Donald Macintyre is off target when he suggests that "The unions should realise - this isn't an attack"
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Donald Macintyre: Independant |
Miliband seems to have
forgotten, or is conveniently ignoring, what many other Labour party
leaders since Clement Attlee, have also ignored.
The relationship between
the Labour Party and the TUC, and the wider Trade Union movement, is
an historic one dating back to 1900. It should be a relationship
where the Parliamentary Labour Party, (the MP's) should have as its
primary objective the representation and well being of working people
in this country. The same objective in fact as the TUC. In this
context, “working people” is used in its wider definition, to
include employed and unemployed, the disabled, the sick, benefit
claimants in fact the whole spectrum of society.
Over recent decades and
certainly since the days of Blair, the “relationship” has become
one where the Parliamentary Labour party are more closely associated
with business interests and the “establishment” rather than their
traditional base in the workplace. This is the main reason why
thousands of people, myself included, have left the Labour Party over
recent years and why there is now this contrived “struggle”
between the party leadership and its union affiliates. The Labour
Party no longer represents “working people” in this country and
any attempt to highlight this fact is immediately seized upon by the
press and media as union militancy or left wing extremism or some
other emotive term, designed to scaremonger the public into believing
that “the Unions” are trying to hold the country to ransom and
are blackmailing the Labour party.
The evidence of the
growing rift between the Labour party and its traditional base is
compelling, particularly since the last election. All the current
ConDem coalition legislation attacking working people, pensioners,
disabled, unemployed etc, seem set to remain in place should a Labour
government emerge from the next election. We have even seen Liam
Byrne Labour's opposite number to Ian Duncan Smith instructing Labour
MP's to abstain on a vote in Parliament pushing through legislation
to allow the compulsion of unemployed people to work for nothing. The
anti trade union legislation remains on the statute books and has
effectively castrated the TUC and affiliated unions to the extent
where working people have no real representation in the workplace.
There has been nothing about the current Labour leadership or the
actions of the shadow ministers to suggest to me that anything has
changed.
Like a married couple who
have been arguing and bickering for many years, the TUC and the
Labour party should recognise that they have come to the end of the
road and that the best option for both parties would be a swift and
preferably amicable divorce. I have been arguing for some time that
the TUC should end the relationship with Labour and field its own
candidates at elections under a manifesto which represents working
people and social structure rather than the finance and business
interests which now are the main areas of concern of the Labour
party.
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