Editorial
Time for unions to get tough on new Labour
IF ANYONE still cherished the illusion that the New Labour government was merely biding its time or playing its hand cautiously before moving to radical, progressive reforms, Gordon Brown’s vicious "Pre Budget" and the right wing package of legislation in the Queen’s Speech should have put them straight.
Clearly what distinguishes this government from previous right wing Labour governments is the extent to which it is fully committed to using its massive majority to implement what until recently was seen as a Tory agenda.
Sat on a war-chest variously estimated at between £7 billion and £20 billion of government surplus, Brown has decided to leave the NHS and other public services to struggle. His one gesture towards the poorest pensioners was the proposal for free TV licenses for pensioners aged over 75 – who are already losing the equivalent of £25 per week as a result of the Tory government’s decision to link pensions to prices rather than average wages.
The claimed "fairness" consists in even-handed cuts – on the one hand cutting taxes on big business and the rich, on the other cutting the value of pensions, axing the student grants and slashing benefits for the poor and disabled.
New Labour has outstripped the Tories in devising new ways and more draconian regulation to press-gang the unemployed – including single parents and people with disabilities – into low-paid jobs or laughable "training" schemes: but there is more to come.
Brown chose his pre-Budget speech to suggest that unemployed people suspected of "moonlighting" may be called upon to sign on every day for their benefit.
Of course there is no sign of any comparable enthusiasm to get tough with high-flying tax-evaders who as company directors and top bosses defraud the Inland Revenue of hundreds of millions each year.
As Guardian economics editor Larry Elliott pointed out, Brown’s statement was "heavy on enterprise and light on fairness".
He went on: "In political terms, the aim seems to be to turn Labour into a British version of the [US] Democrats, unashamedly pro-business but leavened by redistribution and the promise of full employment."
It was no accident that Brown’s announcement of £100m worth of tax breaks for the wealthiest company bosses came within hours of the government ruthlessly forcing through its brutal cuts in incapacity benefit, slashing back payments for disabled people with income as low as £4,250 a year (£85 per week) – cuts from which previous Tory governments had recoiled.
But New Labour is seeking other, perhaps even more Dickensian, ways to "get tough" with the poor. Jack Straw’s savage application of the new Asylum laws will further impoverish refugees, while new jails are being built to bang up even more asylum seekers.
One plan unveiled in the Queen’s Speech was that unemployed offenders who fail to comply with community sentences could have their benefits cut for four weeks –a knee-jerk policy which could simply push them back into crime.
And ministers have kow-towed to reactionary public prejudice against people with mental illness: trading on stereotype views of mental illness sufferers as potentially dangerous and violent, Health Secretary Alan Milburn plans to change the Mental Health Act to enable the compulsory treatment of patients in the community, offering no guarantees of patients rights.
Few of Labour’s right wing policies are balanced by even a hint of liberalism or progressive reform: the much-vaunted Freedom of Information Bill is so restricted in application that it has generated a storm of hostile comment from campaigners.
Police powers are to be further increased with a new anti-terrorism bill, while even the police are wary of Jack Straw’s plan for them to carry out mandatory drugs tests on all 500,000 people arrested each year. The right to trial by jury will also be curtailed – and it doesn’t take a genius to work out whether this will have most effect on richer or poorer defendants.
The only gestures towards a more liberal regime are in the proposal to reduce the age of consent for gay sex to 16 and the long-awaited abolition of Section 28.
Whether it be on matters of economic or social policy, the government’s drift is consistent – it has stepped into the shoes and taken on the mantle of the Tories, adorned (as is "one nation" Toryism) with the empty rhetoric of "partnership", and "social justice".
Since it came to office, New Labour has openly set out to establish itself as the natural party for big business.
While brazenly stealing many traditionally Tory policies, Blair and Brown have been le to exploit the demoralisation and disorientation of the Tory Party.
Tory weakness has been compounded by William Hague’s increasingly extreme line of opposition to the Euro, which isolates the Conservatives from key sections of their former business backers.
But Labour’s arrogant disregard for the aspirations of its core supporters also rests on demoralisation and disorientation in another quarter.
The trade union leaders, whose political funds bankrolled Blair and whose block votes helped him seize control of the party, scrap Clause 4 and push through his abolition of internal democracy, have done nothing to protest as New Labour turns its back on unions and union members.
A few scraps have been contemptuously thrown in their direction – the minimum wage (albeit at a pitiful level), the minimal new rights to union recognition in the workplace: but they are now in the past.
Union chiefs are already struggling to justify Labour’s support for privatisation of Air Traffic Control and the London Underground, the costly nonsense of the Private Finance Initiative in the NHS and education, the cash starvation of key public services, Brown’s insulting 75p per week increase for pensioners, the imposition of student fees – and a host of other unacceptable measures. But ministers are sticking up two fingers – and demanding even more.
Make no mistake: union bureaucrats are still key to Blair’s control of the Labour Party.
Predictions that the electoral college voting on the London mayor may possibly turn up a victory for Dobson rely on the determination of union bosses to suppress democracy in their own ranks – whether (as in the Welsh Assembly stitch-up, with such disastrous consequences) by casting old fashioned block votes as directed by Millbank, or, as with MSF, conniving to ensure that their members’ votes are excluded.
If New Labour is allowed to press ahead towards Blair’s goal of a US-style Democratic Party, the union leaders will – by commission or omission – have played the crucial role in politically gagging the organisations they claim to represent. They must be challenged at every level.
With the London mayoral battle as a touchstone for many Labour activists across the country and the politics of New Labour increasingly exposed, the coming year must be a time for the left to redouble its effort to stop the rot, build the fight, and organise a systematic challenge to the politics of Blairism wherever they can be found.