AS WE KNOW, ED MILIBAND won the leadership of the Labour Party through the union block vote. Now, the ungrateful son-of-a-Marxist is about to bite the hand that not only fed him, but helped him to destroy his brother David’s chance of leading the party.
What Ed intends is a reduction from 50% to 33% to the union’s block vote, and to distribute the remaining 17% among the party supporters. He also intends to ask the unions to relinquish one third of their vote in leadership elections.
The unions, quite rightly, see Ed’s intentions toward them as less than honourable; after all they helped him knife his own brother in the back.
Among the union comrades who will feel they have been slapped very hard in the face are Len McCluskey of Unite, Paul Kenny of the GMB, Unison’s Dave Prentis, and Bob Crow of the RMT. I am sure these dinosaurs and others like them within the trade union movement, will not go down without a fight. For as one trade unionist has already opined: “We provide the bulk of the Labour Party's finances and are entitled to a fair say in its affairs… Ed Miliband should remember who put him where he is.”
The unions have, of course, always been an embarrassment to the Labour Party; and party leaders have always sought to find the leverage to shrink the brother’s overweening power to such a state whereby they pay-up and shut-up.
But the knuckle-headed brothers would never tolerate such a relationship with the party that they are continually reminding, was the creation of the “labour movement” i.e. themselves.
The most successful Labour government (in terms of election victories) was headed by a leader who felt no need to treat the unions with any superior weight or significance than was given to any other part of the party, such as its members, activists and MPs - all were (under Blair) considered equal.
Tony Blair did not feel the need to treat the unions with any particular deference or diplomatic delicately. He knew at the time that, after 18 years of a Tory administration, the Labour party needed Blair more than he needed it; which made his palpable contempt for the unions easier for party rank and file to digest.
He never felt the need to consult, via beer and sandwiches, with the unions on any issue that was the sole responsibility of government. His distancing the party from such an incestuous relationship with the unions, brought the middle classes on board. It was partially to this group that Blair turned in order to help him hold on to power.
Blair demonstrated what the true relationship between the Labour Party and the unions should be. If the party is perceived as being in pawn to the unions; then the party would suffer the same fate as the Militant Tendency and pave the way for New Labour.
A LOT OF WATER has flown under the bridge since Blair was at the helm of the party. His nemesis, the emotionally unstable Gordon Brown, eventually got the job he sulked over for so many years to attain; but then, in the end, only to be found wanting as a prime minister.
So today we have Ed Miliband leading the party and attempting to do what all previous Labour leaders have failed to do: change the rules to restrict the might of the unions in determining how a particular vote should be directed, either at conference or during leadership elections.
Ed Miliband knows that his brother, had the voting arrangements been in any way democratic, would be sitting where he is now at the head of the Labour Party.
Labour history says that the unions will only bend to the will of the party leadership if the party has been removed from power for an inordinately long period; as Labour was, between 1979 and 1997. Which means Ed, if he is serious, has a fight on his hands if he wishes to wean the unions from the party’s teat.
I think that since capitalism’s current crises, with its impact upon public spending; the unions now feel reinvigorated, and are once more asserting themselves within the Labour Party. But if the unions think that the current debt crises will restore to them the damaging power they once had in the 1970s, then they should be quickly disabused of such a thought. For, in today’s world, the public sector, and only the public sector, acts in solidarity.
The private sector have long since had to adapt to the changes in pension arrangements that the public sector are now being asked to comply with as part of the public sector’s reformation. The public purse needs to make billions of pounds in cuts throughout the whole public sector if we are to make any kind of practicable impact upon this nation’s £170 billion debt.
I AM NO FRIEND OF Ed Miliband; I would have sooner seen his brother at the dispatch box at noon each Wednesday, but, if he is serious in his intension to once and for all reign in, or ideally abandon the unions; then I must say he has made the task much more difficult by proving himself reliant upon his union brethren for his preferment.
I do not know what goes through the lesser Miliband’s mind if he thinks he can now turn upon his Frankensteinien union brotherhood and expect from them their silence, if not their support, for his reformation of their deciding influence upon all voting procedures within the Labour Party.
I suppose Ed knew what he was doing when he took on the one body that created him as Labour leader; just as he also knew what he was at when he planned his brother’s betrayal, with his embracing of the trade unions.
But if Ed now believes himself to be able to bring about a diminution of the trade union link with Labour; then his urging of the Party’s ruling National Executive Committee to pick Labour loyalist Chris Lennie, the party’s long-serving deputy general secretary, as the new general secretary, failed; and the National Executive Council of the Labour Party, put in place, Ian McNicol, the GMB union’s political officer; thus snubbing Ed Miliband choice for his personal preferment.
Ed will never be able to rescind his Faustian pact with the unions. His brother knew better than to become entangled with the “brothers”; for to have done so would have diminished any authority he would have been given by the electorate.
David Miliband should have been crowned the leader of the Labour Party. He earned such a position on the votes of the party membership and the MPs. These two constituency’s should have been the only electorate that mattered. But the Labour Party, always afraid of upsetting the unions, gave them the final say once more.
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