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Remodelling the unions’ links with Labour

Jul 9

Posted by James in Parties | 2 Comments

Has Ed Miliband’s “Clause Four moment” finally come, with his plans to require union members to opt into Labour support? It’s certainly brave, not least financially, but might it be the right thing to do?

On one level, it’s none of my business what those links are. I’m not a Labour supporter nor, currently, in a union. The Brownite left of the party see the unions as a crucial part of Labour history (which they are) and argue this historic link must be protected. For the Blairite right they are dinosaurs, politically incapable of appealing to Middle England. Both sides regard the other as manipulative and almost entryist (and the first half of that is hard to argue with in either case: although hardly unusual in a political party). But the relationship matters beyond those directly involved. Today’s announcement from the leader looks like an attempt to park the tanks in the sweet spot, not just a triangulated mid-point.

The relationship between the party and the unions remains thoroughly intertwined. More than a third of the places on Labour’s National Executive Committee are officially reserved for the unions. Unions wield 50% of the votes at conference, something which doesn’t feature in Labour’s modest FAQ on such gatherings. In 2011, the unions provided 90%+ of Labour’s funding, although that proportion has fallen away, and will fall much further under this plan.

The unions founded the Labour Party’s predecessor the Labour Representation Committee at the turn of the twentieth century for a good reason. The working classes were barely represented in Parliament, and indeed the universal male franchise was little more than thirty years old. If the mass unions of the time wanted parliamentarians who cared about the grinding conditions of the late Victorian working poor, they would have to get them elected.

“Breaking the link” with the unions, therefore, is about as totemic a possible betrayal as can be imagined for the Labour left, which in the current febrile atmosphere around Falkirk includes the Brownite centre of the party as well as the John McDonnell left. But the current relationship feels wrong from the outside for a number of reasons. In policy terms, Labour hasn’t operated as a party that puts working people first for a very long time, whether you see July 1994 or October 1951 as the end point for that.

Unions (rightly) bemoan the increasing privatisation of the NHS in England, which has proceeded apace under Tory and Labour governments alike for decades now. They got a minimum wage for their members (and the rest of us – thanks guys!) but at a low level, and one that’s fallen behind inflation since 2009. The extent to which Labour are less distressing a prospect for office than the Tories has been eroded and eroded, and I would have thought the recent wholesale adoption of Tory austerity might have led to more outcry from the unions.

So what’s best for union members? What’s best for Labour members? And what’s best for democracy more widely?

For union members, this looks like progress. If they support Labour, which applies to fewer than is usually assumed, they will now get a direct and clearer role in the party’s democracy. Those who don’t support Labour won’t see their money spent trying to elect Labour politicians, which has to be better too. If I’m ever employed by someone other than myself I’ll feel much happier joining a union again and knowing I’m not listed as a Labour supporter thereby. It’ll also put pressure on the unions to be more internally democratic themselves: trade union leaderships of both the left and the right often appear like an out of touch elite, more like the old Soviet nomenklatura than true leaders.

For Labour members, they will see a substantial influx of new but proper members. If Labour’s internal democracy becomes properly one member one vote throughout, with newly empowered individual trade unionists taking part, it might just be revived from the moribund and pointless state it’s in now. This might even genuinely swing Labour a little back from the right-wing anti-worker positions it’s adopted over the last twenty years in particular, because some of those non-Labour supporting union members will be to the left, but probably more will be to the right. (2008 trade unionist voting intentions: 38% Labour, 33% Tory, 14% LD, 16% other)

It’ll also free Labour up to challenge corporate power over politics, if they’re brave enough, as primarily expressed through donations to the Tories. When their individual trade union members have all actively ticked a box that says “I want a proportion of my subs to go to Labour”, it’ll be much easier for them to take on those Tory double standards. Those conference and NEC rules should be next to be reformed, too. That doesn’t mean scrapping union places on the NEC, mind. Whatever the percentage of true members under this scheme have come in through the unions, let them elect that proportion of NEC members if they wish, although direct democracy throughout could also be considered.

Pending the detail, this looks like a smart move, albeit one forced on the Labour leadership by hypocritical media lines run by the Tories and Progress. It looks better for individual trade unionists, worse for their leadership, better for Labour members, worse for those who want them to stick to unpopular Blairite prescriptions, and just possibly better for the country. Although I’m not holding my breath for an improved Labour party after the last 20 years.

Why are Unite (the union) so determined to ignore their members and unite the Union?

Jul 5

Posted by James in Activism, Constitution | 14 Comments

Yesterday, in the heat of the Falkirk row, Lord Ashcroft  published a leaked Unite strategy paper, written by the union’s political director Steve Hart. The main thrust is a discussion about how Unite are frustrated with Labour’s timidity on policy (quite right), how they wish Labour was more inclined to select working class candidates (entirely reasonably), how they’re organising to get their own people selected (which sounds worse than it is), and how they still have faith in Labour as a party of the left (bafflingly).

Tucked away on the penultimate page, though, is a short section on Scotland which has been largely ignored, but which is certainly telling.

Unite paper

 

It’s consistent with the lines given to the Record here, but does indicate the limited extent to which the Unite leadership is prepared to listen to their members. The Scottish membership, Steve reports, “doesn’t want to be rushed to a decision” – but the Unite response certainly wasn’t to avoid taking sides.

Instead they pressed the Labour leadership to set up their own partisan Devolution Commission, which “attempts to address one overriding question: how can we meet the aspirations of the Scottish people for fuller devolution while maintaining the integrity of the UK which we know they value strongly“. Neither Labour nor Unite are prepared even to ask the question here: do Scots, whether Labour members or trade unionists or not, really think Westminster is serving their best interests?

Unite then went on to press Labour to go further and establish their own pro-Westminster campaign, which was amusingly called United With Labour – perhaps as a consequence of the same psychological process I imagine lies behind the choice of name for the Ford Focus. Preserving the Union may be Labour policy, and there’s no reason why they shouldn’t campaign to support it, but why are those efforts actually being led by Unite, given the more neutral position their members appear to have taken.

Through these two decisions, the open-minded and questioning uncertainty the Unite leadership found amongst their membership has been ignored and worked around in favour of a determined unionism of the other sort. Their position will develop, they say, not as led by the membership, but led by the Scottish Committee.

I’m a huge supporter of the principle of labour organising itself, and we know how much worse the workforce gets treated where they’re not organised. I have been in trade unions, too – not currently, given I’m self-employed – but I look at Westminster and do not see a political system which supports working people, let alone those unfortunate enough to be looking for work in a climate of intentional austerity, austerity supported by Labour from the opposition benches.

It reminds me of an anecdote of George Orwell’s. He was no supporter of nationalism, of course, and his essay “Notes on Nationalism” has this to say about “Celtic nationalism”:

One symptom of it is the delusion that Eire, Scotland or even Wales could preserve its independence unaided and owes nothing to British protection.

Despite the difficulties Ireland’s going through, few would argue now that their independence relies on British protection. To be fair, in the same essay he also includes “old-fashioned British jingoism” in his definition of nationalism, something still found within parts of the Labour Party as well as the Tories or UKIP.

 

But the anecdote is this. When he was young he kept noticing streets called Union Street. As a good socialist, he assumed it was in honour of the struggles of the trade union movement, but was then bitterly disappointed when he realised it was in honour of something entirely unrelated: the Act of Union. Whatever your views on independence, there should be no automatic link between unions and the Union. Inside the unions as inside Scotland, the people should decide.

You may continue to pay for sex

Jul 1

Posted by James in Holyrood | 9 Comments

Well, you probably don’t. Maybe you do, though: some people clearly do. Perhaps you do but you wouldn’t admit to it in public. Either way, Rhoda Grant’s proposals to make you a criminal if you choose to do so have fallen at the first hurdle, perhaps unexpectedly. Most of her Labour colleagues signed up to support it, but were only joined by one other MSP: Murdo Fraser, from the Scottish Tories’ evangelical wing. One might have expected the puritans on the SNP benches – folk like John Mason – to have signed up. The fact they didn’t suggests the SNP leadership were strongly against Grant’s bill, whether on grounds of principle or presentation.

This proposal caused a lot of anxiety amongst sex workers and former sex workers, and a divided response amongst those who identify as feminists. Personally I agree with the Ladyfest Glasgow submission to Rhoda Grant, and will simply quote from their document.

You write, “currently in Scotland, it is possible for a consenting adult to have sex with another consenting adult in return for payment without any offence being committed by either person”. We would be profoundly alarmed to see the principle of consenting sex between adults, that occurs in private, being criminalised for any reason (or, based on the evidence you’ve provided, none.) As a collective that includes trans* women, queer women, and sex working women, we have good reason to be highly suspicious of any state-originating discourse that sees the starting point of “it is possible for a consenting adult to have sex with another consenting adult [ … ] without any offence being committed by either person” as an opportunity for change.

…

On the topic of the fight against HIV-AIDS, you appear to have missed the recent landmark report joint-authored by the UN Development Programme (UNDP), the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) and the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), which found, “where sex work has been decriminalized, there is a greater chance for safer sex practices through occupational health and safety standards across the industry. Furthermore, there is no evidence that decriminalization has increased sex work”.

…

It goes without saying that we at Ladyfest Glasgow are not epidemiologists, or experts on public health. It is therefore all the more troubling that we appear to be better informed about these issues than you. The complete lack of mention of the issues surrounding HIV in your consultation document suggest either, a) you don’t think these issues are relevant to a discussion of sex work, b) you’re not aware of these issues, or c) you didn’t include a discussion of them because you couldn’t find any evidence on this topic that would back up your poorly informed crusade. None of these options suggest that you’re the best person to be legislating on these issues.

Actually, maybe just read the whole thing if you’re interested. Personally I think the priorities should be protecting sex workers from disease, violence and exploitation, alongside providing support for sex workers who want to get out of the business. There’s no evidence this bill would have done anything to deliver on any of those objectives, and in fact plenty of evidence from the UN down it would have aggravated many of the existing problems.

A sickness at the heart of Westminster

Jun 30

Posted by James in Health, Holyrood, Westminster | 2 Comments

nhs-cameronThe Tories’ latest wheeze to head the racists in blazers off at the pass is this: to make Johnny or Joanna Foreigner have to pay for his or her treatment on the NHS, unless it’s an A&E visit.

Well, it’s not that new, but it’s back in the papers, and it sounds like Mr Hunt has spent another ten minutes thinking how it’d work. Time for a crass press release!

As the Guardian points out, the cost of the problem they’re trying to solve is £33m out of £109,000m – less than a thirtieth of one percent of the English NHS budget.

Actually, is it even right to call the English system “the NHS” any more? It feels like spin, or perhaps nostalgia: like the sad wee British Rail logo you still get on your tickets even through the system has been smashed into pseudo-competing franchises to be run by anyone’s national rail company except our own. But I digress.

This may be a gross over-simplification, but imagine NHS services as a line that stretches from the poor souls stretchered into A&E after a motorway pile-up at one end through to the most elective of treatments at the other. If the Tories erect a wall just beyond A&E, they ensure non-British nationals go untreated for infectious diseases they currently can see a GP for. Sure, if Johnny in this case is Mohammed Al-Fayed they’ll go to Harley Street or BUPA. But most foreign residents are working, studying, looking for work.

And deciding not to treat those people when they’re sick means they’ll spread disease to others, leading to more unhappiness and taking folk away from their jobs. And costing the NHS more. They may get sicker and sicker until they do eventually get rolled into A&E: now they’re much more difficult to treat. Again, costing the NHS more. This stupid idea isn’t even likely to save taxpayers money. In fact, immigrants are taxpayers too: VAT in every case, often income tax, stamp duty or VED, all sorts.

Part of the reason the NHS has been so totemic for voters is that it treats everyone. It’s one of the few bits of actual socialism to have put down proper roots across much of the political spectrum. But the Orange Book Lib Dems and the ideological and racist austerity-addicts of the modern Tory party want to undermine that universality. The mid-market press and Nigel Farage have laid the groundwork for them to start this assault by not treating foreigners. How long before “shirkers” get treated after “strivers”?

Not long, perhaps. There’s already a campaign going on the right (with all sorts of misleading and emotive propaganda in it) to start charging for GP visits. It’s to reduce pressure on them, honest! Nonsense. It’s to ration healthcare away from the poor. Would the worried well middle classes be put off by a fiver charge? Unlikely. Would the seriously ill poor be deterred? Sometimes. And so the pressure on GP’s surgeries would fall, perhaps, but offset again by extra pressure on A&E. And at the price of a fair system that treats people according to need, not income.

Thank goodness this vicious and counterproductive idea would only apply to the English health service, although I’m starting to have the first twinges of anxiety when I visit England: what will happen if I get ill? A taste of the same concern people get when they visit America: will my travel insurance cover me? Will I come back a million in debt for having broken my leg?

It baffles me that English voters appear to be swallowing this stuff: competition in the NHS, patchworks of privatised services, bureaucratic chaos. Shouldn’t this lead to protests and a collapse in the polls? Perhaps it’s because Labour aren’t opposing it with the kind of fierce clarity that led their much more admirable predecessors to set the NHS up in the first place. In fact, they were making the same sort of argument before they got chucked out in 2010.

Health is one of those areas where the SNP have got it broadly right, for my money, and one where devolution is saving Scotland from horrors no-one foresaw during the 1997 referendum campaign. Westminster may have a sickness at its heart, but whenever English voters turn against market control of health, hopefully Scotland will have a system that they can point to and say – that! That’s what we want back!

pic from Liam

Jingo Unchained

Jun 29

Posted by Dom in Culture, Defence, Democracy, Education, Society | 2 Comments

evening news heroes

Evening news heroes

Not respecting  ’our’ troops is one of the biggest taboos in politics. Armed Forces Day is a most bizarre invention, plucked from the ether by politicians to justify support for various overseas expeditions and to placate the military establishment.

The cult of military heroism in Britain is absolutely bizarre. It has created a climate in which everyone is a hero, even those people who have ambivalently signed up to the military due to a lack of options at home for reasons of class, education or general unemployment.

A few years ago the Army started recruiting via Spotify, running adverts that began with a supermarket checkout beep and contrasted the low-paid monotony of Tesco jobs and dead end college courses with the excitement of sitting on top of a tank with your mates carrying guns. This whole recruitment ethos was lampooned in Gary: Tank Commander and the central character’s bemused reaction to being hailed a hero on his return to Glasgow Airport.

The other odd thing is that we already have a day set aside each year to remember all those lost to war and conflict, though of late Remembrance Day has been appropriated by the jingoistic people who emphasise the Great in Great Britain and turned into a celebration of war which makes it uncomfortable for anyone not into military cheerleading.

Armed Forces day in Scotland is also a chance for the unreconstructed  Union Jack wavers to have a day out and assert some sort of made up connection between Scotland and military expeditions – the recent article in the Scotsman by Major General Andrew Mackay in which Scots were described as ‘a warrior race’ being a case in point.  Since the referendum has been on the radar this also plays in to a particularly nasty kind of militaristic British nationalism, typified by the appallingly small-minded rhetoric of ForcesTogether and its attempts to construct the United Kingdom as some sort of military brotherhood.  Not by coincidence, the report which General Mackay authored was commissioned by a private think tank, the Scotland institute, set up and funded by a multi-millionaire former Territorial Army member.

I’ll respect our troops for the people they are, and I’ll remember the kid I went to primary school with killed by a roadside bomb in Basra, and I’ll support the member of my extended family who went into the RAF after being repeatedly failed by the school system,  but I will not do it on Armed Forces Day.