Labour: Organ grinder's monkey?

It will be interesting to see how the huge fuss about the Unite trade union's dominance over the Labour Party pans out with the electorate.

It is well known that working folk who join the Unite union can supposedly opt-in/out of contributing to the Labour Party as part of their membership.

It is also well known that Unite are at the heart of the proposed British Airways strikes which could bring the struggling company to it's knees while causing misery to tens of thousands of British and international passengers over the next few weeks.

The depth to which Unite holds the strings to the Labour Party is exposed and explored in great detail in all of today's newspapers.

It's in The Guardian, The Sun, the Daily Mail, The Times, and the Daily Express.

Three of the British news sources also add that the Unite union is now involved in an international escalation of trade union might, with an American union reportedly vowing to stand in solidarity with Unite on the British Airways strike issue. Read more in the Telegraph, The Times - and even on the BBC.

As you'd expected, the Conservatives are milking the revelations like billy-ho.

Yesterday, Michael Gove gave a speech in which he condemned "Charlie Whelan's new militant tendency" which is now seeping and oozing through the Labour ranks.

Not content with that, the Conservatives have also issued a dossier with revelation after revelation of the depth and breadth of the Unite / Labour links. You can download the dossier in pdf format from HERE.

Yet, for all this fuss and drama, will Labour suffer at the ballot boxes?

Only, one may be wrong here, but one suspects this is hardly likely to damage the traditional Labour vote. If anything, it could have a positive effect.

For a long time, we have heard rumblings of feelings of discontent amongst the working class - a sense that they had been abandoned, with nobody to represent their views.

Many members of the 'old' working class would have worked in British industry - coal miners, steel workers and so on. Most of that industry has long since gone. But has the sense of workers uniting gone with it?

So, before rushing to rub our hands together in glee at what - on the face of it - looks like incredibly shaming headlines for Labour, one should first remember that the Unite union represents hundreds of thousands of people in work (2 million, in fact, according to one news article). Those people, if they had an issue with Unite, would obviously end their membership.

Outside of Unite, the trade union movement still has plenty of support and traction.

And those heady days of British industry and the trade unions being on the side of the worker against bad employers and bad government might yet see this exposé having the opposite effect from that which one might expect.

And trade unions are not the preserve of smoke covered cloth caps and old men with whippets.

There are plenty of trade unions representing the middle classes.

And we also need to figure in that one of the biggest employers in Britain today is... the Government.

This is all going to become really interesting.

But with the Government being such a huge employer, the unions and their influence could have a huge impact on the national deficit - should Brown or Darling attempt to follow the orders of the European Empire (and markets) and start attempting to slash public spending.

Cash Gordon: the Conservatives use
this image to raise questions about
Labour's links to the Unite trade union

See also:
Unite workers! You’re in Mr Brown’s pocket - The Times