Trade Union Power

30 Aug 2006

Evening Standard

In the wake of the "cash for peerages" scandal, the number of mega-rich individuals donating to the Labour Party has dwindled away. Fear of getting their collar felt by Knacker of the Yard has apparently overwhelmed their sense of civic duty. So commentators are trying to make everybody's flesh creep with the idea that increased dependence on trade union funding is going to mean vastly increased power for trade unions inside the Labour Party. Whatever the merits of such a thing, it is not going to happen.

People trying to conjure up the bogeyman of trade union power forget a number of things. Historically, the leadership of Britain's unions, and the TUC itself, has been quite conservative. Famously, it is the TUC that "sold out" the General Strike of 1926. And, although individual trade union leaders became hate figures for sections of the media in the 1970s, the militancy of that era was driven by shop stewards.

For better or worse, Mrs Thatcher's reforms and the collapse of British manufacturing has meant that the legal space for "wildcat" strike action does not exist and that the kind of production processes that were vulnerable to strike threats are a shrinking sector of the economy. And the unions themselves have been chastened by the anti-trade union propaganda of the Thatcher years. You cannot get elected to the leadership of a major union nowadays without distancing yourself from Tony Blair. But most of the leaders of the major trade unions are extremely cautious about intervening in the affairs of the Labour Party or speaking our publicly on anything but "industrial" matters.

And, if the unions were interested in wielding their political muscle, they could have done so all along. They still have the majority of votes at Labour Party conference; they have the members on the National Executive of the Labour Party to determine votes there and between them they sponsor dozens of MPs. But these are levers they have chosen not to pull. The traditional role of the unions in the Labour Party has not been as fomenter of quasi-revolutionary dissent at all. Traditionally the unions and their bloc vote have been used to crush the Left in local constituency parties.

Nor does the advent of Gordon Brown mean a "Red Dawn" for organised labour. Gordon is unfailingly nice to trade union bosses. But the man that brought you independence for the Bank of England and PPP for the London Underground is scarcely a pushover for the trade unions.



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