By Andy Ford, Unite rep
A key question for the big unions is their relationship with the Labour Party. In the light of Starmer and his clique’s sheer political incompetence and arrogance, as well as Starmer’s betrayal of the unions (and most other sections of the Labour Party’s support) there are increasing calls for the unions to sever all links with the Party – to disaffiliate.
There are eleven unions affiliated to the Labour Party. Two have around a million members – Unite and Unison. USDAW, GMB and CWU and have memberships in the hundreds of thousands, while Community, TSSA, ASLEF and FBU and the Musicians Union have over 10,000.
Lastly, the miniscule National Union of Mineworkers remain affiliated, a sad reminder of Margaret Thatcher’s destruction of British industry. All told the affiliated unions comprise about 4 million workers.
The Bakers and RMT, two small but influential unions, were affiliated in the past but left the Labour Party in disgust at the policies of the leadership. Many, many union members and reps share that disgust at the shameless betrayal of Starmer and his clique of the Labour Party’s history, traditions and its democratically decided policies.
But is walking away from the Labour Party the answer?
To the advocates of disaffiliation, all the problems in the trade unions – acquiescing in local authority cuts, crap pay deals in the NHS, failing to defend manufacturing, and many others, are caused by the link with Labour. But the cause and effect are the other way round: bureaucratisation of the unions has allowed Starmer and his think-tank buddies free rein to stitch up parliamentary selections, to attack pensioners, to go along with genocide, and ultimately to become not just unpopular, but politically toxic.
The union reps on the Labour Party NEC, with some honourable exceptions, have either sat on their hands and watched it all, or actively colluded in return for crumbs, like safe seats or elevation to the Lords. They have done this often in direct contradiction to their own union’s policies as determined by conferences.
That is why both the Labour Party NEC and the TULO are unminuted meetings – to hide from members what is discussed at these meetings and obscuring the voting record of those involved, all the better to facilitate betrayal. [See Left Horizons article on USDAW members fighting fire and rehire, here].
To which party would a newly disaffiliated union give its loyalty – and money? Would any union affiliate to the Greens? To Your Party? To TUSC? To ask the question is to answer it. The Greens are not and never have been a working-class party. Their worthy aims have no mechanism in place to realise them. And once in power, whether locally or nationally – in Ireland or Europe – they have ended up collapsing into the same old neo-liberal consensus.
No worker would seriously entrust their fate to either TUSC or Your Party, the former a proven irrelevances and the latter quickly becoming so. Thus, a union disaffiliating would end up like the NEU, PCS or RCN – with lots of very good aspirations, but no political voice or leverage to realise them.
Four fifths of Unite conference motions called for political action
Remember that fully 80% of motions to Unite’s conference called for political action to be secured, either from the Labour government, or Labour councils. The problem is that the union motions passed at the Labour Party conference are simply ignored by Starmer and the ruling clique in Labour – and most union leaders raise barely a squeak of protest. They are experts in disguising lack of action with pseudo-working-class rhetoric. [See Labour and the trade unions: the GMB view in Left-Horizons, here]
The answer is to force the Labour Party leadership to obey its own members and the unions who pay for the very existence of the Party. The wealthy donors pay very little into the Party itself. They prefer to “fund the private office of” (correctly termed bribe) the leading figures in the Starmer clique and to get their policies enacted that way.
It actually took nearly a million pounds of dark money to make Starmer the leader of the Labour Party in the first place, as painstakingly detailed in The Fraud by Paul Holden, describing the machinations of the poisonous Labour Together factional organisation.
As long as the big unions can maintain the bureaucratic domination of the officials over their members, the right-wing misrule in the Labour Party will continue. But things are changing: the ‘ice age’ in the Labour Party is at an end, with Andy Burnham’s almost certain replacement of Starmer and the election of new, fresher and more responsive leaders of Unite, Unison and USDAW.
if Labour’s policies are not radically changed, then Reform will continue to progress and hundreds of Labour MPs would face the loss of their privileged existence; the unions would face the prospect of a deeply hostile Farage administration.
Although the likes of Dave Prentice, Christine McAnea and Gary Smith try to hold back the tide of their own members’ anger and disappointment, ultimately when they cannot deliver, they are voted out and replaced, or have to step aside…or change their approach.
And what effect has the disaffiliation by RMT and the Bakers had on the Labour Party? Precisely nothing! Except to strengthen the right-wing factional regime operated by Labour Together.
The example of union disaffiliation in Ireland
That is what the example of Ireland shows us. Many unions, including Unite, left the Irish Labour Party after their disastrous coalition with Fianna Fail in the 1990s, and have been in a political limbo ever since.
But the Irish Labour Party has not collapsed or disappeared. It currently has two senators, eleven TDs in the Dail and 56 councillors. That is not much, but imagine what effect it could have, if it was won to trade union and socialist policies. The Irish Labour Party retains the affiliation of GMB. the RMT, the Bakers, SIPTU, Forsa, the TSSA – and the Munster Graphical Association.
A slight variant to disaffiliation was raised briefly at the recent Unite NEC – to allow individual branches to affiliate to whichever party they saw fit, or maybe to any party that (someone judges to) “follow Unite’s values”. But that really wouldn’t work. Some branches would affiliate to Labour, likely some to the SNP, or Plaid Cymru, or even Sinn Fein, others to the Greens or maybe…maybe…Your Party or TUSC.
The union’s political funds would be spent, but the branches would simply cancel each other out politically. And on present showing, a number would affiliate to Reform, such is the revulsion at what Starmer turned the Labour Party into. The idea of ‘any party’ affiliation looks seductive, it looks democratic, but it falls apart under any logical examination. In reality most branches would affiliate to nobody at all, and Unite would be excluded from the Labour Party.
So, what should the affiliated unions do?
First of all, they should do what they should always have done; to totally distance themselves from Keir Starmer and his policies. Starmer is going now, but he could have been forced out much earlier, had the trade unions made it clear that he was misleading the Party.
Sharon Graham and the Unite delegation did well to walk out of the Labour Party National Policy Forum over Starmer’s shameless betrayal of the ‘New Deal for Working People’ [See article on Labour Conference and the fiasco of the National Policy Forum]
No follow-up to protest over manifesto
Again, Sharon Graham and Unite were alone in refusing to endorse Starmer’s 2024 manifesto when he passed it “by acclamation” (whatever that means) at the Clause V meeting. But not much was done by Unite to follow up that brave move up, for example by pulling together Unite activists across the Labour Party and in the regions to fight for Unite’s policies and against Starmerism, every step of the way.
Andrea Egan, as the new leader of UNISON has proposed an excellent tactic – of sending UNISON activists to Shabana Mahmoud’s constituency in Birmingham to expose Mahmoud for pandering to Reform’s racism on immigrants coming here to work, with her attack on Leave to Remain and visa restrictions for workers coming to do the jobs no-one here wants to do.
It remains to be seen what the new leader of USDAW will do to live up to her promise of a new approach to Labour, but we can but hope. We can guess which way the pressure of her members will be brought to bear.
At least all the unions signed up to a TULO statement on X, brokered by Unite and Unison. It says in part that “Labour’s affiliated unions are deeply concerned by the Party’s catastrophic election results. They show a stark disconnect between this Labour Government and the working people…”
The unions could organise regional political conferences for all their members who pay the political levy to organise for better policies for Labour, policies that can actually see off Reform and win elections. We could fund good MPs like Ian Byrne and Richard Burgon, and give the Starmerite carpet baggers absolutely nothing.
We could push to make the NEC and TULO into minuted meetings so union members can see how their reps vote. In Unite we could democratise our own union’s political structures, which unfortunately excludes – overwhelmingly – far more affiliated members than it includes decades of bureaucratic control.
Above all, we must organise to make sure that our union’s policies form the core of the policies offered by the Labour Party to its working-class supporters. Then Labour would win.
[Andy Ford was recently elected from the health section to the NEC of Unite]
