03.08.1995

Labour conference blocks union vote

THE LABOUR Party’s annual conference is now certain to reduce the unions’ block vote from 70% to 50% after its national executive committee backed the move by 22 votes to 3.

Union leaders themselves were among the most enthusiastic supporters of the change - only the Rail Maritime and Transport union and the Communication Workers Union opposed it, alongside ‘left’ MP Dennis Skinner. Apparently Skinner argued at the NEC that the party would lose its ‘historically stabilising’ union influence if party membership fell under an unpopular Labour government. That influence has of course usually been exerted from the right, against leftist constituency activists.

However, Tony Blair’s statement that the vote marked “a very important day for Labour and the trade unions” is correct. It is a further step along the road to the eventual complete severing of the link between the two, as Blair continues his full-throttle rightwing drive towards the Thatcherite consensus. Moves are also continuing to end union sponsorship of individual Labour MPs, despite agreement to postpone immediate plans to do so.

Unlike many on the left, the Weekly Worker has never had any illusions that Labour is anything but a bourgeois workers’ party. It was born from an unholy alliance between the Liberal Party and the trade union bureaucracy, and its leadership and policies have always served capitalism, not the working class.

But the breaking of all formal links with the organised working class will throw the left into crisis and offer us new opportunities to forge the revolutionary alternative that will genuinely serve workers’ interests.

Alan Fox