UNION WRECKERS' VERSUS BLAIR'S MODERNISERS
Nick Wright  

Tensions between Tony Blair’s ‘new’ Labour government and Britain’s trade unions are mounting. One symptom is the increasing enthusiasm for industrial action. Railway workers striking for pay increases and over safety threats posed by the under funded privatised rail network are nightly news items. Postal workers confronting a bullish management gearing up for privatisation wage a largely unreported guerrilla campaign of sudden stoppages. Civil servants are locked into a long running strike battle over safe working conditions in unemployment and social security offices. Schoolteachers in London have voted for strike action over pay allowances to meet the exorbitant cost of living in the capital. Even the low paid stagehands and theatre staff in London’s West End are balloting for strike action over poverty pay.

Another symptom is the election of a new generation of trade union leaders with little loyalty to the nexus of social democratic policies, bureaucratic patronage and parliamentary politics, which traditionally characterised relations between unions and Labour Party. If this ‘awkward squad’ have little affection for traditional social democracy they have even less for the big business-friendly policies of ‘new’ Labour.

Despite a vicious press campaign (and a mysterious incident when a gang of iron bar wielding thugs attacked him on his doorstep) railway workers have elected a militant to lead the Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers union. Bob Crow joins his opposite number leading the train drivers’ union, Mick Rix, in an alliance that entrenches trade union opposition to the continued privatisation of the railway.

The postal and telecoms workers, who defeated an earlier Tory bid to privatise the Post Office, have elected the cheerfully intransigent Billy Hayes to oppose Labour’s own privatisation scheme.

The Neanderthal right wing in the civil servants union surprised observers by failing to rally enough support to re elect the ‘cold warrior’ incumbent and instead elected Mark Serwotka on a platform of outright opposition to privatisation and social partnership.

The depth of Blair’s difficulties can be measured by his surprising estrangement from John Edmonds, leader of the GMB general union - which cut £2million from its funding to the Labour Party, switched the cash into a campaign against privatisation and suggested it would not support Labour local government candidates who backed private delivery of public services.

This massive general union - with a large membership in public utilities, local government and industry - is traditionally a bastion of the right wing social democratic bureaucracy. Indeed, patronage from its powerful regional barons – particularly in the North – ensured the selection of many right wing figures – including Blair himself – as parliamentary candidates for the Labour Party.

Sharp leadership tussles are expected in two of the biggest unions. The massive Transport and General Workers Union faces a series of elections to its top posts. Last time the left wing candidate Bill Morris, Britain first black trade union leader, humiliated a ‘social partnership’ candidate backed by Blair and the media. Downing Street is reported to be anxiously searching for a candidate more accommodating than any of the front-runners.

Meanwhile, in the newly merged Amicus (a complex amalgam of the engineering, electrical, manufacturing, science and finance unions) the notoriously combative right wing Ken Jackson faces a stiff challenge from a resurgent left wing seeking to build on their traditional workplace strongholds.

A left wing axis around engineering, manufacturing and transport would recreate the conditions which could challenge both the domestic and foreign policies of new Labour. In the seventies this axis underpinned both trade union militancy on wages and opposition to Britain nuclear arms policy. A more potent threat to new Labour’s policy of social partnership at home and new imperialism abroad is hard to imagine.

Blair can shrug off predictable opposition from railway workers, firefighters and postal staff as the inevitable ‘blowback’ from his privatisation policies. Indeed one tendency in new Labour welcomes conflict with unions and would like to weaken or break the unions’ links with the Labour Party. Their project is for a Lib-Lab alliance; state funding of political parties to weaken Labour’s dependence on workers’ cash and a permanent governmental alliance of new Labour, Liberal Democrats and pro-Euro Conservatives.

Part of the explanation for the GMB stance lies in its subterranean turf war with the biggest public service union, Unison, which has a traditionally more combative style and itself faces a debate on continued affiliation to the Labour Party.

But more fundamentally, divisions between union leaders and Labour politicians are the inevitable consequence of new Labour’s alignment with the most powerful sections of big business, the banks and the transnational monopolies. They are a reflection of the inability of British capital to guarantee the flow of sufficient profits and simultaneously sustain a social peace based on relatively high wages and the welfare state.

Public finances are at the heart of Blair’s dilemma. Privately committed on one hand to entry to the Single Currency – with its constraints on public spending; and wedded to his global alliance with Bush – with its unavoidable military expenses - he still needs to deal with a public disenchanted with poor public transport, under funded schools, costly higher education, a housing crisis and a failing health service.

Trade union politics in Britain move to the rhythm of two processes. The wages cycle and the calendar of trade union conferences. These begin in spring when the traditionally combative Scottish Trades Union Congress meets, develop with the TUC women’s conference and really get underway as the individual unions gather. The national conference of the Trades Union Congress is in September – just before the party conferences. The conferences are important precisely because of the special relationship between the unions and the Labour Party which means Labour politicians traditionally fight hard to secure a consensus around social partnership policies. And because they are an accurate expression of rank and file feeling.
Uniquely, it was the trade unions that formed the Labour Party. Indeed for the first two decades of the 20th century it was not possible for an individual to belong to the party except as a member of one of the affiliated socialist societies or co-operatives.
Famously, Lenin – in Left Wing Communism, An Infantile Disorder - advised communists in Britain to press for the re affiliation of their organisation to the Labour Party.

Forming the Labour Party gave organised workers the means to break from the stranglehold of the Liberal Party and find an independent political expression. The result is that almost uniquely, Britain has a single union federation to which almost all unions are affiliated, and most – particularly in manufacturing, energy, construction, printing and basic industries – are directly affiliated to the Labour Party.
And even though new Labour has weakened trade union representation in party counsels the unions are still potentially the most powerful centres of opposition.
Although half the votes at the Labour Party conference are cast by directly elected trade union delegates and at local level trade unions have the right to send delegates to party bodies it is not the formal constitutional relationship, which poses the biggest threat to new Labour. Rather it is the political threat if the myriad of separate threads of opposition to new Labour’s ‘modernising’ agenda joins together.

However, such is the disillusion with Labour that individual membership of the party is plummeting, union participation in party affairs is declining and voter abstention in working class areas reaches 70 per cent.

In a faintly ludicrous echo of the dispute so magisterially resolved by Lenin in 1920 a new campaign is underway to persuade workers to disaffiliate their unions from the Labour Party. Its foundation is the deep disillusion most active trade unionists feel for the direction Labour has taken. Its most vocal advocates are to be found in a warring constellation of groups, mainly Trotskyite in character, which seek to challenge Labour electorally. But of the new breed of ‘awkward squad’ union leaders only the leader of the civil service union – which is not affiliated to the Labour Party – openly backs this opposition while even the miners union, led by Arthur Scargill of the breakaway Socialist Labour Party remains firmly linked to Labour.

While the more extreme elements among new Labour are almost as enthusiastic as the ultra left to see the unions disaffiliate most trade unionists remain cautiously wary of such tactics. A lively debate in the left wing daily Morning Star newspaper pitches an alliance of Communist Party, left wing Labour and trade union opinion in support of the Labour link against advocates of breakaway.

As always it is the industrial agenda which drives union politics. Pay and conditions and job security are the main issues. But neo-liberal attacks on pensions and job security, sackings and rationalisation in the private and manufacturing sector and, for public service workers privatisation, compel British unions to adopt a critical view of government and European Union policy.

But it is on the issue of trade union rights, where new Labour has carefully preserved the main features of Thatcher’s anti union legislation, that a new critical spirit is emerging. Echoing an important formal decision of last year’s TUC congress a united campaign to repeal the anti-union laws - bringing together rank-and-file groups, union leaders and labour lawyers - will gather on 27 April to hammer out details of new charter for workers rights.

It carries with it a hint of the 1970s when shop stewards’ power and official trade union action combined in a wave of working class militancy to defeat attempts by both Tory and labour governments to shackle the unions. The next period will determine whether Britain’s organised workers can begin to shape events or whether they remain on the margins.