YET another Labour Party inquiry has been set up, this time into the links with the unions. HARRY SLOAN argues in defence of the union block vote. "NO SAY, NO PAY" is the militant-sounding slogan under which leaders of the public sector union NUPE are challenging moves that could break the historic links between the unions and the Labour Party.
NUPE Deputy General Secretary Tom Sawyer, spelling out the policy at their annual conference, opposed any further reduction in the weight of the unions block vote at Labour Conference, and any attempt to remove the 12 trade union representatives who sit on the Party's National Executive.
"This is a non-starter and would take away our influence," he told delegates.
Sawyer is not the only union leader anxious to limit the extent to which Labour's rightward-moving leadership is allowed to distance the Party from the Larry Whitty: from GMB bureaucrat to Labour bureaucrat June 13, 1992 No. 23 unions which built it and still sustain it TGWUleader Bill Morris and, surprisingly, even the GMB's new realist General Secretary John Edmonds have also drawn attention to Labour's de pendence on union funds.
"During the election we were asked to keep our heads down, and we did, while contributing hugely to their political funds. Then after Labour screwed it up at the election, they turn round and blame us. There is a lot of anger out there " Edmonds told the Observer.
Unlikely
The anger reaches into even the most unlikely unions. While engineering union bosses of the ABEU make the most explicit calls for severing links between unions and Labour, stewards in Manchester recently crowded into a much larger than usual meeting of the confed of engineering unions to pas nilitant resolutions in defence of the Instead of building on this base of rank and file support to build a campaign that could beat back the modernisers, Sawyer and his co-thinkers are restricting their efforts to the for level of the bureaucracy.
And they are already making concersions, voting to set up an NEC inquiry into the trade union link, which Sawyer says will look at the issue 'in the round" rather than chip away at it piecemeal.
Meanwhile union chiefs have also helped nod through by 18 vote to 2 on the NEC the decision to weaken trade union involvement at local level in the selection of local parliamentary candidates, by instituting a 'one member, one vote ballot procedure.
The issue of union links and influence over Labour has always been central to the very character of the Party, which was built on the wave of anxiety union leaders after the 1901 Taff Vale judgement, which declared the rail union ASKS liable for damages as a result of an official strike.
Independent voice
The inability of the unions' traditional allies in the Liberal Party to deliver the necessary legal reforms generated a dramatic shift towards an independent voice for the labour movement, and the tiny Labour Representation Committee mushroomed into the Labour Party in 1906.
Interestingly, the carly party had no Individual membership structure at all -it was entirely constituted of MPs and affiliated organisations, reflecting the potics of the unton burcaucracy Trotsky did not exaggerate when he wrote in 1929:
"The Labour Party in England, the classic country of trade unions, is only a political transposition of the (...) trade The same leaders guide the trade betray the general strike, lead the electoral cam paign and later on sit in the mistres these are not two principles, they are only a technical division of labour. Defender of union links: Dennis Skinner MP Examples of such leaders include the infamous rail union leader and Colonial Secretary JH Thomas; Ernest Bevin, the right wing TGWU leader turned Miniand another TGWU leader turned minister under Wilson, Prank Cousins, More recently Tom Sawyer, union boss and leading architect of 'new realism', was widely expected to have taken up a pouncat postir Labour nad wontes pru Even where union leaders themselves have not taken on the role of leading the Labour Party, they have shaped leaderships in their own image: Neil Kinnock and his 'dream ticket' pairing with Roy Hattersley was the fruit of bureaucratic union manoeuvres, just as the Smith-Be ckett candidacy is the result of several years back-room plotting by rightvingers anticipating a Kinnock failure Labour is he only European socia democratic party to have been built and influenced in this way by the unions, and integrally tied to them.
Organic
Its very character as a workers' party has always hinged not on its (generally right wing. bourgeois reformist) programme, still less on its stubbornly parliamentarist methods, but on its organic links to the unions which have always been the front-line organisations of the British working class.
Inthisres pect Labour has always been qualitatively different the Democratic Party, who, like the 1901 Liberals in britain, ancie union votes and cash, while in practice remaining a thoroughly capitalist party allowing no union voice in the shaping of policies ritish employers have always recog tial threat, and their attacks on Labour have time and again focused on ettorts to cut it off, often by changing the Law to obstruct collection of the political levy.
For a capitalist, of course, any notion of party democracy or block voting to determine policy is alien and irrelevant.
individual workers can only influence politics through collective action The Tory Party never had any internal democracy whatever, leaving all policy On one ace as sou sur ficient for a party of wealthy individuals who trust to their personal money and PICKET LINE the whole union membership were to be proportionally divided according to voung patterns wiwwn the won s men bership, rather than cast monolithically Rumpus over PR