No surprise at Miliband’s anti union outburst

Posted by John McAllion on July 8, 2011. Filed under John McAllion,Opinion. Posted with the tags:Labour, Trade Unions
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Many activists would have been stunned by the recent spectacle of Ed Miliband, the leader of the Labour Party, condemning public sector workers who were on strike and instructing his party’s MPs to cross official union picket lines.

Was the Labour Party not the political arm of the wider labour and trade union movement? Had the enduring relationship between Labour and the unions not shaped the character of the British Left for most of the twentieth century?

Had the unions not created the Labour Party to give them a voice in Parliament that would defend trade union freedoms?

Moreover, did the unions not provide ninety per cent of the donations that keep today’s Labour Party afloat? Had they not delivered the Labour leadership for Ed Miliband?

Without union support, could the Labour Party Miliband leads survive for any length of time as a national political force?

Given all of the above, how could he turn against the unions in their critical struggle against the coalition Government and in their battle for public support? How could he bite the hands providing the funds that sustain both him and the party he leads? One prominent commentator suggested that the unions would be “astonished” by “his ingratitude”.

However, it would be surprising if they were all that astonished. Miliband is not the first Labour leader who failed to support workers on strike.

Throughout its long history, the Labour Party has been led by men who have serially failed workers in struggle.

Ramsay MacDonald dismissed the General Strike of 1926 as a “lamentable adventure in crowd self leadership”.

He even assured the then Tory Prime Minister Baldwin that as leader of the Parliamentary Labour Party he would have nothing to do with “general strikes and Bolshevism and all that kind of thing.”

Clem Attlee’s Labour Government used an old wartime order making strikes illegal to prosecute striking gas workers and dockers in the early 1950s. Army, Navy and Royal Air Force personnel were deployed repeatedly and enthusiastically to break dock, electricity and Smithfield drivers’ strikes during Labour’s golden era between 1945 and 1951.

Harold Wilson not only condemned the seamen’s strike in 1966 as an act against the state and the community, but went on to denounce the union’s executive as “a tightly knit group of politically motivated men” who were “endangering the security of the industry and the economic welfare of the nation.”

Wilson even sent the troops in to break a strike of Glasgow dustcart drivers in 1975. His successor Jim Callaghan used troops to defeat the fire-fighters two years later before taking on a range of private and public sector workers on strike during the so-called winter of discontent.

When Thatcher used the full power of the state to break the NUM during the 1984-5 strike, the then Labour leader Neil Kinnock refused to fully back the miners, preferring instead to condemn the violence of both the police and the pickets. His priority throughout the yearlong struggle was to limit the damage he believed miner militancy was doing to Labour’s electoral prospects.

Blair and Brown held prime ministerial office for 13 years during which they left savage anti-trade union legislation untouched on the statute book.

For good measure, their deputy prime minister John Prescott attacked striking firefighters in 2003 for requiring 19,000 British troops to be on standby cover here when they could have been deployed in support of the illegal and murderous attack on Iraq.

Miliband’s betrayal of public sector workers is therefore not that unusual. He belongs to a long tradition of Labour leaders stretching all the way from MacDonald in the 1920s through to today’s Blairites and Brownites who made it their business to put the boot into industrial militancy whenever and wherever it breaks out.

Throughout its hundred-year plus history, Labour’s parliamentary leadership has always made a distinction between what they describe as the “sectional” interests of the workers in trade unions and the “national” interest of the majority of the population who are not in trade unions. As the elected Government they see their role as being to defend the “national” against the “sectional” interest.

Today there are some six million public sector workers who are mainly in trade unions and 23 million private sector workers who are mainly not in unions. Public sector pensions, although modest, remain significantly superior to those in the private sector where 65 per cent of workers have no occupational pension at all.

To Labour’s centrist parliamentarians it is a nobrainer to be seen to be on the side of the private sector many and against the public sector few. If that means taking on public sector unions and attacking public sector pensions, then they are more than up for it. No-one should be surprised that the author of the Hutton Report being used to attack pensions in the public sector was a Labour cabinet minister and is a Labour Lord.

What is surprising is that the leadership of major public sector unions such as UNISON should go on supporting a political party that treats then with such open contempt.

Labour’s parliamentary leadership may calculate that under the two-party First Past the Post system, the unions are trapped and have now where else to go. The unions either back them or let the Tories in It is for the union leadership to explain to their betrayed members why they so docilely submit to such cynical blackmail by the parliamentary party they fund and keep in business.