HERE we go again. Officials at the top of the Labour Party screw up over secret donations and in the blink of an eye the unions’ financial link with Labour is under the spotlight. In a criminal setting, it would be a blatant frame-up. In a political contest, it flies in the face of natural justice. In an effort to take the heat off those responsible, the unions are fingered even though they were never near the scene of the crime.
It happened under Tony Blair following the cash-for-coronets scandal when he made it plain to the Hayden Phillips inquiry through his Number 10 messengers that he, indeed, wished to see the breaking of the union link with Labour. Credit must go to Jack Straw for the role played in holding the line that time.
But Mr Blair had set the Tory hare running and their determination to break the link was reflected in their decision to call off any attempt at cross-party consensus. It lies near the top of the Tory legislative plans if and when they win a general election.
Gordon Brown admittedly, does not wish to break the union link, although his reopening of attempts to find a cross-party consensus has inevitably brought the agenda right back where it was left.
The Tories have been given momentum and it is the unions, rather than the culpable Labour officials, who are in the firing line. Contrary to the dodgy deals which have prompted two police inquiries into Labour donations, the arrangements for trade union funding are completely transparent and above board.
The unions bring Labour an invaluable range of frontline experience and democratic policy-making. That they wish to support the implementation of these policies through finance and organisation is understandable and desirable. The link is something to be proud of, not something to be discarded as a scapegoat for incompetence and worse by a few officials at the top of the party.
There is a pernicious common denominator between the cash-for-peerages affair and those surrounding David Abrahams and, in a similar vein, Wendy Alexander in Scotland: secrecy. The desire for anonymity cannot be separated from questions about motive for wanting secrecy. The justifiable suspicion that a quid pro quo is involved cannot be erased from the equation. whether it’s a peerage or a planning application. The number of big donors to the party who are now peers is testimony to that.
Another common denominator is the arrogance which was endemic in the “new†Labour culture. In both the cash-for-peerages affair and the latest scandal people who should have known better, and indeed, damningly did know better, were prepared to enter into shady deals to protect the anonymity of donors, in Mr Abrahams case, a businessman with a murky and bizarre past. Why? And why the cover-up over who else knew? That there is one cannot be in doubt.
It was not compatible for the former general secretary, Peter Watt, to say he thought he was doing nothing wrong but, just so that no one else was implicated, he told no one else. It was right for him to go, as swiftly and ruthlessly as he was ushered out of the post.
But it is wrong for him to be the token sacrifice. Every official who knew of any secret donations should go. That’s where the canker lies, not in the unions. That’s where Mr Brown can show that he means, with action, what he says about cleaning up the mess.
It is these people – and as yet we do not know how many – not the trade unions, who have brought the party and politics into disrepute and for whom Labour, real people, real candidates attempting to champion progressive politics, will pay the electoral price at the polls.
There is a view, growing in strength, among some sections of the labour movement that there is room for the unions to be even more transparent with its members about the affiliation fees. There is a mood to discuss it. But not when the unions are pinned against a wall on spurious charges of culpability.
Gordon Brown should respond to David Cameron’s opportunistic attempts to dismantle the Labour Party in the language that old Etonians understand well: Bugger off!
