IT IS sensible to delay sending a testily worded email until a good night’s sleep and the human body’s mysterious internal processes have restored a clear head and a sober mind to the resolution of life’s problems.
The Morning Star offers this advice to Keir Starmer’s team in the expectation — alas born more of hope than experience — that they think through the consequences of its slash-and-burn assault on Labour’s political heritage.
Labour is only credible as a party of government when it unites the organised strength of workers — which confers influence over the working class as a whole — with allies whose position in society lifts them above any narrow professional, sectional or commercial interest.
To put it another way, the working class is the only class without an interest in exploiting anyone and this is why, unless Labour is fixed on making the working class the ruling class or at least representing its interests in Parliament, it has no special claim on workers’ loyalty or cash.
Just as the pubs were closing on Wednesday night, the Labour Party responded, in Starmer’s name, to the suggestion by Unite’s Sharon Graham that the union’s funding of Labour’s national and regional efforts was not unconditional and that even its national affiliation was under consideration.
What brought this to a head is the union’s disappointment at the behaviour of Coventry’s Labour council, presently in a two-month industrial dispute with its refuse lorry drivers.
Starmer’s team responded with language drawn directly from the lexicon of a mergers and acquisitions lawyer extolling a corporate takeover: “We would have hoped that Unite would have got the message that the Labour Party is under new management.”
To argue, as it did, that “Keir Starmer’s Labour Party will always act in the public interest. These sort of threats won’t work in Keir Starmer’s Labour Party” implies that some public interest is served by councils paying their employees below the rate for the job.
There are always problems between public service unions and cash-strapped Labour councils, but if councillors behave like the worst of private-sector employers they forfeit any flexibility their employees and the unions might otherwise offer.
Workers understand full well that they sell their labour power in a market and that if a combination of skills shortages — which is the case with HGV drivers — and good union organisation strengthen their hand in negotiation then this, in the public interest, needs to be taken into account.
Coventry Council is paying scab drivers at above the rate to break the strike of refuse workers who just a few weeks ago were among those lauded as the heroes of the pandemic.
To put the matter in terms which the right-wing team running Labour might understand: when Labour councils behave like the worst of bad employers they undermine the party’s brand.
You might think that a Labour leadership that has created a cash crisis — and a strike threat by its own employees — by driving down the party’s subscription-paying membership might understand that there are consequences to its actions.
But these are no accidental effects. There is a well-founded fear that the Thermidorian regime presently running Labour prefers a transactional relationship with big money business donors to any reliance on union funds derived from the willingly given political levy by which individual trade unionists fund Labour.
But trade unionists do more than stump up the cash. Along with individual members, they can vote in constituencies and at conference, select candidates, elect the leadership and can change the rules.
This is a power that unless used will become redundant.
