John Humphrys asks: has Ed Miliband done enough to fend off the danger of the unions, and have his actions been justified?
The Labour leader, Ed Miliband, has had to act with urgency over his party’s links with the unions. The controversy concerning undue influence – indeed alleged skulduggery – of the unions in party affairs threatened to undermine his leadership and jeopardise Labour’s chances of winning the next election. But have his actions been enough to fend off the danger? And are they in themselves justified?
Like many big political stories, the latest storm over Labour’s links with the unions began in relative obscurity. The process of selecting a parliamentary candidate for the Falkirk constituency, following the fall from grace of the sitting Labour MP, Eric Joyce, raised alarm within the party, and especially among its Blairite wing, that the Unite union was trying to rig the selection process to make sure its own candidate secured the nomination.
Unite has made no secret of its wish to influence candidate selections to ensure that the parliamentary Labour Party is more broadly representative of working people than it believes it is at the moment. But it is alleged that the union was trying to rig the process by signing up new party members en bloc from among its own union membership living in the constituency, even without their knowledge. The union has strongly denied any wrongdoing but Ed Miliband was so disturbed by the party’s internal investigations into the matter that he asked for the confidential report to be handed to the police.
All this, of course, has been gold dust to David Cameron. The Conservatives have long claimed that the Labour Party is far too much under the influence of the trade unions for it to be trusted with the government of the country. The Tories like to point out that Labour depends on the unions for around 80% of its funding; that unions control half the votes at party conference; and that in the electoral college that decides who should be Labour leader, the unions have a third of the vote.
Indeed they like to remind voters who may have forgotten, that Ed Miliband won the job in a very tight contest with his brother, David, only because of union support – the other two thirds of the electoral college, constituency party members and Labour MPs, backed David. It is clear that the Conservatives would like to fight the next election by portraying Ed Miliband as a weak leader in the pockets of his union paymasters and by scaring voters that if they choose Labour in 2015 Britain risks being returned to the 1970s with union leaders in and out of No 10 all the time dictating how the country should be run.
To fend off this attack, Ed Miliband has proposed a major change in how unions relate to the Labour Party. At the moment individual trade unionists are able to be affiliated to the Labour Party simply by virtue of being members of their particular trade union. If they don’t want to be, however, they have the right to opt out. The default position is that they will be affiliated unless they explicitly make use of this opt-out (as many do). Mr Miliband wants to change this so that in future trade unionists will have to opt in to affiliation. (They can of course also simply join the Labour Party, like anyone else, but that is something quite separate from affiliation through their union.)
The cost to Labour of this proposed change seems obvious enough. Such is the nature of human inertia that far fewer trade unionists are likely to become affiliated to the party if they have actively to opt in than would be affiliated if they had to make the effort to opt out. And since the funding of the party by the unions currently depends on the numbers affiliated, this change could cost the already indebted party millions of pounds in funding. As to the other elements of alleged undue influence by the unions, the Labour leader has asked a former party general secretary, Ray Collins, to look into issues such as the share of the unions’ votes at conference and in the electoral college.
Critics of the Labour leader’s proposals say that, on the issue of union voting strength, Mr Miliband’s ideas are far too vague. And on funding, they argue that the change from opting out to opting in may well not affect the scale of union funding of the party and may indeed even increase union influence in the process. The reason is that unions are required by law to place a part of their members’ dues in a political fund. It is from this fund that unions pay the Labour Party the membership fees of affiliated members. Under the new proposals, although it may well be that the size of affiliated membership fees will fall, as a corollary, the unions’ political funds will become less depleted, leaving union leaders with more money to spend on political campaigns. This extra money could, of course, still find its way to the Labour Party but union leaders will have greater control than now on whether or not it does, and this, say Mr Miliband’s critics, could increase union influence.
One critic in particular was not impressed by the Labour leader’s plan. David Cameron taunted Ed Miliband at prime minister’s questions on Wednesday saying that the unions “own you, lock, stock and block vote”. The Labour leader hit back saying that Mr Cameron in turn was owned by a few millionaires, pointing to the millions of pounds that hedge fund owners have contributed to Conservative Party coffers.
All this comes in the context of a breakdown in discussion between the parties on how party politics should be financed. Ed Miliband renewed his demand that individual donations to parties should be capped at £5,000, a proposal turned down by the Tory leader, partly on the grounds that capping individual donations would be likely to require taxpayers to fill the gap in party finding.
Although Mr Miliband has been put on the back foot by what’s alleged to have been going on in Falkirk, there are plenty of people willing to speak up for Labour’s links with the unions. The Labour Party was, after all, partly created by the unions. Many go further, applauding Unite’s professed wish to broaden candidate selection. For there is widespread concern that stretches far beyond the Labour Party, that far too many parliamentarians come from a narrow group of Oxbridge-educated political anoraks who go straight from university to work for an MP, get promoted into becoming special advisers to ministers and are then parachuted into safe seats by their patrons. If Unite is trying to break that pattern by getting others in on the act, then that’s a good thing, they say. The trouble is that it seems that Unite may be less acting as the disinterested agent of the public good and more as a political operator simply attempting to get its own people in positions of power.
What’s your view?
- Do you think the unions, and Unite in particular, have been trying to exert too much influence in the Labour Party or not?
- If you do, how significant is it when you come to deciding whether or not to vote Labour yourself?
- Do you think David Cameron is on to a winner by claiming Ed Miliband is “owned” by the unions?
- Similarly, do you think Ed Miliband strikes a chord with voters by claiming the Prime Minister is “owned” by a bunch of millionaires?
- Do you think the Labour leader has acted decisively and wisely on the matter, or not?
- Do you think Labour will pay a financial price from the proposed changes regarding affiliated members?
- Do you think there should be a cap on individual donations to political parties?
- And do you think parties should be financed by the taxpayer?
