Union leaders say they will restore life to Labour conference

Submitted by Anon on 14 July, 2009 - 10:29 Author: A UNISON activist

At the recent Unison Labour Link conference, UNISON General Secretary Dave Prentis said that the union would push for the restoration of unions and local Labour Parties' right to put motions to Labour Party conference.

According to an insider from the Executive of the Unite union, all the big Labour-affiliated unions - Unison, Unite, GMB, and CWU - are agreed on this push, and expect Labour's National Executive to respond to their pressure by proposing restoration to the Labour Party conference this September.

Whether it all goes through like that remains to be seen, of course. Union activists should remain vigilant and seek to call the union leaders to account.

Val Graham, a supporter of the Labour Representation Committee and long-time UNISON activist, reports that Prentis used his speech at the Unison Labour Link conference to go further than he had done at the main Unison conference in fleshing out the changing relationship between UNISON and Labour. He also signalled some surprising U-turns of his own.

Val reports: "He took privatisation and specifically NHS privatisation as the keystone, calling on members to campaign for a change of policy in the party and target Labour Link funding to this end. He said he would be calling on the other affiliated unions to do the same and would press unions such as RMT to re-affiliate to the party to join the fight inside. He was critical of attempts by these unions to stand candidates in elections and called for unity around a TU intervention to influence the Labour Manifesto. He said he did not think he could support a manifesto which did not put clear red water between Labour and the Tories on the issue of privatisation.

"He said he would be approaching other unions to support a motion to LP Conference on NHS privatisation and that they would seek a restoration of the right to put motions to Labour Conferences starting this year."

Of course, when the right to put contemporary motions to the Labour conference was taken away, several union leaders, Prentis included, talked big about how they would not accept such an attack on democracy, only to abandon the fight at the first opportunity, settling instead for a promise of a review after two years. So it is entirely possible that Prentis is not serious about his claims to want to restore some democracy and 'clear red water' to the political arm of the Labour movement.

However the fact that he used a speech to the most Labour-loyal section of his union to spell out these moves makes them something more than just rhetoric. Talking left to the UNISON national delegate conference is one thing, but telling the Labour-loyal individual Labour Party members of the UNISON Labour Link that he will be seeking to get the RMT re-admitted to the Labour Party to "join the fight" is another thing altogether.

Even to stand for election as delegates to the Unison Labour Link conference, UNISON members must also be individual members of the Labour Party, which severely limits attendance from the left of the union - most of whom have either resigned or been expelled from Labour, or were never members in the first place. In previous years, the Labour Link conference has been an orgy of red baiting and slavish advocacy of support for the Government almost regardless of its policies.

What is certain is that Prentis wouldn't be making such speeches if he hadn't already been having discussions with the leaders of the other big affiliated unions. There may be an element of jockeying for position amongst them - and being a little less pro-Labour than Unite might be an asset in recruitment at the moment, but Prentis wouldn't be going up against the Labour machine alone. In which case, it does seem at least a distinct possibility that the unions will make an effort to restore their right to put contemporary motions on Labour conference agendas, and to force Labour into contesting the next election on a manifesto promising less, not more, privatisation.

Even a modest attempt at this from union leaders who have been acquiescent in the face of so many attacks on their members over the last dozen years would have massive implications. Why do it, and why now?

Why has Prentis started talking this way?

Possibly the answer is recent polling data which showed that only one in three public sector workers (UNISON's core membership) planned to vote Labour. Such a context makes continued toadying to the Labour Party a positively dangerous thing for the union to do, and damages its ability to recruit and retain members. Possibly it is the prospect of inevitable defeat at the next General Election, leading Prentis to calculate that knifing the Labour Party now will make him more popular with his members with no real political cost in the long run.

At this year's main UNISON conference, Dave Prentis shocked delegates (most especially those amongst the pro-Labour leadership-loyal wing of the union, who seemed most put out at not having been consulted about the content of Dave's speech) by declaring that UNISON would no longer "feed the hand that bites it". This phrase had first been coined inside UNISON by supporters of the Socialist Party in their unsuccessful attempts to have UNISON disaffiliate from the Labour Party, and Prentis' decision to echo them clearly upset those who have made comfortable political careers for themselves out of the UNISON Labour Link - the singularly supine organisation within UNISON supposedly crafted to represent the union inside the Party, but most often seen seeking to persuade UNISON members to give their time, money and votes to elect Labour candidates who then promptly turn a deaf ear to the demands of those same union members.

It is not yet clear what the results of this shift will be. Already UNISON has "suspended" the Constituency Development plans whereby it channeled union money into specific CLPs, but with a year to go before the General Election it would be easy to restore the funding without having had a major impact. UNISON previously suspended such payments in protest over the attack on the Local Government Pension Scheme, but it did so instead of a serious political fight to save the pensions of its members, not as part of one. It was simply gesture politics, and once the campaign had fizzled out with a compromise around a two-tier pension scheme, the flow of members' money to the Labour Party was restored.

It is also worth remembering that money to individual constituencies forms only a small part of the union's overall generosity towards the Labour Party.

More significantly, however, Prentis went on at the conference to say "we should only work with and support trade union MPs who also stand up for our values and to ensure that any labour party manifesto does not continue the privatisation of our public services and those who provide them... We cannot tell our members to campaign and vote for a party whose manifesto promises more competition and more privatisation of our public services.”

Since very few of Labour's current crop of MPs could be described in the terms above, it is difficult to see how Prentis will be able to square this speech with any kind of blanket support for Labour at the next election, unless there is a marked change of direction by the Labour Party.

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