Editorial
GMB's anti-PFI campaign raises the heat on Blair
It’s just three months since the second Labour landslide victory. But one of the shortest and worst-tempered political honeymoons is already over, and things are hotting up in the public sector unions in the run-up to this year’s Labour Party conference.
It may come as a surprise to some left activists, but the pace is being set – and cranked up – by the leadership of the GMB, which has followed up its decision to withhold up to £1m of its expected donation to Labour Party funds with a decision to spend this cash on campaigning against Tony Blair’s privatisation offensive.
GMB leader John Edmonds and the union’s publicity team have homed in on the soft target of the controversial Private Finance Initiative, especially in the NHS. Recent weeks have seen a steady stream of hard-hitting full-page GMB anti-PFI adverts in national daily papers, while the union’s press office has been pumping out a series of releases which have stirred the interest of journalists and helped popularise the issue.
All the evidence from the first few weeks of this is that the GMB line is going down very well with its members and with the wider public, who have been relieved to see arguments in defence of public services and challenging the onward march of privatisation.
This of course does no harm to the GMB in its rivalry with UNISON for recruitment of public sector workers. The high-profile, hard hitting GMB offensive has caught UNISON off-guard, with its vague and plodding "Positively Public" campaign of postcards and pledges looking decidedly undynamic.
However there is a certain degree of common interest to unite the public sector unions: not only do they want to retain and extend their level of membership in the key services, but they feel the need to be seen by their members as fighting hard on their behalf.
Perhaps with a sideways glance at the potential for the development of the Socialist Alliance, the leaders of the GMB, along with their opposite numbers in UNISON and the TGWU, are also agreed in wanting to do this without splitting the existing labour movement politically.
Rather like the stranded Roy Hattersley, who wants to oppose Blair’s right wing policies without embracing the politics of the left, and reject New Labour without relinquishing the old, they want to pressurise New Labour to change its policies rather than break the remaining links between the party and the unions.
The General Secretaries of all three unions will share a platform at a key fringe meeting at Labour Party conference in Brighton, under the title "Keep Public Services Public". There is talk of similar meetings at local level to build up campaigning, and even mass demonstrations and a lobby of Parliament, to be mobilised by a rather reluctant TUC.
John Edmonds sums up the approach with his warning to Blair:
"By pushing ahead with public service privatisation Tony Blair is not just placing himself on a collision course with our nurses, teachers and doctors, he is on a collision course with the British public. If the Prime Minister does not pause for thought, public service privatisation could become Labour’s poll-tax".
Unfortunately there are none so deaf as those who will not hear, and the unions’ message has made little obvious impact on Labour ministers.
Indeed it is hard to see how – short of a full-scale U-turn on PFI, PPP on the tube and other privatisations – Labour could offer the kind of concessions that might appease the public sector unions. One effect of the GMB campaign has been to heighten popular awareness of the issues at stake, and encourage members to take more interest: they are unlikely to be impressed by any token gestures.
With the traditional back-room deals and contacts increasingly exposed as ineffective, each of the big unions has tried different ways to step up the pressure to force ministers to listen.
The GMB, with a combative campaigns team at national level but relatively little in the way of active branch membership in the NHS across most of the country, has adopted the "up and at them" approach: UNISON, with a more volatile and active base, and branches with serious resources beginning to mount their own campaigns, has taken a more cautious line of "reviewing" its political link with Labour; while TGWU leader Bill Morris, with the fewest health workers, has threatened to fund Liberal Democrat campaigns against New Labour policies.
However they may want to play it, by placing themselves at the head of an emerging popular movement at local level, the union leaders run the danger of letting the genie out of the bottle, and triggering a much stronger resistance than they intended.
In practice the most effective way to make ministers sit up and take notice was the solid industrial action staged by the Dudley Hospital strikers in the run-up to the election. Their stance against the enforced transfer of NHS support staff to a private contractor as part of a PFI hospital scheme forced concessions from the Trust – and has subsequently led to Health Secretary Alan Milburn announcing two new "pilot" schemes, in which support service staff would be excluded from PFI deals.
This lesson is also underlined elsewhere: the recent 2-day general strike by South African trade unions challenging the ANC government’s policies of privatisation underlines the fact that even the most long-standing of traditional links between unions and political parties can be strained to breaking point if the party leaders refuse to give way.
In Britain, too, there have been periods in the past in which one or more unions, under pressure from their members, have fought against Labour governments – and won.
The more Blair, Milburn and their privatising pals dig in as defenders of the free market, PFI and PPP, the greater the pressure that will build up within the unions.
The left needs to be a part of that pressure, building the broadest possible base in the unions for the fight against privatisation, and popularising the argument for a socialist alternative.
This is an important stage in the political development of the workers’ movement, as it tests out its political and union leaders and the limits of its traditional organisations. Only when key layers are convinced that a change must be made can a genuine mass political alternative be built.
As the fight develops, we can expect the rank and file and the wider campaigning sections to be more ready than their union leaders to draw the conclusion that the Labour Party has been irreversibly hi-jacked and no longer seriously pretends to represent the interests of working people.
That is why the development of the Socialist Alliance as a united left alternative is also crucial for the political development of the fight to keep private hands off our public services.