MORE THREATS from the unions. This time it is poor old Ed Milliband who has been warned by the GMB union (600,000 members) that they will withdraw their support from the Labour Party (£2m a year) unless he promises to end the public sector pay freeze, once returned to government.
GMB delegates at their annual conference will be given a vote on whether to sever the link between themselves and the party. Meanwhile, Len McCluskey the leader of Unite has, according to the Independent, booked one of the largest rooms in parliament and invited all 258 MPs to attend a meeting.
The Labour MPs are said to be worried that theirs and their party’s benefits will be withdrawn, leaving the party to seek help from the private sector. As David Cameron has said, the benefits culture has to be pruned back for the sake of those recipients who become dependent on them. Such people must, for the sake of their health and integrity be shown the way to independence.
Living off the union tit has brought the Labour Party to its knees in the past, and will do so again, if they once more kow-tow, and allow union leaders to dictate policy, not in the country’s interest, but in the interests of their members.
Ed should do what his brother David would have done long before now, and defy the unions to do their worse. If the only way the Labour party is able to survive, is by endless discord between the party leadership and the union leadership, with the permanent ‘nuclear’ threat of withdrawing funding if the brothers cannot get their way, then the party can only survive by liberating itself from the hold that the unions have over them.
I have seen in my lifetime, the damage the union movement can do to the Labour Party; from beer and sandwiches in Downing Street, and the Winter of Discontent, to marshalling the public sector to strike and march against the much needed public sector belt tightening today.
All the unions have done for Labour, is to make the Party dependent upon their finances. The relationship is anachronistic, and the union brotherhood are behaving like Russian oligarchs toward the party they claim to have created. Although it is true that they founded the party; but it has long ago ceased its representation of the working class, by turning the remnants of this once proud dynasty into mere ‘chavs’.
Since Blair, the party now represents a ‘rainbow coalition’ of minorities based upon those belonging to a race, a particular gender, or being gay. The unions’ financial grip on the party today is comparable to the grip a line of cocaine has on a drug addict.
THE LABOUR PARTY should strike out on its own and take its chances. It was of course tried in the 1980s by a group of the party’s most talented who formed the SDP. This failed because the so-called ‘Gang of Four’ of David Owen, Roy Jenkins, Bill Rogers and Shirley Williams were just that, a quartet of considerable political talent, but representing a movement still up against a popular class based party.
Today, the Labour Party has been invited once more by their old ball-and-chain to change its policy or else. The unions are, like a drug dealer, confident of their clients acquiescence. They believe that Ed Milliband was the weaker of the two brothers, and so made sure of his election. He was of course advised to make the right noises[i] to the unions, which his brother refused to do.
Which led the unions to believe he was malleable. But it is now up to Ed to rid himself and his party of the union influence. If not, the public will not reward his leadership with their vote come the next election.
IF DAVID MILLIBAND had won the party leadership, he would have continued with Tony Blair’s distancing of the party from union influence; and, faced with such a threat that the GMB now makes, would have sent them packing with Martin Luther King’s cry of ‘Free at last!’ ringing in their ear.
It is not the Conservatives who are Labour’s worse enemy, but the band of brothers who are constantly making their demands and embarrassing the party. They wield their power via the block vote at party conferences and disregard both the wishes of MPs and activists - let alone the vital party members. They should have long ago been driven from any influence within the party, but the party lacked the will to do so.
Perhaps Ed has the courage to once and for all do what no other Labour leader has dared do (not even Tony Blair), and tell the unions they are no longer welcome within the party structure. If they wish to make a financial contribution on the same basis as any other freely given input into party coffers, then they are free to do so. But it will not come at a price.
The architecture of the Labour party needs changing; especially the voting arrangements at conference. The party may or may not survive without union finances, but one thing is for sure; the party will never survive in the modern world if the leader is seen as a supplicant of trade union power.
Blair attracted private wealth into the party and David Milliband would have used the same formula, knowing that a free and independent Labour Party could only survive if it was indeed uncoupled from union finances.
Ed Milliband has, up to now, taken the party in a backward direction that gives the unions hope of once more realising their ancient power over the Labour Party and its future government. He must now deny them their demands. If he fails then so does the Labour Party, maybe for the last time. But if he stakes everything on getting rid of the unions once and for all off the back of the Labour Party; he will be met with much more support from the same middle classes that Tony Blair sought to embrace and David Milliband hoped to welcome permanently to the Labour party.
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