'Labour and the Unions: In a Place of Strife' - Danny Leach

'Labour and the Unions: In a Place of Strife' - Danny Leach

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 town for Labour moderates anymore; an intellectual right had developed in the 50s and 60s, and in turn, the party and the unions became more left-wing in the 70s. All this meant that while there remained still a large body of right unions, and a similarly large number of right and pro-union MPs, one faction was already considering a split under Callaghan. In 1981, Owen, Rodgers, Williams, and Jenkins declared they were leaving Labour to form their own party, the SDP. After a few fractious years in which the unions had begun to flex political muscle within the party by passing left motions – including one in favour of the electoral college which gave unions 40% of the vote in leadership elections – the Gang of Four had decided that either the party was ungovernable or not worth the effort. To a large extent, New Labour was the result of a drive to make the party governable, and the new Labour right learned not from those who had stayed, but from those who had left. To make things worse, New Labour also chose not to contest the legacy of the 1970s, but to agree with Thatcher that the unions had run amok and caused financial ruin. The right no longer wanted to be associated with the unions, and never even seriously tried to build relations in the 1990s and 2000s.

It was this context which pushed the major unions to leverage their block votes in favour of an underdog candidate in 2010: Ed Miliband. Despite the fact that he was, and is, a moderate left MP, he drew the ire of the Labour right for defeating their candidate and his own brother. Ed Miliband had lost in both the members’ and the MPs’ section, but a strong victory in the trade union vote meant he won very narrowly. This only heightened the animosity of the right, and led to the implementation of the one member, one vote system in 2014. While unions may not have had any direct influence over the winner of the 2015 leadership election, many of Corbyn’s campaign staff were seconded from Unite. After his win, much of his office staff was made up of former union people. Jennie Formby, Simon Fletcher, and Andrew Fisher had worked for Unite, Unite, and PCS respectively before entering Corbyn’s office. Andrew Murray as chief of staff at Unite, and Len Mc- Clusky as general secretary were also regular advisers to his office. Many other union figures were less, but still, important. Cortes, from the TSSA; Serwotka, from PCS; Ward, from the CWU; all provided support, funding, and ideas to the leader’s office under Corbyn. To return briefly to Steve Turner, he himself is the chair of the People’s Assembly, a left organisation which fights austerity. It would not be a stretch to imagine that the more overt support given by unions to the left of the party in recent years could account for the new schism they’ve had from the party’s right.

After Corbyn’s defeat and exit, all three of the major unions held leadership elections. However, Labour was far from the front of members’ the front of members’ minds. GMB and Unite, which have a combined two million members, both elected leaders who explicitly promised a focus on jobs, pay, and conditions, with an implicit rejection of playing Labour’s political game. Unison elected a “moderate” General Secretary but a left-wing executive committee. While the results had appeared to be a break from the organised left in Unite, and continuity in GMB and Unison, it soon became apparent that the unions would not be acquiescent. When Starmer proposed a return to the electoral college, a move that would have given the unions significantly more power, they refused to back it. In the end he was forced into accepting watered down proposals for an increased MP threshold, and even then, he needed Angela Rayner to leverage her own roots in Unison to get the votes for the measure on the NEC. You might imagine this would have offered an opportunity for a reset in union relations, but you’d be wrong. A number of union general secretaries, including ASLEF’s Mick Whelan, who is the chair of the Labour-Union link committee, are reported to be facing an uphill fight to persuade their conferences to vote for re-affiliation. More recently Sharon Graham has been threatening disaffiliation over a series of industrial disputes between Unite workers and Labour councils, and even though this is unlikely, funding has been cut despite the fact that Labour is badly cash-strapped. GMB, previously a loyal right-ish union has been making increasingly unfriendly noises under new general secretary Gary Smith. Starmer can’t go on alienating Labour’s biggest funders, not to mention its raison d’êtres, so, what’s the solution?

The fact is that LOTO have often been overcomplicating things in this dispute, or simply failing to act in good faith. For example, while Starmer met with Graham fairly recently, he had noticeably failed to for several months now, which is ridiculous given how heavily Labour relies on Unite’s money and organisational strength. It sounds so simple, but it’s a truism that picking the phone up won’t do any harm! This failure to engage characterises so much of what has gone wrong. Unison’s NEC representation were clearly persuadable on the issue of leadership contests – if they weren’t they wouldn’t have been persuaded – but Starmer’s team failed to move them where Rayner succeeded. We shouldn’t underestimate her links to Unison or political talent, but the fact is that plenty of Starmer allies have strong Unison connections and instead he chose Morgan McSweeney to be his trade union enforcer. McSweeney is no doubt talented but he’s a former adviser and office manager to politicians. He has no experience working with unions and charging him with pushing Starmer’s project among them is a move which values factional loyalty over ability. This same obsession with factionalism runs right through the anonymous rent-a-quotes given to various journalists every time Graham threatens Labour.

Not only are Graham’s issues with Labour not factional, but they’re also not hard to solve. She wants what is best for her members, and if Starmer got on the phone and promised to apply pressure on the councils in dispute with Unite members, this disaffiliation talk would cease. Generally listening to the trade unions and acknowledging their concerns would go a long way to ease tension. Finally, over the past two years, Starmer’s close team have shed even the few trade union people they had. Bringing some staff into the leader’s office who understand the various unions and their feelings would go a long way to bridging the gap that has opened.

For the time being though, we are at a dangerous juncture. Trade unions built this party. They, not focus group gurus, are Labour’s authentic link to the British working class. If Starmer wants the Red Wall back he should start by listening to the unions, who have more members there than anywhere in the Southeast. The risk is that, with a leader’s office at best indifferent to the unions, and with union leadership similarly uninterested in Labour politics, we could reach a point of no return in this completely unnecessary stand-off. If we do, and if Labour loses the unions, it would be more like the SDP than the US Democrats. Labour without labour is nothing.

[Danny Leach is a second-year PPE student at Pembroke College. He served as Co-Chair of OULC during Hilary Term]