Chapter Six
Blue Labour and the Trade Unions:
Pro-Business and Pro-Worker
I can still remember my first party card, proudly handed to me by Mum for my fifteenth birthday – a coming of age that showed I knew my class and tribe. But we have to accept that these totemic expressions of belonging are not as potent for the next, digital generation, whose members expect parties to work harder for their loyalty.
The Labour Party has wrestled with the need to reform in order to be relevant to that generation. This debate does not end with an internal constitutional reform, it has barely started. We need to build a party that sets out a sense of long-term national purpose and mobilises broad political support. To govern effectively in the digital age will require a Labour Party working with lots of other organisations in order to build coalitions for real change and lasting transformation.
This is not solely a challenge for the party I love, but for politics as a whole. And with 24-hour political news coverage, it is impossible to have an internal debate about this challenge without the inevitable headlines about party splits, as we saw in the latest iteration of the debate on how the trade unions and the party relate to each other.
My concern is to dig deeper into a debate broader than the important nitty-gritty about affiliation and member participation. For if we are going to make politics relevant and real again, I believe there are only two options that stand a chance. Parties must either broaden their bases – becoming more pluralist and actively engaging members in innovative ways – or change the electoral system to allow smaller parties into Parliament. The results of the AV referendum do not bode well for the latter, so we are back to the party.
There is an unwise third option, preferred by David Cameron: to do nothing. It is tempting for a prime minister to make this choice because the effects will not be felt on their watch. But the result of inaction – membership decline, electoral disengagement, civic institutions withdrawing from political debate – would be to decrease parliamentary legitimacy.
Reform of the Labour Party must not be reduced to a debate about opting in or opting out of trade union affiliation, as sometimes appeared to be the case in the debate of 2013. That would be to miss the point and to scupper the opportunity – it is the tactics of mid-level media managers. What we need is an overarching strategy.
I think it is important the Labour Party retains a clear and serious link to organised labour. Unions have always provided a pool of people who learn how to represent and debate – outside the party machine – and who could then challenge the dominance of intellectuals in the party, which leads to a party bound to a progressive and liberal worldview. This worldview is largely alien to the constituents I represent in the Black Country. In addition to the countervailing influence of the workplace-empowered shop steward, unions brought organisation and campaign support too. You simply cannot run an authentic electoral machine without workers.
It goes deeper than that though. Labour was built by workers to represent the interests of people without many assets, who work for a living. Labour must represent a vision of a prosperous country that does not only work in the interests of capitalists, whether they be media owners, venture fund owners or the owners of football clubs, but resists this domination through democracy. Labour is the instrument of that resistance and we have lost that vision. The idea was never to dominate. Unions stood as a bulwark against communism. In the 1930s it was Labour that stood firm against both fascism and communism at home and then abroad, and the people elected a Labour government because it was in line with their values and experience. Ernest Bevin was a great Labour politician and a great patriot. We are in danger of losing the natural support of working people and that does not imply breaking the link with trade unions but engaging on the renewal of both party and unions.
When you join Labour, you are still joining a movement that stretches beyond the narrow definition of political party. And that means building a place where everyone can feel at home, where decisions are dealt with transparently and people are given a fair hearing. Our sense of mutual responsibility should be at the heart of our culture.
Still, we must find more ways to work in partnership with civic institutions. Look at the incredible work of Maurice Glasman, pulling together faith and community groups to use their power to improve the lives of those around them. He wants to give power back to people in their communities by building new institutions. This is the challenge of our age and it is one that Labour should be equipped to meet, with our history emerging from working communities to confront the powers of the day. Yet talk to the average Labour political adviser these days and Glasman is dismissed. This task has only just begun. Unions need to think about their potential role in a wider movement, involving civic and faith groups and other non-state institutions. The nascent Bank of Salford is just such a venture. Here is an example of a union collaborating with other organisations to create a new institution for the future. When the Christians of Nineveh were being slaughtered it was vital that the unions and the churches came together to show solidarity.
When I was Campaigns Coordinator I worked closely with the Chicago community organiser Arnie Graf to implant a new culture at the heart of the party. It is bottom-up, it values relationships, collaboration and mutual self-help, develops new activists who never stop listening, and creates lasting partnerships with civic actors outside the party. It is more exciting than a stale debate about the Labour rulebook. Such an approach could build Labour’s base and give the party and the country a new sense of purpose. But as we broaden our reach to new institutions and movements, as I asserted in the debate about internal party reform, what is needed is more affiliation – more cooperation – to challenge the party’s internal machine, not less.
The unions need this too. Where the leadership is elected by less than 10 per cent of the membership there is a lack of connection between union members and activists. The same approach as that pioneered by Arnie Graf is required. A strong stress on leadership development of workers, a far more relational approach to the culture of the union can lead to a far more amenable culture to partnership and training so that unions can be a constructive and vital force for the renewal of society. We used to call it socialism and maybe we will do so again.
In addition to developing a distinctive form of community organising Labour needs a new political economy. The German economy, with its co-determination in corporate governance and pension fund management and its vocational labour market entry, provides an instructive roadmap. Of course we cannot transplant every institutional and cultural arrangement from Germany into the UK ecosystem. However, given the broken neo-liberal model whose ruins we live amidst there are real principles that emanate from Germany which we can embrace, agitate for and integrate into the Labour offer. This also builds upon Christian traditions that have long been dormant and ignored within Labour: ideas of vocation, subsidiarity and the balance of power.
What is required, therefore, in the United Kingdom is a new pro-business and pro-worker political economy. This approach is less focused on external regulation and more concerned with relational accountability within the governance of the firm and sector, and less focused on tax and fiscal transfer and more on giving incentives to vocation and value through building decentralised institutions such as vocational colleges and regional banks.
What would such an agenda look like? First, Labour should champion a partnership model that gives a constructive role to trade unions and to workers in vocational training and corporate governance. This would build on the work of Dr John Lloyd when the AEEU pioneered the partnership approach to industrial relations. Yet, the challenge is serious: we need to be bolder and go much deeper.
To make this a reality, it is necessary to give a primary role to work and labour value in the corporate governance of firms so that there can be an active negotiation of strategy that does not exclusively benefit the managers of firms. One of the principal causes of the crash was a lack of accountability, which led to cheating and excessive risk. The workforce are the only people with internal expertise and an interest in the flourishing of the firm. A third of the seats on boards should be elected by the workforce. That would also give them ‘skin in the game’ when it comes to the sacrifices required for profitability.
Furthermore, there should be a decisive change in our attitude to vocation and skills. As Maurice Glasman has asserted, half of our universities could be closed and turned into vocational colleges jointly governed by business, unions and local authorities. This could renew the skills lacking in our workforce. UnionLearn could yet become the most significant and vibrant wing of the Labour movement.
Finally, we should establish regional and sectoral banks so that there is stable access to capital in regions that can support local business with an awareness of their specific needs, which was a key recommendation of Labour’s small-business taskforce and it is a radical one. The work that Unite is supporting with the Bank of Salford is commendable and needs to be built on.
This then is the common good approach to renewing Labour that reconnects unions and the party with their civic roots. As a party we must get ready for the next generation. To be relevant in the digital age, the Labour Party must be more pluralist and retain and build upon its trade union links. A pro-business and pro-worker agenda restores economic vitality and ensures Labour is a vital and indispensable partner in national renewal. Labour needs to value labour and business and seek a common good between them. That is the new Labour political economy. Blue Labour? Post-liberal? I don’t really care what these ideas are called. However, they have the potential to fire Labour with a transformative mission once again.
The stakes are high. UKIP is growing in strength in Labour areas. We also need to bring the white working class together with Sikhs who are running soup kitchens, black Christian churches that believe in and promote the common good and environmental groups that are campaigning around preserving forests and clean rivers that people love. In the end, that is what we need to stand for. Relationships of mutual responsibility based on love, and we should not be ashamed to say that. For a century Labour has risen to the challenge of serving the country in the interests of locals and immigrants, faith and secular, cities and provincial. It is time to do so again.