Blackpool
For the last 20 years the annual TUC conference has occupied a subsidiary role in the political season. During 18 years of Tory government, the unions carried no weight. Their autumnal seaside rumblings could be ignored with a clear conscience. Nor did they relinquish this peripheral role when Tony Blair first came to power five years ago. Trade union leaders were so delighted at a Labour government that they resolved to cause no trouble. This was roughly the state of affairs right up to Tony Blair’s second election victory in June 2001.
It would be wrong, on the other hand, to assume that the unions were of no account during this 22-year period of comparative invisibility. They mattered desperately – but only for Labour. Fundamentally, the Labour party – even Tony Blair’s New Labour – and the trade unions are one and the same thing. In many parts of the country the two are impossible to tell apart, either organisationally or financially.
This profound interdependence explains the paradox that, while it was undoubtedly the unions that destroyed Jim Callaghan’s government in 1979, they saved the party in the years that followed. Labour was riven by far more damaging splits, and in 1983 received a sharply lower share of the vote than even the Tories got in 1997. But throughout this desperate time, the party was sustained by its solid organisational base in the unions. The real reason to fear for the long-term survival of the fractured post-1997 Tories is that no comparable support exists. It was once the case that business was as reliable a friend of the Conservative party as the unions have been for Labour. But capital has been fickle. Much of it has opportunistically fled to Tony Blair.
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