This week has seen the annual conference of the Scottish Trades Union Congress under the theme of ‘Rebuilding Collective Prosperity’.
It may have been tempting for the STUC to take this opportunity to say “I told you so”. As Stephen Boyd, Assistant Secretary of the STUC pointed out in a recent article in the Sunday Herald, they can point to ‘a long record of questioning the sustainability of the prevailing growth model’. Instead, what we have seen from the STUC is an eagerness to involve themselves, to get their hands dirty, in a reshaping of Scotland’s economic architecture, to build a strong and flexible economy with the collective good at its core.
Throughout the past two decades, we have sometimes been too quick to forget that Labour is a movement, not just a party. We may have turned to the Unions when we needed an election campaign funded, but for new thinking we’ve often looked elsewhere, to the now-discredited bankers and brokers, to the US, who are now learning their own hard lessons. We didn’t always want to hear what our critical friends were telling us.
Perhaps now it’s time to rethink our relationship, to open ourselves up to radical ideas, grounded in the values we have always shared.
The building blocks of this new economy must be the needs of the people, with innovation, new technologies and a spirit of co-operation as the cement.
The purpose of any economic system is, or should be, to meet the needs of the people. If it fails to do this, it’s not working. A question this poses however, is, meet the needs of which people?
Scotland does not exist in a vacuum, nor should the needs of the people in this country necessarily take precedence over those elsewhere. It may be convenient for people in this country to buy cheap goods, but if people elsewhere can only provide this through sweatshops, child labour and human and environmental exploitation, it’s time to think again.
It’s not easy, there are no simple solutions or choices without consequences, and that’s why we need to work together. We know that dissonance between our behaviour at home and abroad is in no-one’s long-term interest, as the time bomb of climate change and the upsurge in terrorist incidents has shown.
This presents the Unions with a challenge. Their remit is to protect the interest of their members, but pandering to thinly veiled racism towards migrant workers should not be entertained and does their cause no favours. Shades of Dagenham leave a nasty taste in the mouth and sit uncomfortably alongside a long-standing commitment to an equalities agenda.
Another challenge for the Unions, if our movement is to re-forge our partnership in a new mould, is to accept the reality that it is only the Labour party that shares their values. The SNP may have been keen to woo the Unions, but at their core is a commitment to a right-wing economic model, and a narrow political ideology, which makes for an extremely undesirable bedfellow come mornings’ light.
A challenge then for both partners: to listen, to trust, and to be faithful to each other, our ideals, and the people we claim to serve. Doesn’t that sound like the beginning of a beautiful friendship?