Signs of a political tussle between Unite and the RMT? Never. The train workers union tabled a motion calling on the TUC to campaign for a million signatures in support of the radical People’ Charter. Some members in Unite thought they could detect a clever tactic for hijacking the TUC’s authority for a cause espoused largely outside the Labour affiliated unions and accordingly submitted an amendment calling for the campaign to be run within the affiliated unions. That was gleefully accepted by the RMT, one of whose organisers declared: “If they want to do that, that’s fine. What we’ve got here, now that the motion has gone through, is the TUC supporting a set of policies which are totally against what Brown and Mandelson stand for. We have the TUC adopting the alternative economic strategy put forward by Labour in 1982.” Which some cynics unfairly dubbed at the time part of the “longest suicide note in history”.
