Miliband marches in Blair's footsteps

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 

Miliband follows in Tories' footsteps with opt-in plans

Whichever way he dresses it up, Ed Miliband’s plan for trade union members to opt-in to paying a subscription to Labour is an historic break with the organisations that formed the party and have since provided the bulk of its funds.

At present, members of unions affiliated to Labour have a small part of their subscriptions automatically transferred to the party’s coffers. They have to opt-out of paying the political levy if they don’t want to support Labour financially.

Labour was a somewhat reluctant creation in 1900 of a trade union movement that wanted its own representation in parliament. Now Miliband is effectively breaking that link. And he’s not the first to try to impose an opt-in. The Tories did it – over 85 years ago.

In 1927, in a vindictive piece of revenge in the wake of the 1926 General Strike, the Tory government led by Stanley Baldwin enacted just such a law. The Trade Disputes and Trade Unions Act not only made general strikes illegal.

The Act also banned unions from automatically passing subs over to Labour, replacing it with the same opting-in proposal that Miliband is making. So now he is doing the Tories’ dirty work for them after they made hay over the Falkirk selection farrago.

Labour has called in the police following allegations that its main funder, the Unite union, was recruiting members to the party without their knowledge in order to get its nominee adopted as the candidate for the upcoming by-election.

Back in 1927, Labour and the Trades Union Congress fiercely opposed the Tory legislation. On May 2, the shadow leader of the Commons, J.R. Clynes, a former leader of the party, told MPs:

We say that to reduce the trade unions with regard to their political income to the level of making each man initiate the payment of contribution, without the educative effect of any prior collective action—[Interruption]. I know that there are many Members in this House who would not have them educated — without the educative effect of prior organised action, would be to make a mockery of any political liberty whatever, or of the use of any funds for political purposes.

He said attacked the legislation as a  “malignant endeavour on the part of the Government to back up organised capital in the struggles with organised labour” and pledged that Labour would repeal the legislation when in power. The trade unions had to wait nearly 20 years before that could happen.

How times change! Labour has since been transformed into party that embraces corporate-driven globalisation – aka as free-market or neo-liberal capitalism – beginning with the abandoning of the famous socialist Clause 4.  

While the Tories are free to take money from business, the trade unions, by contrast, are viewed by Miliband and those around him as “sectional interests”. Miliband’s party gets £8 million a year from union subs. This will plummet if his plans are adopted.

This is not “mending” the relationship with unions affiliated to Labour. This is not reforming it. Miliband’s proposal is effectively ending it.

However long it takes to get through, Miliband’s declaration of war on the unions is designed to impress the middle-classes and business, to show that  “responsible capitalism” is his only policy. So Labour will go on backing spending cuts and attacks on welfare while offering only token opposition to ConDem attacks on the NHS, education and human rights.

Two things become clearer as a result. Representation of workers’ interests in parliament through the Labour Party is a dead duck. And that’s official. Secondly, parliament itself is an arena now totally dominated by and subordinate in every sense to the requirements of a capitalist system in deep economic and financial crisis.

New democratic forms that go beyond the limitations of representation, that deal with the question of power, of who rules Britain, are therefore urgent questions. We should thank Miliband for prompting us to look beyond Labour and a discredited, corporatist political system.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

He who pays the piper doesn't always call the tune

The unseemly row between the Unite trade union and Labour over the selection of a parliamentary candidate could bring to a head the increasingly frosty relationship between the party and its single biggest funder.

Unite contributes around a quarter of Labour’s funds but is getting precious little return on capital invested. Although Unite was a key financier and organiser of Ed Miliband’s leadership campaign after the 2010 election defeat, its influence has, if anything, diminished since.

Miliband has backed the ConDems’ public sector pay freeze, insisted that Labour councils carry out austerity-driven cuts, refused to back strike action over pensions and declined to oppose a raft of government anti-union policies. Now Labour is committed to the coalition’s 2015-16 spending cuts as well.

Not much for Unite general secretary Len McCluskey to cheer about there!

So the union has turned its attention to the constituency parties in a bid to regain some clout. The Farkirk by-election in Scotland led to a massive recruitment campaign by Unite in an attempt to get their preferred choice, Karie Murphy, adopted as the candidate.

But Unite’s organisers got a little too enthusiastic, it appears, and the whole selection process was halted by Labour headquarters as a result of alleged malpractice in the selection process. Clearly, the finger was pointed at Unite. The constituency party is now under “special measures”, that is under the control of HQ.

This is not what McCluskey anticipated. He surely hoped that his close friend Tom Watson, former hatchet man for Gordon Brown and now Labour’s campaign co-ordinator under Miliband, would get it sorted and land Murphy the relatively safe seat.

So what next for McCluskey and Unite? A couple of weeks ago, McCluskey threatened to make Britain “ungovernable” through strikes and civil disobedience in response to the ConDems’ draconian attacks on jobs, welfare, the NHS and services carried out in the name of austerity.

Miliband must be appalled, although it has to be said McCluskey’s bark is, so far, worse than his bite. Labour is desperately trying to distance itself from Tory accusations that the unions call the party’s tune (were that true!). Labour wants a period of social peace before the general election scheduled for 2015.

Enter Kim Howells, former Blairite minister who was also an official in the mineworkers’ union during their 1985-6 strike for jobs. At that time, Howells was a member of the Communist Party and encouraged a return to work against the policy of the national leadership. Not long after, surprise surprise, he was a Labour MP.

Howells over the weekend described the unions as an “interest group” and said the whole “reputation of the Labour Party” was at stake over the Falkirk row. He told the BBC that it was "absolutely crazy" to let unions pay the party membership fees of their members. Howells is stirring the row quite deliberately.

In the end, however, would it matter if Unite got one of their own into parliament? Not really. Labour from its formation has b een wedded to capitalism and to directing the trade unions to seeking redress through parliament. For guidance on this issue, you can do worse than look to Ralph Miliband, the father of the present leader.

In 1960, he published his book Parliamentary Socialism, which is a study “in the politics of Labour” from its beginning right through to the post-war period. He writes:

The Labour Party has not only been a parliamentary party; it has been a party deeply imbued by parliamentarism. And in this respect, there is no distinction to be made between Labour’s political and its industrial leaders. Both have been equally determined that the Labour Party should not stray from the narrow path of parliamentary politics.

Now, of course, even parliamentarism has run its course. Corporate-driven globalisation has seen to that. We have a corporatocracy in all but name. That’s why Ed Miliband has reduced Labour to the party of “responsible capitalism”.

So Brother McCluskey, he who pays the piper does not always call the tune. Over to you.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor