Labour and the Unions In a Place of Strife Danny Leach
LOOK LEFT
When Steve Turner, the Assistant General Secretary of Unite, visited Oxford University Labour Club just a few weeks ago he made it clear that his union’s relationship to and influence in Labour was more important than any individual, or dispute. Since then, it feels as though that accord has been wearing dangerously thin. Unite’s new General Secretary, Sharon Graham, has been making threatening noises over their affiliation fees every time a member enters into any dispute with a Labour organ, and in retort the leader’s office offers only generic left-bashing. It wasn’t always this way. The Labour right used to be the most strongly union-affiliated, and even where there were public spats, the back channel connections were strong. These days we have a situation where the leadership of major unions, even so-called “moderate” ones, barely care about Labour, and vice versa. What went wrong, and what can Starmer do to fix things? To understand why unions used to be on the right of the party we can go right back to the start of the 20th century. When Labour was formed, it was an amalgam of smaller left wing political groups like Hardie’s Independent Labour Party, and larger trade unions. Until 1918, one couldn’t
be a Labour member at all except by affiliation. Even way back then, the union sponsored MPs were usually more moderate than the ILP ones. This may be because trade unions have sometimes been lacking in political ambition in this country, and always had a position in favour of free bargaining. Maintaining the conditions for free bargaining is hardly a doctrine for ethical socialism. The left-right pattern of the party was confirmed in the interwar period, as Unite’s forerunner the T&G (among others) spent the decades trying to expel communists, thereby defining themselves against the left to some extent. While Labour also expelled communists and continued to proscribe them, despite many requests for affiliation, there were those on the Labour left who were in favour of a “united front”, against fascism and the right. It never got anywhere but may have deepened the suspicion of some left MPs by trade unionists. The Labour right still kept a strong presence in the unions until the 1980s: Callaghan, Labour’s last Old Right leader, was always a union man. However, the rumblings of discontent were already present before and during Callaghan’s leadership. The Old Right wasn’t the only game in
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