Mark Seddon: The unions should seek divorce from this loveless marriage to Labour
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'The pact is an abusive relationship that requires a marriage guidance counsellor or divorce'
As the annual Trades Union Congress kicks off in Brighton today, it is worth recalling that in his pomp, Tony Blair toyed with ditching Labour's link with the trade union movement altogether. With little time for gratitude (the unions had put their collective shoulder to the wheel for the 1997 landslide), and even less for sentiment (the unions created the "people's party"), at least one senior Blairista was prepared to go on the record. Stephen Byers adjourned to a Blackpool seafood restaurant at an otherwise uneventful congress to reveal to four incredulous Labour correspondents that it might be time for party and unions to, as Stevie Nicks once warbled, "go their own way".
Shortly afterwards, I bumped into an almost impeccable loyalist, soon to be a minister, in the Commons lobby. "It's true," she said "this is the advice that is being fed to Tony by the usual suspects. We must do something."
And "something" was done – very successfully – in the years after Labour's 1997 election win. The Labour left linked up with ancient enemies on the old Labour right in the guise of the Amalgamated Engineering and Electrical Union. They told Tony that he would be the loser should the link between what used to be known as the political and industrial wings of the movement be broken.
The left told the Prime Minister that without the organisational and financial muscle of the trade unions, Labour might not have survived its long years on the opposition benches. The old right eschewed such sentiment and reminded Blair of that other historic role played by the union movement; policing the party in government and keeping a cap on dissent.
This was the argument that probably swung it for Tony. And in the years that followed, some of the unions were first happy to surrender power at Labour's annual conference, and then join in the great stitch-up debacles of the first term. For Ken Livingstone and Rhodri Morgan could not have been nobbled so effectively without the connivance of those same unions. Today, the keenest advocates of "keeping the link" are the youthful Blairistas in the Progress ginger grouplet.
But hear this from an up to now solidly Labour loyalist from the powerful GMB union last week; "Not for nothing have the trade unions been described as the industrial wing of the Labour Party [we do most of the donkey work]. Yet it is increasingly difficult to ascertain what benefits we get in return for our unflinching loyalty". And the remedy? "Given an informed choice, there is little doubt that many rank-and-file trade unionists would now choose to dump Labour".
No isolated cri de coeur this; similar views will be heard in the bars and coffee rooms of the Brighton Centre all week. During Labour's first term, the trade unions put up with patronising talk of "squat men in shiny brown suits shambling up Downing Street" from those who worked in the very same street. There was the minimum wage; there were new rights of recognition at the workplace. Small beer in comparison with what their European cousins were used to, but progress nonetheless.
The unions could do business with some people; Ian McCartney, a Trade and Industry minister proud to claim that the word union ran through him "like a stick of rock"; and Jon Cruddas – now Labour MP for Dagenham, then in the Downing Street Policy Unit. Against a machine now pulling in a different direction, these, and others like them, enabled the union chiefs to tell their restless members that they had influence where it mattered.
But next to nothing is on offer in this, Labour's second term. Even the irrepressibly moderate TUC general secretary, John Monks, talks darkly of his members "concern and suspicion" at Labour's privatisation plans. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown have nailed their colours to the mast of trade liberalisation, privatisation and de-regulation. To more thoughtful trade unionists such as Monks and the GMB's increasingly outspoken general secretary, John Edmonds, Blair and Brown are deliberately distancing themselves from the European social model of partnership at work, a healthy respect for workers rights and a publicly funded welfare state.
Instead, they are acting as a bridgehead in Europe for the rip-roaring, American, free-market model. Monks has an acid test – whether the British government signs up to the Information and Consultation Directive, which gave workers at Marks & Spencer in France the right to know of their company's plan for mass redundancies, and the absence of which left British workers at Ford in the dark.
But as Monks knows full well, the British have time and again voted against any meaningful extension of workers rights in the European Parliament, and there is no sign of them shifting on this contentious directive.
The unions have never attempted to dominate Labour's thinking, for they have shared a mutual suspicion of intellectuals for much of the 100-year marriage. But this is now an abusive relationship; one that requires a last ditch appointment with a marriage guidance counsellor, or failing that, divorce. Bill Morris, the general secretary of the Transport and General Workers Union and president of the TUC, warned last week of a "cancer eating at Labour's soul". Bill Morris – and many others too – have watched and warned as those symptoms developed, but if "New" Labour's regression; to becoming a neo-liberal party of the right is to be arrested, the time for talking is over.
"This will be the most political conference in recent years," John Monks told me in Congress House last week. This is an understatement. TUC delegates will tell Blair and Brown in no uncertain terms that they do not want to see schools and hospitals put out to tender. They will listen to Ken Livingstone, and agree with his spirited attack on the Government's half-baked plans for London Underground. If Tony Blair is lucky tomorrow, he will be heard out in a polite silence.
This week is decision time for the unions; either put-up or shut-up. They must either decisively move to wrest the Labour Party back in three weeks time, when the party has its conference in Brighton. Or save their money and forge new alliances elsewhere. If Labour cannot be saved as a party of social justice, then that role may yet fall to the trade unions.
Sentiment, as Tony Blair has taught them so painfully, is for losers.
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