By Bernie McAdam and Dave Stockton
The Tory popular press, joined by the liberal “quality” papers, have launched a regular hue-and-cry over the so-called scandal of Falkirk constituency Labour Party’s candidate selection procedure. Len McCluskey of Britain’s biggest union and Labour doner, Unite the Union, has been cast in the role of a villain trying to reduce the party’s parliamentary leaders to mere puppets: an old ruse but one that always gets results.
The Labour leadership obediently launched an investigation and placed the Falkirk CLP under special measures. But this was still not enough it seemed.
The Bullingdon Club bruisers on the Tory front bench mercilessly hounded Labour leader Ed Milband for being in the pockets of Len McCluskey and Unite.
“They want to control everything. They’ve taken control of the Labour Party,” jeered Cameron.
Miliband is indeed a puppet, but whose? His strings are certainly not pulled by the trade unions, that’s for sure. In fact this was demonstrated by the sight of him pathetically dancing to the Tories’ tune and referring his confidential inner-party report on Falkirk to the police.
The Guardian too was soon reporting that “senior” Labour figures were considering a constitutional break with the unions. But however much the middle class lawyers and media people of New Labour might wish this, when over 80 per cent of the party’s funds come from the unions, and when Blair’s billionaire donors have deserted them, this is not an option.
Nevertheless a further diminishing of the unions’ already pathetic influence on Labour policy will doubtless emerge, perhaps at the neutered Labour Party Conference. Miliband’s Blue Labour advisors are looking for a version of Blair’s “Clause IV moment”, when the long ignored socialist goal – formulated in 1918 – was finally ditched. They are almost a rite of passage for a Labour leader these days.
Ed Miliband’s three years in the leadership should have convinced all but the invincibly dim that Ed was no red and that Labour – even faced with the demolition the party’s greatest achievement, the NHS – would not move to the left. Their response has shattered hopes that Labour might “return to its roots” or pledge to reverse the cuts when they got back into office.
That vain hope had been expressed by Dave Quayle, chair of Unite’s political committee. He said Unite wanted “to shift the balance in the party away from middle class academics and professionals to people who’ve actually represented workers and have fought the boss.”
This was the goal of Len McCluskey’s half-arsed, but perfectly legal and democratic plan to get union members to join the party and vote to select candidates who support a Labour Government reversing cuts. It has earned him a stinging rebuke from Miliband.
Instead of defending what happened in Falkirk, Len McCluskey should be facing up to his responsibilities. He should not be defending the machine politics involving bad practice that went on there, he should be facing up to it.”
A good reply to him would have been: “Instead of attacking unions for standing up for the welfare state and their members’ jobs and wages, he should have been attacking the Tories’ cuts and pledging to reverse every one of them and to make the rich parasites pay for it all.”
The embarrassing weakness of McCluskey’s plan was that it depended on the unions paying their members’ subs to join and targeting 40 constituencies rather than promoting a campaign to restore the levels of democracy that campaigners achieved in the early 1980s but were overthrown by Kinnock and Blair.
The allegation that some of the new members may not even have known they were joining Labour, if proved, speaks volumes for McCluskey and his adviser Andrew Murray’s bureaucratic approach. It is indeed reminiscent of Unite’s practice on the construction sites, where they and the employers agree a set number of Unite “members” whose subs are paid for by the employer, then “negotiate” terms and conditions behind the “members” backs. As a political or an industrial strategy, it is anathema to any self-regarding socialist and doomed to fail.
However, clearly stung by the public rebuke, McCluskey was obliged to blame King Ed’s courtiers rather than the King himself. Moreover he swiftly swore fealty too:
There can be absolutely no question about who runs the Labour party: it is Ed Miliband and he has my full support. Yes, there may be issues we disagree on, that is allowed in a democratic party, but Unite is fully behind Ed Miliband and after today’s performance by Cameron the sooner he is prime minister the better.”
This demand that Labour carry out what 3 million trade unionists, who freely choose to pay the politically levy, want is naturally regarded with horror by the capitalist class and their tame journalists. They demand that all parties without exception pursue the same austerity policy and admit that, “there is no alternative”. Then they feign astonishment when opinion polls register the electorate’s view that “parties are all the same. ” Or that politicians are all “in it for themselves” when, despite unanimity on the main planks of policy, they still fight like cats in a sack.
Wait for Labour?
The summer spat over Falkirk is a blow to McCluskey and the other union leaders’ wait-for-Labour strategy, very much in evidence at the People’s Assembly. It is the strategy being pursued by those on the left, like Communist Party of Britain and the Morning Star, with their Counterfire bag carriers. It goes like this.
First put pressure from outside by way of generating a People’s Assembly movement which stages big rallies and demos, supported by union leaders, but which has no expectation of those leaders calling for widespread and coordinated strikes.
Second within Labour constituencies use Unite influence to get more trade union backed MPs selected and then elected.
An unspoken final stage of this strategy – at least by the CPB and Counterfire, though not by the big union bosses – is that once a Labour government has disillusioned the working class we can perhaps talk about a new party… but only then.
This is a strategy for defeat. And is already turning into a fiasco even before it is implemented. Blue Labour is as right wing as New Labour and will not allow itself to be “taken over” or seriously challenged, even by the likes of McCluskey and the millions of pounds he pays out. It has a grip on the constituencies and the parliamentary party. And it has the total support of Unison, the GMB and most affiliated unions.
The fact is that this undeclared party faction around the leadership jealously guards its monopoly rights to choose candidates for the safest constituencies, to write the election manifesto and to decide which of these policies will be implemented after an election and which will gather dust.
Most union leaders accept this. They see McCluskey’s rhetorical sallies about general strikes and his behind the scenes manoeuvres as Quixotic, foolish and self-defeating. Their attitude is – don‘t challenge Miliband and Balls and you won’t get humiliated. If need be, call a demo once every two years and meanwhile wait for Labour, who will be a little bit better than the Tories. Any other strategy threatens to get the members all riled up and they might then run amok and actually do something about a general strike or suchlike.
Of course this assumes that Labour will win the next election. This is far from inevitable, as Thatcher and Major showed Kinnock in the 1980s and 1990s. Another two years of Tory cuts without any successful working class resistance could well depress workers’ confidence in voting for Labour. More worryingly another two years of Tory cuts will see the effective destruction of much of our welfare state. Waiting for a Labour government, which has just declared their refusal to reverse the Coalition cuts, is a recipe for disaster.
That is why we need a plan of action to stop the austerity-mongers now. And just as we cannot rely on – or wait for – Labour, neither can we wait for our union leaders to organise serious resistance: the policy of those who dominated the People’s Assembly. Instead of big rallies, another monster march, and at best a few one-day strikes, rank and file militants need to take the initiative within their unions and workplaces to lead a campaign of coordinated and escalating strikes, leading up a General Strike to stop the Tories in their tracks.
There is only one way Unite or any other union can defend their members and pay the Labour leaders back their repeated insults (whilst coolly trousering their millions). That is to ignore Miliband’s condemnation of strikes and forge ahead with a militant campaign against the Tories. A new upsurge of industrial militancy can drive out Cameron and Clegg. But it needs to be combined with breaking from Labour and mobilising the 3 million political levy payers and the millions they pour down the drain to build a new workers’ party which can take power and organise an alternative, socialist society. If Left Unity and Ken Loach can muster 9,000 to sign up for a new party, then imagine the response if Unite and other unions were on board.
