Dave Prentis, your time is nigh. Bob Crow, the country needs you at this hour. Derek Simpson, prepare for the call of history. As trade union leaders gather in Liverpool for the annual Trades Union Congress, their agenda items give no hint of the drama to come. Worthy motions will call forth windy speeches on composite resolutions about rights at work, equality in the workplace and public spending. Newspaper reports will be sparse and television coverage limited to five seconds of shouting from an unknown delegate and a short clip from the Prime Minister’s speech. The press may, whisper it, give short shrift to Salvador Valdes Mesa, the General Secretary of the Cuban Workers’ Confederation.
All in all, there will be little sense of anything important unfolding. But offstage left, Labour politics après le déluge will stir. Anyone with pretensions to lead the party will put in an appearance. Three in every ten votes for the next Labour leader will be cast by trade unions so their invitations are suddenly embossed in gold. As Labour MPs retire, the unions will try to get their candidates selected. The NEC, which is a more important body in opposition, will hold elections in June. This is requiring fearsome organisation under the direction of Charlie Whelan of Unite and (every so often) Downing Street.
For a decade the unions have barely mattered in Labour politics. Tony Blair’s numinous popularity and (to them) mysterious ability to win elections held the unions to an uneasy alliance. But the end of power in the country heralds again what, after all, they really want — power in the party.
That power is vested mainly in money. Between the first quarter of 2008 and the same point this year, Labour took in £11.4 million in cash donations from unions. That was almost twice as much as party members contributed and 60 per cent of total income for the year.
Funding comes at a price, of course. Unison recently subtracted £100,000 from their annual £1.5 million donation and warned the Prime Minister that the rest would go the same way if he didn’t stop privatising public services. The GMB and the CWU both have votes on cuts pending. It’s no wonder privatisation of the Royal Mail had to be postponed.
In the mid-1990s the wild hope was mooted that breaking the trade union link might, one day, suit both parties. In fact, the opposite has happened — decline is locking the two into a grim embrace. A weak trade union movement is facing down a weak government. It is a spectacle of two weeds arm-wrestling.
The unions themselves are slowly dissolving. There is a paradox about this decline. It derives in part from success. The more that statutory recognition has been granted, the less need there is for a voluntary organisation to do the collective bargaining. The minimum wage now puts a legal floor under pay, working time is regulated, maternity pay guaranteed and individuals have a list of legally enforce- able labour rights.
Of course, trade unionism also failed to renew itself as the economy changed. Even in 1980, about half of all workers were members of a trade union. Today less than a third carry a union card. In the private sector it is only 15 per cent. Trade union strength (if that’s the right word) is in the public sector, where 57 per cent of employees are members.
Which latter fact makes the argument about public spending crucial. Search parties have been sent from Downing Street to discover the lost tribe which agrees with the Prime Minister’s line on investment versus cuts. In Liverpool they will be found.
Notwithstanding Alistair Darling’s clear victory in refining the formula, some version of investment versus cuts will define the politics of the general election. If there were a general election on the Planet Zork in the year Infinity And One, the Brown strategy would be to set investment against cuts. This is the conjugation of the verb to Gordon: I invest, you cut, he thinks this whole argument is ludicrous. The Prime Minister’s motivation is not empirical; it is existential. He thinks Tories cut services as a matter of ideological conviction. ‘Tory cuts’ is, for him, close to tautology, a dictionary definition.
The impasse of this argument means the Labour government is just waiting to expire. Most of the older Cabinet ministers have retired, hurt. Most of the younger ones have their heads down, enthusiastically expatiating on the next big thing in their department. That they are colluding in an avoidable political disaster no longer seems to concern them. They talk about Gordon and Peter as if they were describing their Mum and Dad and they’d been allowed to stay up late to watch the football.
In the historical two-step of the Labour party and the trade unions, it has usually been the case that only one has been bonkers at any given time. To anyone schooled in politics by the corporatist catastrophe of 1978, the unions in the role of saviour seems wildly unlikely. But time and again in the history of the Labour party, the trade union bloc vote has been the weapon of the leadership against the membership. Whenever the Labour party flirted with oblivion, in the 1930s and in the 1980s, it was the earthy good sense of the trade unions that brought it back from the brink.
In fact, for at least the first half of its first century, it was the Labour party’s bourgeois intellectuals who were its in-house menace. The now forgotten books of Douglas Jay, Evan Durbin and Hugh Dalton committed the party to the methods of planning and central control from which the party has been in retreat almost ever since. The trade unions, by contrast, wasted no time gazing at the shining city on the hill. They wanted a better deal for their people, in this world, now.
The historic role for the trade unions is calling again. For all their virtues, you have to wonder whether Messrs Prentis, Crow and Simpson are up to it.
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