Stan Keable of Labour Party Marxists looks at the latest attack on the union link with Labour and reviews its history

So Len McCluskey’s prediction was right. The police found nothing wrong in Falkirk. They looked at the report on Falkirk Constituency Labour Party’s selection process for its prospective parliamentary candidate – disgracefully handed to them by Labour’s HQ – and found “insufficient evidence to support a criminal investigation at this time”.

Instead of accepting this result, lifting the suspension of the CLP and reinstating chairperson Stephen Deans and Unite’s preferred parliamentary candidate, Karie Murphy, Ed Miliband announced that the party – ie, the bureaucracy – will now pursue disciplinary action using party rules instead of the law. Meanwhile, the local Labour Party is disenfranchised. Individual members, trade union delegates, socialist organisations and any others affiliated to Falkirk CLP are deprived of any opportunity to discuss and resolve the matter collectively themselves, and Karie Murphy remains barred from becoming a candidate.

Far from being stampeded by Tory pressure, as many naive leftwingers would like to believe, the media union-bashing furore over Unite’s campaigning in Falkirk is an opportunity not to be missed. Ed Miliband and Ed Balls want to turn a ‘crisis’ into an opportunity. But the simple fact of the matter is that Unite did nothing more than pay the first year’s Labour Party membership fee for some of its local members. This, it should be pointed out, is a practice that the party had encouraged trade unions to adopt in order to draw trade unionists into active involvement. No rules had been broken.

So, seeing his moment, Miliband closed down the membership scheme by diktat, and upped the stakes by throwing the whole Labour-union link into the melting pot. He has now asked former Labour general secretary Lord Ray Collins to organise a “consultation” (‘the Collins review’) on the relations between affiliated organisations (principally the trade unions) and the party, which is to culminate in a special party conference in April 2014 to amend party rules.

Do not be fooled by Miliband’s declared aim – to “mend, not end” the link. His proposals, in his notorious July 9 speech,[1] smearing Unite’s legitimate involvement in Falkirk CLP as “closed”, “hated”, “damaging” and “part of the death-throes of the old politics”, will certainly weaken the link, preparing the way for its abolition, if we allow it. Perhaps he is consciously setting the scene for the introduction of state funding for political parties, along with the further extension of legal interference in the internal affairs of the workers’ movement. Socialists should aim to get the law out of the workers’ movement altogether. We should as a matter of principle decide our own affairs.

Miliband’s main proposal, to replace the legally imposed individual right to “opt out” of your trade union’s affiliated political fund by the right to “opt in”, will certainly lead to a loss of affiliated members, cutting the party’s finances at a stroke. More importantly, however, under the slogan of increasing individual choice, he is further undermining collective decision-making by trade unions, weakening their political strength. The principle of solidarity – united we stand, divided we fall – is the key to working class strength against capitalist class power just as much in political struggle as in the workplace. Opting out of the Labour-affiliated political fund after a union has decided to affiliate amounts to political scabbing, just like strike-breaking after a collective decision to strike.

Separating political affiliation from union membership divides union members into two camps: politically affiliated and not. This is already the case in Unison, where (as a result of the 1993 merger of non-affiliated Nalgo with affiliated Cohse and Nupe) only about one-third of the membership subscribe to the Labour Link political fund, with two thirds opting for the general (ie, non-party) political fund (and a tiny minority opt out of both funds). The result is collective depoliticisation, the exclusion of party-political matters from trade union branch meetings. A well-attended local branch meeting can deal with general trade union matters, but cannot take party-political decisions about Labour Link matters – such as who to delegate to the constituency management committee of the local CLP, and what motions to propose there; or who to delegate to the union’s regional and national Labour Link structures. Branch-level Labour Link meetings in Unison are usually tiny or non-existent, as is Unison’s affiliated membership input into the Labour Party locally, leaving control of the union’s political input into the party firmly in the hands of the bureaucracy at regional and national level.

This debilitating division of Labour (pun intended) is a cornerstone of the ideology of Labourism which the workers’ movement must ditch: leave politics to the party, and workplace matters to the trade unions – a reactionary principle of non-interference, which cripples both wings. On the contrary, we need freedom of expression, freedom to discuss all issues in our unions and in our party, without interference by the courts of the capitalist state or the bureaucrats of our own movement.

A look at our history is in order, to remind us that democracy is alien to the capitalist class, for all their hypocritical talk. It interferes with the rights of property, just as working class collective organisation does. From the campaign for the 1825 Reform Bill and the Chartists in the 1830s and 40s, the main driving force for the extension of the right to vote was the workers’ movement, while our wealthy rulers regarded ‘democracy’ as a dirty word. Likewise, from the earliest days of working class self-organisation, they have always tried to use their law to hold us back. The common law of conspiracy was first used against industrial action in 1721. After 150 years of struggle, legal immunity from criminal conspiracy was eventually achieved in the Employers and Workmen Act 1875 – so the employers turned to civil conspiracy legislation, with the potential to bankrupt trade unions daring to take illegal industrial action.[2]

When, in 1901, the Taff Vale Railway Company won huge damages in a court action against the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants, this triggered a flood of trade union affiliations to the Labour Representation Committee, formed by the Trades Union Congress the previous year. The LRC already had two MPs, and by 1906, with 30 MPs, it changed its name to the Labour Party, and achieved further statutory immunities from prosecution for striking.

From 1900 to 1913, affiliated trade unions funded the LRC and then the Labour Party without legal interference. But in 1909 the House of Lords intervened with the notorious Osborne judgment, ruling that “political action was outside the definition of trade unions, and that they were no longer allowed to make any financial contributions to political parties”.[3] This judges’ ruling was reversed by parliament in 1913, but only with conditions – not ending legal interference in our unions and party, but institutionalising it, as part of the ongoing process of incorporating the workers’ movement into the capitalist state. Trade unions were permitted to set up political funds, on condition that they first ballot their membership, and that individual members were entitled to “contract out” of contributing to the political fund – the thin end of the wedge aimed at undermining collective political decision-making.

When the workers’ movement is weak, our enemies take the opportunity to further undermine our solidarity. So, in the aftermath of the defeat of our class in the 1926 General Strike, Stanley Baldwin’s Tory government enacted the 1927 Trade Disputes and Trade Unions Act, enforcing the compulsory disaffiliation of the civil service trade unions, and substituting “contracting in” for “contracting out”.[4] Contracting out was restored by Clement Attlee’s 1945 Labour government. Despite its celebrated landslide parliamentary majority, Labour did not take the opportunity to repeal the right to opt out, and remove legal interference in trade unions altogether. We have been stuck with it ever since.

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Notes