Time and again in the history of the Labour Party, trade union realists have saved the leadership from the membership. In the 1930s, and then again in the 1980s, Labour contemplated oblivion and, each time, trade union centrists brought it back from the brink. Such earthy wisdom may soon be needed again and it looks like it might be in short supply.
The British Airways cabin crew, egged on by Len McCluskey, the assistant general secretary of Unite, who has designs on the top job, yesterday announced that a second strike ballot will begin a week from now, after the first vote was ruled unlawful by the High Court. Unite has led a blatantly protectionist campaign against a foreign bid for Cadbury despite the furious protests from Kraft that its proposed takeover would involve no job losses in this country.
A pattern seems to be emerging, which includes the successful opposition to reform of the Post Office, in which Unite sponsors destructive industrial action and the Government shows that it has no purchase over the trade union leadership. A Labour Party that is increasingly associated with trade unionism of this unimaginative kind will be punished by an electorate that sees little but irritation in the industrial action.
The parlous state of Labour’s finances means that it is being forced to look once again to the trade unions as its saviour. Between the first quarter of 2008 and the same point in 2009, the party received £11.4 million in cash donations from unions. That was almost twice as much as party members contributed and 60 per cent of total income for the year.
The financiers are exacting a heavy price, paid in personnel and policy. Unite, with the influence of Gordon Brown’s one-time aide Charlie Whelan to the forefront, has wrestled control of the process by which parliamentary candidates are selected — a catastrophe in a party short of talent. Favoured sons are being foisted on constituency parties and there is a real prospect that the next intake of Labour MPs will take the party disastrously to the left. Three in every ten votes for the next Labour leader will be cast by trade unions and ambitious Cabinet ministers are already auditioning before them.
Advertisement
These are the actions of a party that has given up on power; and defeat is assured, in any case, if the desired policies of the current trade union leadership prevail. Unison recently withdrew £100,000 from its annual £1.5 million donation to Labour as a taster for the Prime Minister of what would happen if he persisted with what the union sees as public service privatisation.
There is no future for the Labour Party in this embrace, either ideologically or financially. The trade union movement is dwindling almost as quickly as the membership of political parties. Fifty per cent of all workers were members of a union thirty years ago. Today fewer than a third carry a union card and fewer than one in five workers aged between 18 and 29 are members.
On the day that the super-union Unite was created from the merger of the Transport and General Workers’ Union and Amicus, one of the prospective joint leaders, Derek Simpson, decided that he hated his colleague Tony Woodley so much that he decided not to turn up to the launch. Given their leadership since, it might have been better if neither had showed.