By Andy Ford
None of the moves to the right in the Labour Party could have been accomplished without the support of right-wing trade union leaders. It is interesting, therefore, to look into the thinking of those union leaders who back Starmer and Evans and have done all the way from Corbyn’s removal.
How do they see the relationship between the unions and Labour Party? We got some insight into their thinking from the recent speech made by GMB general secretary, Gary Smith, who gave a speech recently to “Labour in Communications”, a right wing Labour group that seems to exist to link lobbyists with Labour MPs and some trade union leaders.
Gary Smith discussed the Sam Tarry ‘picket line row’ over the summer and he was not even mildly critical of the substance of Starmer’s stance – that shadow cabinet members (or even Labour MPs) had no place supporting workers in dispute His only quibble seemed to be with the presentation. Labour, he said, had turned “Tory chaos into a Labour Party story”, but whether he thinks shadow cabinet members should or should not support picket lines remained unclear.
In relation to Starmer and Reeves, Gary Smith said, “I don’t tell them how to do their job. Because I know if they phoned me to tell me how to run the GMB, it’d be a very short and industrial conversation…it’s the public who mark their card, not me”. But that approach is to take the Labour Party and the trade unions as two entirely separate organisations with entirely different objectives. It completely ignores the fact that it was the unions that set the up Labour Party, that they are affiliated to it, and that they pay a very significant part of the Party’s running costs.
Trade union monies paid to the Labour Party
The GMB alone pays £290,000 every 3 months in to the Labour Party, plus other sundry donations, including support for individual Labour MPs. All in all, GMB members have given the Labour Party £1.23 million in the year to May 2022.
Whereas the Tories get their money secretively and furtively from businesses and rich individuals, union support for Labour is transparent. It is the ‘cleanest’ money in politics and so the unions have every right to influence and control (alongside the members) the Labour leadership. A hands-off attitude is hardly going to secure ‘value for money’ for GMB members.
Smith spoke approvingly of the trade union upsurge of recent months, “I have so much optimism and I see so much positive energy around the trade union movement” and we would agree with him on that. “I see so much passion,” he added, “and I see so much anger. I see the hurt in workplaces, but for the first time in a long time, I see people saying we’ve had enough”. But he then claimed that Labour has a “radical programme” on workers’ rights, although that can hardly argued to be true when the Party is only committed to repeal those anti-union laws that are passed by this government.
All anti-trade union laws need to be repealed
Surely, to protect and extend all that “optimism and energy”, and to end the “hurt”, the GMB should be insisting on repeal of all the anti-union laws, right back to Jim Prior and Norman Tebbit in the 1980s? There have been at least sixteen pieces of anti-union legislation in the last 32 years and all of these need to be repealed. (see https://www.ier.org.uk/a-chronology-of-labour-law-1979-2017/)
What Gary Smith may really have been talking about when referring to Labour’s supposed “radical programme” is Starmer’s pledge to set up a national economic council “to bring together representatives from government, industry and the unions”, to put “working people and businesses at the heart of economic decision-making”. This is a promise, in other words, to bring the trade union leaders in from the cold, with a seat at the ‘top table’. Some of them might be happy with just that, but it will make no difference to union members and, in fact, will become a means of ‘justifying’ attacks on workers’ standards by roping their union leaders into unpleasant decisions.
This idea is not new and is definitely not ‘radical’. It was first implemented by Lloyd George during the First World War, as a way to undercut the shop stewards’ movement. It has been regularly dusted off since, notably by Harold Wilson with his National Economic Development Council in the 1960s.
But it’s a different era now for British capitalism – and it will equally be a different era for the unions and the union leaders. A seat or two for the unions on a top advisory council will not be enough to protect the members of the unions from the ongoing crisis of British capitalism.
