Pro-union candidate attacks the unions

Submitted by cathy n on 12 January, 2007 - 2:06

By Ann Mack

Jon Cruddas MP, the man who likes to style himself the union and grass roots friendly candidate for the post of Labour Party Deputy Leader, has called for the union vote at conference to be drastically cut.

In a Compass pamphlet entitled Fit for Purpose? A Programme for Labour Party Renewal, Cruddas (and former Kinnockite youth, journalist John Harris) propose a cut in the union vote at Labour Party conference from just under 50% to 33%.

“The settlement of the party's federal structure along lines that have been taking shape for the last two decades. Labour’s decision-making bodies — the National Executive Committee (NEC), the National Policy Forum (NPF), the annual conference — should be founded on a model in which a third is given over to the membership, a third to the unions, and a third to a new force made up of MPs, MEPs, Labour representatives in local government, and socialist societies.”

The proposal is presented as a reasonable compromise to stop the dangerous ultra- modernisers:

“Within the current debate, senior party figures have reiterated and developed proposals that have been heard regularly since the 1990s: a decisive move away from the idea that Labour is a federal, pluralist party; a severing of its formal link to the trade unions, which would be partly facilitated by increased state funding; and an increased role for a so-called Supporters’ Network, whose proposed status in decision-making remains very unclear. The party's recent history suggests that within this vision there lurks the danger of a pseudo-democratic monolith: a tightly drilled central bureaucracy, serviced by a loosely bound mass of 'supporters' with no meaningful role beyond that of electoral campaigning, and providing the kind of support that can be easily manipulated.”

Cruddas used to work at Downing Street as Tony Blair’s messenger boy where he had the role of selling Blair’s policies to the trade union leaders.

It was in that job that he deployed the tactic of painting up imaginary threats from dangerous shadowy forces as a means of getting the union leaders to eat shit and accept a ‘compromise’ that gave the unions very little and Blair exactly what he wanted.
This pamphlet is just another attempt to pull the same trick.

The message from the Cruddas camp to the union leaders is this:

The number one priority is beating David Cameron at the next election. If Cameron wins he will reverse the progressive things that the labour government has done and will bring in legislation to outlaw the union political funds and bankrupt the Labour Party. The only person who can stop Cameron is Gordon Brown. But the unions will make it difficult for Gordon if they keep voting down the leadership at Labour Party conference. So why not accept less of a formal say in the party to help Gordon Brown fend off Tory allegations about ‘union domination’ and in return a Brown government will give you more in terms of real changes in your interests.

The cheek of it has to be admired.

There is no chance that the Labour Party leadership damaged as they are by Iraq, PFI, Hospital cuts and a thousand other things, could win a vote at Labour conference to reduce the union’s say without getting the unions themselves to vote for it. So the leadership have to spin a yarn which some of the union bosses can use in order to justify the unjustifiable. That is Cruddas’s role. The party unifier, the candidate who is not in the cabinet, the ‘union man’, the voice of the grass roots, proposes ending all this internal strife and pulling the party back together. People don’t look too closely at his platform and before you know it he’s elected and has a mandate which the unions couldn’t possibly oppose.

What is interesting is how some allegedly left wing trade union figures have fallen for Cruddas. Barry Camfield of the TGWU spoke at the launch of Cruddas’s Deputy leadership campaign while AMICUS General Secretary Derek Simpson has already endorsed him.

Who says you can’t get turkeys to vote for Christmas?

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