AT LABOUR Party conference all other questions were overshadowed by the Partyunion link. Everything else took a back seat, or was merely a pawn in the main game.
Gordon Brown spoke of full employment, Jack Straw gave a commitment to the abolition of Compulsory Competitive Tendering and the NEC recommended (and got) support for a resolution which went much further than previously in a commitment to repealing the Tories' anti-union laws.
These promises were made in order to swing union votes behind proposals on the link.
What it won them was a narrow victory on rule changes which removed trade union input into the selection of parlia mentary candidates and lesser, primarily cosmetic changes in how the unions vote in leadership elections and at conference.
Broken mandates They had to pull out all the stops. Two union delegations, UCW and USDAW, broke conference mandates. But the clincher was the switch by MSF.
Their leadership accepted they had to vote for the TGWU resolution, so resorted instead to convincing the delegation (by only two votes) to abstain on the rule changes.
The pretext was that the one vote covered both the new rules for selection and the provision for all-women shortlists (which MSF supports). This abstention alone made the crueial difference.
Underlying all argument from the parliamentary leadership and particularly John Prescott's summing up speech was the Big Lie that they were strengthening the link, not weakening it.
This was based on the claim that levy-plus will massively increase the number of trades unionists who join as individuals, despite the fact that a reduced membership subscription has existed for years for levy payers which hasn't halted the decline in membership.
They side-stepped the fact that they were abolishing the collective input of the unions.
Without this lie, propounded by Garfield Davies of USDAW and Jimmy Knapp of the RMT as well as Prescott, they could not have won.
No-one else on the NEC W could have made the speech Prescott did, attempting to convince conference that he was absolutely commited to the union link while calling for a vote to weaken it (with an appeal for loyalty to Smith thrown in).
To do so they explicitly distanced themselves from the most extreme modernizers. Brown and Blair kept away from the platform during the crucial session.
Media message
In themselves, the chnages do not mean much. More important for the leadership is the message they hope to give the ruling class, its media and the SLD, that union influence in the party has been curbed.
While the right achieved little of its agenda, they are unlikely to come back for more too quickly. The scale of the resistance together with the unlikelihood of a significant leadership challenge this side of the general election will probably make them stay their hand. But they have inserted the wedge between the Party and the unions which they hope to drive further.
The Tory press have already made it clear the changes do not go far enough for them.
The parliamentary leadership has been strengthened in their drive to distance Labour from class politics, but at a cost.
For the first time in 10 years there has been a real fight from large sections of the trade union bureaucracy - the same layer that has voted through the policy changes over the years.
They have weakened their link with the bureaucracy as well as the unions in general. Trade unionists, including some not very left bureaucrats, recognising the connection between the watering down of policy and the weakening of the union link, are beginning to fight.
This meant that scrapping Trident, cutting arms spending and renationalising privatised pits were passed against the platform.
Many unions will now have a drive to get members to join the Party as individuals. The left should use this to demand not only that the unions fight for Labour to adopt policies in the interests of the working class, and campaigns on its commitments like full employment, but also that the Party fully support the unions in struggle.
The TGWU leadership is already talking of calling a conference on the issue of Labour and the Unions, the left need to take this up in a serious way.
LABOUR PARTY