Not all right Jack

Rex Burr

The very suggestion, that the union movement should seek to influence the organisation that it created for the benefit of its members.
You’ll be suggesting next that the leaders of private enterprise would ever try to influence the Tory party.
Union leaders are not elected by the general population but neither are the leaders of industry.
I have no time for union leaders who seek political power as such, but most are working for their member’s interests not to boost the value of their share options.

David C

This is especially interesting as the Unions are much diminished since their zenith in the mid-seventies.
They are a minority grouping funding a minority Party.
Labour's refusal to deal with Brown has left them at the mercy of a quasi-political lobby group.
Of course the 'Party' is funded by the Unions, but individuals in the executive would feel the 'pinch' (or more precisely; the 'choke hold') if the Unions withdrew funding.
So Harriet Harman and Gordon Brown are personally financially interested in keeping their union 'brothers' happy.

George Hinton

Under the Tories it was cash for questions.
Under Blair's NuLab it was Loans for peerages.
Under Gordo's Soviet it appears to be cash bailout's for policy dictat's.
Were any illegal in the past? certainly they were morally unjustifiable, but the actions of Labour show just how contemptable they are, so throughly uncaring of the electoral system in this country, that they will allow unelected and unaccountable individuals dictate and enforce policy, cocking a snoot at the voters to whom they had presented a manifesto for election.
We are headed for severe discontent, spiralling inflationary wage demands, strikes, secondary picketing....the whole gamut of the 70's before Thatcherism brought prosperity and sense.

Edwin Lee

Unbelievable really, but Labour are bankrupt and the only way of getting through the next two years is to receive funding from the unions.

Has anyone checked up on Labour's progress through its 2005 election manifesto? It was this document, after all, that every Labour MP was elected on - not a long list of union demands would never usually make it anywhere near a modern Labour manifesto.

Mr Mhena

Your imagined meeting between a Tory cabinet and leading business people to set policy... we don't need to imagine it, we just need to recall it.

That's how it was last time they were in and I don't remember much of an almighty row.

Hysteria

Rex - what are you on.? The Union leaders demands were to do with establishing their own power - as debated eleswhere in these pages the socialist approach to improving the posiitn of the poor/workers has been demonstrated time and again to NOT WORK.

At least if company leaders improve the position of share options they are adding value for all the shareholders - that's capitalism man - may not be perfect but a whole lot better than the alternatives.

There was definitly a need for organisaed labour in the late 19th/early 20th C. But the working environment has moved on.

Rex Burr

Creating sub-prime mortgages raised the share value long enough to take the money and run but it did little in the long run for the customers and shareholders.

cuffleyburgers

Edwin lee

the manifesto has already been abandoned - one important item was a referendum on the EU constitution...

victoriasecrets

Um,

The meeting took place not in Whitehall, but in Labour's Victoria St HQ.

Imagine for a minute that the head of a major donor union not only had meetings with the governing party, but had an office within their HQ.

Now get rid of the word union, and replace governing with opposition and there you have Lord Ashcroft. This isn't real outrage, this is just a distraction technique for the Tories' reliance on people far less accountable than elected Union members who at least pay tax here.

Hysteria

lifted this from the Times article on the topic

"A Labour source said: “We govern in the interests of the whole government – not just one section.”

VERY interesting Freudian slip!

David Lindsay

So Michael Ashcroft, Stanley Kalms and Leonard Steinberg give their money for nothing, do they? As if! The difference is that they are three people, whereas the unions are millions of people.

Eleven years into what purports to be a Labour government, and the unions are still having to call for (but not get) such hardly Castro-esque measures as the scrapping of prescription charges, the bringing of all hospital cleaning back in-house, the requirement that government contractors have unionised workforces, withdrawal from Iraq, a new council house building programme, the extension of the adult minimum wage (such as it is) to 18 to 21-year-olds and to apprentices, free school meals for all primary school pupils, the breaking up of the dominance of the big six energy companies, the introduction of a duty on individual company directors to ensure health and safety, the extension of the Gangmasters Licensing Authority to construction, the allowing of low-paid workers to access sick pay, and the extension of parental leave to the first 16 years of the child’s life.

People who do not agree with even these most modest of proposals already have a party. It is called the Conservative Party. The fact that there is any need to withdraw from Iraq, and the fact that even so much as one of the other policies set out above was not enacted a decade ago, proves that there is simply no point to the Labour Party. The unions should stop wasting their money on it. And everyone else should stop wasting their votes on it.

It always used to be argued that policies such as these would be economically ruinous. Well, the absence of them has now proved to be economically ruinous, so we might as well give them a go, since they cannot possibly be any worse than what we already have. The argument of economic ruin has now gone the way of the equally specious argument of unaffordability, which was killed off by the wholly voluntary, never-ending, eye-wateringly expensive war in Iraq.