiations are still going on”. This is not the reason that the strikes are wrong. They are wrong because both the method being used and the demand being made are wrong. He then adds that he believes that the strike is the fault of both sides, because “the Government has been reckless and irresponsible”. He does not explain in what way it has been irresponsible. The best understanding of what Mr Miliband means by all this is that public sector pension policy needs to be agreed by the unions and everyone should keep talking until it is.
This will not do. It is not the position of a credible candidate for the office of Prime Minister. And it is not even good opposition politics. By failing to choose, he has a position regarded as grossly unsatisfactory by everybody.
What appears as a challenge to Mr Miliband, a tricky one to deal with, he should determine to see as an opportunity. He has the chance to be seen as his own man, as brave and as capable of taking tough decisions. He should realise that he cannot please everyone and that his job is to lead. He should tell the unions that pension reform is essential and that strikes like this are not simply a tactical error, not simply premature, but are simply unacceptable to him.
Then he should move decisively to reform the relationship between his party and the unions. He should announce that central to his changes to party rules will be an end to the role that unions play in both the election of the leader and in the nomination of candidates for parliamentary selection. Yesterday the unions had their strike. Now it is the turn of Mr Miliband.