Campaign to save union voice in Labour Party to be launched

Submitted by martin on 9 July, 2007 - 10:47

A meeting to "launch the campaign to save Labour Party conference democracy" has been set for 11 September.

It will be a fringe meeting at the TUC congress.

The initiative is welcome. But worryingly late as a response to Gordon Brown's drastic plans.

A comprehensive briefing on and response to the plans can be found on this website.

Slyly slipped out in the wake of Brown's anointment as new Labour leader, the plans amount to nothing less than closing down what few channels remain for unions and local Labour Parties to influence what the Labour Party does, or even to have recognised public room for their say about it.

Unions and CLPs would lose their right to put motions about political issues to conference. Conference would only be able to discuss such issues without voting. All decisions would be in the hands of the pretty-much-impermeable National Policy Forum, to be ratified by take-it-or-leave-it referendum of the Labour Party membership.

The plan, if executed and consolidated, would go very far towards wiping out the already-weakened "workers'" element in Labour's "bourgeois workers' party".

And the "consultation period" on the plan closes on 14 September, just three days after the "launch" of this campaign against it. If Brown gets his way, the plan will be rammed through at Labour Party conference less than two weeks later.

In the last few years it has become a regular thing for the unions to vote resolutions through Labour Party conference opposing Blair and Brown on key issues - the right to trade-union solidarity action, the rebuilding rather than destruction of council housing, the defence rather than the privatisation of the Health Service. Equally regularly, the Labour Party leadership ignores the resolutions, and the union leaders make no complaint.

Brown, however, can see that this situation creates a permanent tension - a risk for him, a hope for us. Some day the unions' rank and file will gain the confidence to demand that democratic votes are respected, and put pressure on their leaders.

To banish that risk, Brown wants to banish the democratic votes.

Even the dimmest or most timid union leader can see that the plan is directly aimed against their union having even the most plaintive voice in politics. So it is possible that even without a vigorous campaign against Brown's plan, sufficient union leaders will oppose it that Brown will not go through with it in full.

Possible, but not certain. And Brown could severely damage what remains of Labour Party democracy even by a diluted version of his plan.

That is why the slowness of the campaign against the plan is worrying. It is also worrying that, even now, the announced speakers at the 11 September meeting, from the major unions, are only Billy Hayes and Tony Woodley. No public stand from Derek Simpson, Paul Kenny, or Dave Prentis.

In these last few weeks before Labour Party conference, socialists should redouble our efforts to get union branches and local Labour Parties committed against the plan.

A broadsheet recently published by Labour Left Briefing also contains valuable material on Brown's plan.

Sadly, it also reflects the widespread failure on the Labour left to grasp the size of the stakes here.

The language is of "anxieties that, far from...breaking with the trend to ignore the views of the Party which was commenced by Tony Blair... Gordon Brown would actually go further"; of a step to "undermine further the Party's democratic procedures".

As if one were to describe a lynch mob as "a further health and safety problem"...

The broadsheet even has one article offering the helpful advice: "I wouldn't spend too much time worrying about these staged insults... I was never a fan of the conference motion approach to politics: too much wasted energy... The real challenge will come from the streets and the workplace, same as it ever did..."

Which is tantamount to saying that as long as workers are active on the streets and in the workplace, it matters not at all whether we have a working-class political party of our own, or don't have one.

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