When Labour’s national executive committee today
rubber-stamps plans to “reform” the party’s historic relations with the trade
unions, it will put the finishing touches to a long-term project to bring the
party’s organisation into line with what it actually stands for.
Many sins have been committed in the name of
“modernisation”, not least the creation of New Labour as a party wholeheartedly
committed to corporate globalisation and an economy pretty much dominated by
market forces. Add a little “light-touch” regulation and you could be looking
at any of the mainstream political parties.
For New Labour – now rebranded as One Nation Labour – this
has been a project that began with Neil Kinnock in the late 1980s and was
carried on by his successor, John Smith. Ed Miliband, the current leader, is
proud to march in their footsteps. He
said last week:
"The first time I met Tony Blair was in 1993
and at the time he was on a group helping John Smith bring in one member, one
vote for the selection of parliamentary candidates. I remember him looking at
me and saying how difficult change was proving to be. At the very first party
conference I attended, Smith – with the help of a speech by John Prescott –
got those reforms through.
"Smith, Blair and Neil Kinnock have all embarked on
these kinds of reforms over the past 30 years and I see this as completing that
work. They are significantly bigger than anyone expected we would be proposing,
and some are the biggest to the party since its formation."
Of course, Blair and Gordon Brown famously persuaded the
trade unions to vote in 1995 for the abolition of Clause 4 of the party’s
constitution that set out common ownership of the means of production as an
aim. Union leaders did so in the hope that an incoming New Labour government
would deliver policies to benefit their members. How wrong they were!
Today’s generation of union leaders are just as pathetic.
With a few moans and groans here and there, the big three – Unite, Unison and
the GMB – will back Miliband’s plans. They will be told, as they were in 1995,
that the election of Labour in next year’s general election depends on it.
Miliband has to persuade the middle-class that One Nation
Labour has broken free from union influence. So the way the party leader is
elected will change to one member, one vote. At union level, individual members
of affiliated unions will in future have to “opt in” to become associate
members of the Labour Party. The last time that happened was in 1927, when in
the wake of the General Strike, the Tories passed opt-in legislation (which
Labour repealed after 1945).
The aim then was to weaken the collective in favour of the
individual. And so it is with Miliband, whatever he says about “letting people
back into our politics”. Miliband used the Falkirk
selection farrago – which is par for the course in Labour constituencies –
as the pretext for the changes.
In a wider context, Labour is part of the process of the end
of the old politics and these changes won’t alter that fact. The mainstream
parties are no more than state managers rather than independent actors, there
to facilitate for powerful forces rather than respond to electors. This
corporatocracy is so unattractive that millions have switched off party
politics and the electoral fraud that goes under the name of a general
election.
One Nation Labour is for continuing ConDem austerity and
giving tax subsidies to companies to pay better wages. Miliband wants to
“improve” the way markets work (as if he could!) and show that his party is for
nothing less than “responsible capitalism”. I’d have to be dragged to a polling
station to vote for that. And if I’d got that far, I’d spoil my ballot.
Paul Feldman
Communications editor
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