“SOMETHING will have to give”, said the former Cabinet outrider for “new” Labour in the House of Commons on the day of the big rally and meeting to protest against the Government’s proposal to part-privatise the Royal Mail in the face of mounting opposition from unions and MPs.
It was a telling comment from a Labour politician who has been a major player in securing the party leadership’s embrace of the free market. But it could be prophetic, too. The Government’s blindfolded determination to adhere to a market-dominant agenda linking the twin obsessions of privatising public services and targeting the poor with punitive sanctions and conditionality on benefits is out of step with the growing public hostility to what is increasingly seen as a discredited private sector role.
As the Government and the public mood sheer away in opposite directions so too does the leadership from its party and the labour movement. The packed rally in Westminster over the privatisation of the Royal Mail heard warnings that the Communication Workers’ Union would disaffiliate from the Labour Party if the Government plans go ahead – not just from rank-and-file members, but from the general secretary Billy Hayes himself. The sentiment is felt deeply within the CWU which is being asked to stand by and watch a national institution slaughtered on the altar of privatisation along with the jobs of its own members and an irreplaceable public service.
But it goes wider than that. Within other unions a similar feeling is spreading: why should so much of the membership’s dues be handed over to support the election of a government which not only does little to redress the Tory-built, uneven playing field in employment law but which pro-actively introduces measures which damage the interests of union members within both the public and private sectors?
Even union leaders who could never bring themselves to contemplate sanctioning a formal break from Labour are forced to admit that the Government has itself to blame for engendering this mood and from their lofty perches they watch fearfully as they see how the mood plays into the hands of the far left.
But it is not only the Government that is to blame. These same trade union leaders and senior officers who bemoan the fact that the Government ignores party policy are the same people who sit on their hands when it comes to voting policy into the party’s election programme at the National Policy Forum.
This weekend’s NPF should be scrutinised closely for signs that this increasing tension in the Labour-union link is galvanising more determined resolution.
With free-market vanities going up in flames there is a chance, an imperative need, for more radical, creative thinking. Instead, while Cabinet members jostle furtively for position in a post election defeat leadership contest, the Government presses on with an agenda as though it is riding a runaway train to oblivion.
Just as the market is exposed as not fit for purpose the Government, with shamefully little fuss in the Commons, is thrusting through the legislative machinery new welfare reforms which amount to nothing less than a workfare programme.
Even the private sector companies who want to grab the cash for finding jobs for the unemployed say it won’t work. There is too much unemployment, they say, so instead of being paid for results – that is, finding people work – they just want to be paid, upfront, never mind the results.
That is the madness of the market, the same madness that brought us the economic downturn and contributed to the heavy rise in unemployment. It is not too late for the Government to remember its election pledge to fully restore a “publicly-owned” Royal Mail to health.
If it is not already too late to claw back a chance of winning the next general election – leaving aside whether it deserves to or not – the Government may have one last chance of redeeming itself when it comes to April’s Budget. A change of direction is needed, and the Government has been shown the way.
About The Author
This is a thoughtful article, but I am afraid that you should not be so naïve as to believe a thing that the “former Cabinet outrider for “new” Labour” says with respect to any potential change of heart vis-à-vis attitudes towards privatisation. These words will be nothing more than specious verbal formulae concocted especially for your consumption. Being decent people with your hearts in the right place, you cannot bring yourselves to recognise that these are nothing more than vapid blandishments. The elite of the ex-Labour Party, who enjoy the perks of high office and the access to leading financial and business contacts that their positions afford, are wedded to free-market globalist dogma. If any of them should say otherwise, it will only be as a mendacious short-term measure to secure their own skins.
Ordinary union members and the public more generally will not disaffiliate from the ex-Labour Party and offer support to far-left Trotskyist groupuscules as you fear, for the latter offer them nothing. The latter are primarily interested in fomenting social conflict using their Islamist confederates as a surrogate proletariat in their pointless ethnicised “class-war” against the indigenous population, who have so egregiously disappointed them by their moderation (so much so indeed, that they love to employ the inaccurate and insulting term “fascist” in almost all discussions of contemporary white working class political expression). Rank-and-file trade unionists and British citizens more generally want to see a government that acts in the national interest, not on the behalf of an international financial oligarchy or of the sectional interests of certain elements of an increasingly Balkanised society which the ex-Labour Party has created. If any unions are thinking of affiliating with far-left parties such as Respect, this would be a huge mistake, for it would serve only to make them even less appealing to ordinary people, with the consequence that their memberships would in all likelihood decline still further.