Blair and the brothers
There is no reason to maintain the relationship between the union movement and New Labour
By Jonathan Freedland
Tony Blair had his face on yesterday. That clenched, tense expression he wears just before any moment of high anxiety. He had it as he got off his campaign bus during the election of 1997. He wore it when he stood at Bill Clinton's side, days after the Monica scandal first blew up in early 1998. And it was there again yesterday, a rictus of apprehension as the prime minister waited to address the delegates at the Trades Union Congress in Brighton.
You'd think this would be home turf for a Labour leader, a comfort zone where the PM could let his hair down and talk among friends. But this as, the therapists might say, is a relationship with baggage. Tony Blair arrived in Brighton to a warning from the TUC's general secretary, John Monks, telling him to expect the "sharpest argument" from the brothers over Labour's apparent watering-down of workers' rights, from the 48-hour week to the minimum wage. The seaside mutterings were of disappointment in New Labour: the party had become too cosy with the boss class, too cold to the workers. The previous evening the firefighters' leader, Ken Cameron, broke the ultimate taboo when he dared suggest that the unions should sever their links with Labour altogether. "The Labour party no longer sees us as their natural partners," Cameron said. "We can no longer rely on them to be our natural allies."
No wonder Blair felt he had to break the ice. He tried it with a little poem, recalling Jim Callaghan's 1978 sing-song from the TUC platform. It was doggerel, of course, culminating in this quatrain:
The link between us changes,
You've changed and so have we
You're welcome now in Number 10,
But no beer today - just tea
What followed was a plea by Blair for the unions to stick with him, to realise that the alternative to his centrist administration was not the Labour government of TUC dreams but a rightwing Tory regime of their nightmares. It worked well enough, winning Blair a 50-second ovation and putting off any talk of a quickie divorce between the Labour party and the trade unions which created it. But Ken Cameron's idea will not go away. It has too much logic for that. Besides, the debate over the union link matters beyond the whims of a few disgruntled TUC barons. For it goes to the heart of the culture war inside the Labour party. First, the logic. Cameron's call matters because he is not the only one making it. Indeed, one of the few ideas that unite the wilder shores of both old and New Labour is the hunch that union and party will eventually have to say goodbye. The über-Blairite trade and industry secretary, Stephen Byers, blurted out as much three years ago while other ultra-modernisers continue to talk about a "wholly transformed relationship" with the unions even now - albeit privately. And the debate is not confined to Britain. A similar row is under way in Germany, where Gerhard Schröder was urged this very week to divorce his SPD from the "blockheads" of the union movement.
The left case is simple enough. As Ken Cameron explained to me before the current row blew up, "We can't go on signing cheques and sending them to a party which is not taking any notice of what we're doing." Surrounded by the old banners and standards of the Fire Brigades Union, Cameron explained that New Labour looks less and less like a solution to his members - and more like the problem. Here he is, Britain's longest serving general secretary, campaigning for an increase in the minimum wage, for greater protection at work, for a full-blooded British version of the European Union's Social Chapter and the organisation standing in his way is the very party his members prop up with cash. It would make more sense, said Cameron, for the FBU to spend their own money on their own campaigns. They could even send the odd donation to other groups when they happen to be on the same side: that might be Friends of the Earth, it might even be the Lib Dems. The unions would be liberated, able to go shopping in the political market place.
For the right the case for divorce is, if anything, slightly weaker. The modernisers put ditching the trade unions on a par with dumping Clause 4: proof to Middle England that the Labour party of old is gone forever. But since the voters seem to have accepted that fact anyway, a union divorce might be a case of overkill - a gesture that doesn't need to be made. Besides, sending the old union carthorse to the knacker's yard would leave Millbank with a problem: money. Labour currently rakes in £6m from the unions, about 30% of its overall budget. How would it replace that kind of money? The ultras brush such concerns aside. The firefighters' annual donation of £75,000 is no more than the individual gift of, say, publisher Felix Dennis. Labour has new friends now; it doesn't need its old ones.
In the meantime, Labour might just have to live with the tension, as it has done since the early days (Blair took great pleasure reminding Congress yesterday that their predecessors used to whine about Clem Attlee). Still, the gap between Blair and the brothers does seem to be of a different quality from the one that afflicted Labour leaders past. It is part of the wider phenomenon that can make Blair seem a stranger in his own party. It comes down to a matter of culture; almost a question of folklore and custom.
For Blair and the modernisers pay little homage to Labour heritage. They did not spring organically from it; rather they seem to have been grafted on to it. Speaking recently to more than a dozen senior Labourites about the New Labour revolution, I was struck how many of them described the Blair transformation as a change from the neck up: the body and soul of the Labour party still belonged somewhere else.
Blair showed he understood that yesterday, admitting that many in Brighton had gone along with Blairisation only because they thought it would win them the election - not because they believed in it. And that is how it still is for countless members, activists and trade unionists outside the charmed circle at the top: their heads are for Tony Blair - but their hearts are with John Prescott.
Perhaps that is how it will always be, at least until the modernisation process is in the hands of someone the Labour faithful can regard as their own. Talent-spotters see Ian McCartney as a man for the job. A mini-Prescott, he has just the old Labour credentials required to make modernisation palatable to the hard core: perhaps, on the Nixon-to-China principle, it could take a McCartney to put asunder the Labour-union link once and for all. If that is how it turns out, Tony Blair may eventually be embraced by the unions after all - nostalgically remembered as the last leader of the Labour movement.
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