Later today the general secretaries of the Britain’s trade unions will congregate at a wisteria-covered country house in Buckinghamshire. Nothing too unusual in that. The big unions have owned big country houses for decades, ostensibly to run them as training colleges for their shop-stewards, although croquet, saunas and swimming have been known to occur. This time it’s different. The house in question is Chequers, and the union bosses are meeting with Gordon Brown, his ministers and advisers. On the agenda will be the recession, cuts to public services, and the Labour manifesto for the general election next year.
The trade unions have strengthened their hand over the Labour government in the past two years, and they know it. Tony Blair could stick to the formula ‘fairness not favours’ because New Labour enjoyed opinion poll leads and solid electoral mandates. The unions were important ‘stakeholders’, to use an ugly governmental word. But there was a sense that the GMB or Unite enjoyed no greater access to Downing Street than, say, the CBI, Oxfam or the BMA.
Today, the unions are one of the most powerful influences over the government. It’s not just a question of money, although the proportion of income supplied by the unions has increased since 2007. The threat to disaffiliate from Labour voiced by CWU or GMB might have been easily dismissed in Blair’s second term. I suspect some of the people around him would have secretly welcomed it. Now, it’s a loaded gun held to the government’s head. It’s also a question of the political agenda. The unions have a well-worked out platform, and if there’s a policy vacuum at the centre, they will fill it. It’s a zero sum game.
The unions’ umbilical constitutional link to the party means that when the party’s leadership and the parliamentary party are strong, the unions lack influence. When the leadership and PLP is weakened, as at the moment, the unions’ strength is enhanced. The Warwick national policy forum (NPF) in 2007 was a three-day eyeball-to-eyeball negotiation which culminated in a single, significant concession being wrought from ministers by the unions: a guarantee of another NPF before the election. The unions will hold ministers to that single promise, because they will want to exert a major influence over the Labour manifesto.
The road to the manifesto runs via Brighton. It is unlikely that constituency delegates, especially from the north and Scotland, will be at conference in force. Constituencies have the choice between spending hundreds of pounds on travel and hotels, or on election leaflets, and many will give the seaside a miss this year. Nor will the CLPs be voting for government positions in any unified or consistent way, despite the best efforts of the floor organisers – sorry, ‘delegate liaison’. The union delegations will be disciplined and united. First they will want to overturn Brown’s 2007 reforms to the system on putting in emergency motions. It may seem like a typical piece of Labour party navel-gazing, but in reality it will be an arm-wrestling competition between Gordon Brown and the barons. If they win that, the unions will go for policy positions – on public service reform, academies, Afghanistan and other areas of concern to the unions’ leaderships. The party managers will want a conference free from disarray, so you can expect a series of backroom deals and fudges. The local Boots will have run out of sticking plasters by Monday night.
After Brighton, there will be only a matter of months to nail down the manifesto. The unions will not accept something cooked up by policy wonks sitting in a WiFi hotspot somewhere in Westminster. They will want a manifesto which reflects the policies thrashed out by the next NPF as well as conference, and constitutionally of course they are right. Ed Miliband, charged with drafting the manifesto, will be tested by the process: not his writing, but his negotiation skills.
In 2007, Gordon Brown pledged that the manifesto would be subject to a vote of the whole party membership. We did something similar in 1996 with the ‘road to the manifesto’, and – no surprises – the document was overwhelming endorsed. But this time? I don’t think party members are in the mood for writing blank cheques, nor mindless displays of loyalty. My guess is, faced with the prospect of a low turnout and only a narrow victory in the ballot, not to mention a bill for thousands of pounds to a party on its uppers, the idea will be quietly dropped.
And then the draft manifesto will be subject to the legendary ‘clause V’ meeting, when the party’s NEC and leadership will agree the final wording of the programme for the fourth term. In 1983, when the party was polarised as never before or since, the clause V meeting was billed as a major showdown between right and left. But on the day, the meeting was over in a matter of minutes. The right, led by John Golding, decided that the election was lost, and it would be better if it was lost on a batty left-wing programme. When the Bennites proposed a full-blooded socialist programme, complete with currency controls, nationalisation, and a ban on puppy farms, it was nodded through in its entirety. Never was a suicide note so swiftly penned.
This time, it will not be so simple. The union reps on the NEC will want a robust industrial agenda, and any whiff of post office privatisation, more academy schools, or independent sector treatment centres will be fiercely resisted. Harriet Harman will press for a strong ‘equalities’ agenda. Compass will be pressing their modish brand of left-wingery. For my money, I would hope that our leaders can come up with some policies which we can sell on doorsteps, which don’t take more than 30 seconds to explain. The voters are sceptical enough already, without Labour activists bombarding them with baffling policy initiatives.
The atmosphere in Chequers today may be a little frosty, underneath the tea, sandwiches and bonhomie. But we’ve seen nothing yet. The road to the manifesto is no stroll in the park, but an odyssey with siren voices ready to lure Labour onto the rocks.