Unions and the Union

10 April

 

• In his first visit to Scotland during the campaign, Ed Miliband narrowly avoids focussing attention on his rows with the unions.

 

• But there have been high-level arguments and serious divisions over how to handle the SNP.

 

• Jeremy Corbyn will have potentially fewer problems with trade union leaders but is likely to face many of the same dilemmas in defending the union.

 

 

IT WAS TO have been a flying visit to Scotland. We had left the night before, and drove a bit less than an hour north-west from Edinburgh airport to what looked like a magnificent castle which looked out across rolling plains. Sadly the building – parts of which dated back to the 14th century – was largely used as a wedding venue and we were billeted in a building which was architecturally more barrack room than baronial in nature. On arrival, we were greeted by the familiar faces of our ITN and Sky News counterparts.

So here we all were, overlooking the Forth Valley, because it was one of the nearest hotels to Grangemouth, where Ed Miliband would pop in briefly to see the staff at a supermarket’s distribution centre.

Yes, that was the same Grangemouth where management had recently very nearly closed Scotland’s last remaining refinery and the Unite convenor there, Stevie Deans, had resigned amid much publicity. And yes, that union official was the same Stevie Deans who had been chair of the Labour Party in the neighbouring constituency of Falkirk in 2013 – and had been accused of trying to fix the parliamentary selection there for Karie Murphy, a close friend of Unite’s general secretary Len McCluskey. Both Deans and Murphy had been suspended from the Labour Party, though later cleared of wrongdoing, following a protracted, bitter investigation and subsequent wrangle which had led to the resignation of the high profile campaigner, and now the party’s deputy leader, Tom Watson from the Shadow Cabinet – and from a key role in the general election campaign. Watson employed Karie Murphy in his office and once shared a flat with Len McCluskey (though he points out he also shared a flat with the all-together more Blairite Gloria De Piero). And yes, that was the same Falkirk where the retiring MP had been none other than Eric Joyce, who had been expelled from the Labour Party following a violent brawl in the House of Commons.

So even before we had been shown to our rooms, it came as no surprise to be told the Grangemouth trip was off, and the Labour leader would be confining himself to the Scottish capital. We were now in the wrong place but at least by the skin of his teeth Ed Miliband had not come to what would have been the wrong place for him. Both Falkirk and Grangemouth were lost to the SNP on polling day but he had narrowly avoided inviting his opponents to re-examine his relations with his trade union funders.

At the top of the Labour Party there was huge frustration that he hadn’t got on the front foot having been seen to have been the choice of the unions for leader. Some of his closest advisers and allies had urged him to reform the relationship with the unions within a broader context of restoring trust in politics well before the Falkirk fiasco. He had been urged to make that the centre point of the 2011 Labour conference speech, where his attack on ‘predatory’ capitalists had instead captured the headlines. But as one of those advisers put it: ‘He lacked the courage to seize the moment.’