Ian Aitken – Rattling the bars
ONE of the reasons why I have never been much in favour of state funding for political parties is that I have always believed in the idea that the Labour Party is – and ought to be – the party of the have-nots while the Conservative Party is the party of the rich and their hangers-on. So long as the trade unions remained Labour’s main source of funds and the Tories relied on big business, then it seemed to me that this desirable distinction would continue to survive.
For many people, support for state funding had something to do with a desire to sever – or, at least, to weaken- the link between the unions and the Labour Party. At the moment when state funding became a fashionable idea – which was around the mid-1970s – it was also fashionable on the right wing of the Labour Party to admire the German Social Democratic Party. The SPD had become a sort of early, socialism-lite version of “new” Labour when Tony Blair was still in short pants. And the SPD had no formal links with the German trade union movement. So if you wanted Labour to look more like the SPD, clearly you needed to dump the unions.
This, I suspect, was Blair’s general view both before and after he became leader of the party. I recall writing a piece in The Guardian when Blair was still a shadow minister suggesting that he wanted to cut the ties with the unions. Blair didn’t like the piece and rather peremptorily summoned me to appear before him for a wigging. I turned up and was duly wigged, but concluded afterwards that what he had had to say supported rather than contradicted what I had written.
Essentially, he argued that Labour did not really need the unions’ affiliation fees, because it was possible to build a mass membership at the party’s grassroots which would supply the necessary cash. He informed me that they were already doing this successfully in his own Sedgefield constituency and he believed the same techniques could be spread across the entire country, thereby ending the party’s dependence on the then deeply unpopular unions.
I didn’t take the idea very seriously, nice though it would have been to see a genuine mass party again. In the event, the Sedgefield scheme came to rather less than nothing, with an original surge in grassroots membership being followed nationally by a precipitate fall in card-carrying members. This effectively forced the party’s fundraisers to go to City boardrooms with their begging bowls, in direct competition with the Tories, while at the same time redoubling their pleas to the union treasurers. It was, in effect, a perfect double whammy.
But the yearning on the Blairite wing for a union-free Labour Party is as great as ever, if only because they remain a standing reminder to the leadership that Labour was created to be the party of the working class. That partly explains why state funding is still on the agenda. If the poor old taxpayer can be made to cough up, who needs trade unionists? Once that is achieved, the transformation of the historic Labour Party into a respectable-looking mark II version of the German SPD would be complete.
And I have to admit that this would probably correspond more accurately to the realities of “new” Labour. True, some people had high hopes that the transfer of power from Blair to Gordon Brown would involve a return to “old” Labour loyalties, with a restoration of the traditional commitment to the working class. I can’t say I ever shared their optimism- – Brown’s devotion to the concept of the Private Finance Initiative and to catastrophic projects such as the so-called “public-private partnership” for the London Underground should have made it plain that there wasn’t much mileage there.
But any last vestiges of hope in that direction finally came to an end last month, with a series of utterances by Brown and assorted Blairite ex-ministers in which it was made unmistakeably clear that the Blairite “reforms” – in other words, marketisation and partial privatisation – of the public services would continue unabated under the new regime. There is to be no essential change of direction.
All that prompts the question: what on earth was all the fuss about? Why the endless sulks, the slammed doors, the nasty briefings and the general air of bitter disagreement between Number 10 and Number 11 Downing Street if there was going to be no change once the transition had at last occurred? Was it just about who got the armoured Daimler and who sat in the middle seat at the Cabinet table? If so, it was a massive con-trick on thousands of loyal but anxious party members who held their tongues during the infantile tantrums in the hope that it signalled a genuine difference of ideology.
It is beginning to look as if we have swapped a witty, charismatic, slightly unprincipled election-winner for a glum, humourless, nail-biting son-of-the-manse who has yet to prove he is capable of winning an election. In two years time, come the next general election, this may prove to be a false nightmare. Perhaps the Gordon Brown we used to admire when he was Shadow Chancellor – do you remember him: witty, incisive and quick-thinking? – will reappear. If so, there will have to be a remarkable transformation. Perhaps – dare I whisper it? – we need Alastair Campbell back.
But whatever happens, the trade unions are going to have a crucial role in offering the only organised, coherent criticism of the path “new” Labour is taking. Labour MPs sometimes – occasionally – do quite well on specific issues which can be settled in the division lobbies. However, they are not very effective in debating the big, broad issues of where the party is going.
Only the unions look likely to keep hammering away in defence of what Brown would call Labour “values”. And no wonder – after all, they were the people who started the party in the first place, and with that very purpose in mind.
