Tony Blair may be the only man to win a parliamentary majority in the United Kingdom for the last two decades and one of just two prime ministers who can unquestionably be called ‘great’, but he was a sub-par party reformer. Samuel Coleridge wrote of George Canning that he ‘flashed such a light around the constitution, that it was difficult to see the ruins of the fabric through it’, and just as Canning’s brilliance kept the structural weaknesses of early 19th century conservatism from view, Blair’s hyper-charisma obscured the Labour party’s systemic weaknesses. He left the country a far better place than it was in 1997, but he left the Labour party as it was in 1994: governed by a series of anachronistic and undemocratic procedures designed for another era.
Whatever Ed Miliband’s eventual record may be, he made what might be the most important single statement by a Labour leader in history on Sunday, in calling for a drastic reduction not just in the amount that parties can take in in individual donations, but in challenging the Labour party to live without the vast individual donations handed out by the trade unions.
Without the trade unions, there would have been no wave of Labour MPs elected in 1906, no minority governments in 1924, 1929 and 1974, no great landslides in 1945, 1997 and 2001, no Open University, no equalisation of the age of consent and no NHS. But the trade union movement as we know it is in the early stages of a terminal and incurable disease. It is not the victim of failure or poor leadership, but the move from a career structure based around a single firm or factory to mobile labour based around a series of different companies and in some cases, different industries. There will be a future for organised labour, but it will more closely resemble the guilds of Renaissance Europe than the behemoths of the 20th century. That is not necessarily apocalyptic for the labour movement, but it is a catastrophe for the Labour party.
The easy thing to do – and the route taken by successive Labour leaders, from Neil Kinnock to Gordon Brown – is to hand out reassuring platitudes about the enduring importance of the trade union link and to attend earnest panel discussions about the future of the trade unions. But if Labour doesn’t think seriously about how it funds itself in a world without the giants of organised labour then it won’t even be able to afford the panel discussions, let alone a general election campaign. That won’t be always be comfortable; beyond narrow self-interest there is no argument for preventing trade unionists from paying their political levy to the Conservatives, to the Liberal Democrats or to Siobhan Benita. But the cost of not thinking seriously is far heavier.
Just a few moments away from my house is a drinking fountain, built at the turn-of-the-century by the temperance movement. In a cruel historical irony, it is now a rallying point for the local drunks and vagrants, who offer an enduring proof that while you wouldn’t want to invite the temperance movement to a party, they had a point about the destructive influence alcohol can have. But their movement failed because demographic change wiped out the temperance movement as a national concern. The temperance movement also funded the Liberal party, who just two months after the fountain was erected won their last and greatest landslide. They never won a parliamentary majority again, because, shorn of the great movement that had funded its candidates, its advertisements and its national organisation, they could no longer function as a nationwide party.
Labour, then, has a choice. It can take the path of those old Liberals: quietly protesting the dying of the light, allowing younger rivals with alternative funding mechanisms to overtake it. Or it can accept that sunset doesn’t mean the end of the world, but simply the close of day, and start planning for a progressive tomorrow.
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Stephen Bush is a member of Progress, works as a journalist, and writes at adangerousnotion.wordpress.com
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There speaks someone who has either never been a trade union member, or, if he has, has never taken a day’s strike action or even a work to rule – ‘guilds’ indeed.
Miliband’s wish to get rid of trade union money is solely about the peddling of political influence, rather than the funds themselves. Why not redefine the relationship with trade unions altogether? If they still want to contribute to the party, so be it. And of course, the logical consequence of this is instead of relying for funding on trade unions, we rely on the same kind of funding as Progress, and the people funding this will not expect the same amount of influence as Lord Sainsbury, oh no.
There’s no surprises that Progress backs this move.
Are you sure you have understood Ed Miliband? I got the distincy impression that this will not make much difference as the Union donations will be treated as aggregated individual members donations. This limit to 5ooo pounds will annoy the Tories more than Labour.