Leaders of the Labour Party are never short of people to offer advice. The trick is in knowing which ones to listen to and, more importantly, which ones to trust. And a true test of the leader’s strength is their ability to assess advice from all quarters, coolly form their own opinion, and then pursue their course with courage and conviction. That calm deliberation and resolute strength have been the defining features of Ed Miliband’s campaign to win the Labour leadership, and of his time in the role. So it should come as no surprise that he has acted with sound judgement, and decisively, to deal with what appears to be a corrupted selection in Falkirk. The only surprise is that his opponents in the Tory party and the right-wing press should continue to be wrong-footed by the clarity and consistency of his actions.
Let’s be clear for a moment about what has happened in recent days, as it’s been hard to discern in the fevered and Delphic comment in these pages and elsewhere. It seems to me to be pretty straightforward. The selection procedure for a new Labour candidate to replace Eric Joyce appears to have been compromised by the abuse of a scheme designed to boost the numbers of trade unionists within the wider Labour membership. The party investigated, reported its findings to Ed Miliband, who acted upon them decisively: suspending the local party and certain individuals; cancelling the ‘Union Join’ scheme, which was apparently subverted; and publicly informing Unite and Len McCluskey that Labour has no time for machine politics or malpractice, in Falkirk or elsewhere. Desperate attempts to present this aberration as the ‘tip of an iceberg’ or to misrepresent various trade unions’ legitimate and welcome efforts to engage their members in political debate, or to portray Ed as weak or in thrall to the unions are as predictable as they are risible.
Those are the facts. But unfortunately they don’t suit opponents seeking to undermine Ed Miliband and the Labour Party he leads. On left and right (though the distinction often seems moot), in and out of the shadows, from Lynton Crosby to Dan Hodges, an unholy alliance is, of course, looking to destabilise the Labour movement, and to drive wedges between working people and their representatives in the trade unions and the party. For our opponents the motivation is clear: to defeat Labour in 2015, a task made far simpler by creating rifts and divisions in a movement that has been unified and united under Ed Miliband. And the ultimate prize, of course, is breaking the link between Labour and the trade unions that founded our party.
Such a fracture, however spun as modernising or mature, would weaken our party immeasurably and, more importantly, would weaken the means by which the people of Britain might hold to account the vested interests and corporate power which long ago bought the loyalty of David Cameron’s Conservatives. And that is why the Falkirk selection might have precipitated a crisis for Labour, had Ed not acted so quickly to address the specific incidence of malpractice uncovered there, or were there any evidence that trade unions were exercising undue influence over Labour policy elsewhere.
The uncomfortable truth for Labour’s opponents, however, is that there is no evidence of such malign influence outside the overheated imagination of Daily Mail journalists and Lynton Crosby’s PMQs script. Unite the union – my union, for the record – doesn’t agree with all of Labour’s policy prescriptions for Britain, and nor are all Unite members supporters of our party. Some will vote Tory, others might have once voted for the Lib Dems. And Labour candidates throughout Britain are routinely and properly elected by democratic, One Member, One Vote procedures – run and determined by local members, largely untouched by local or national union influence. Unfortunately, the reality is that local union members are invariably no more involved in or inspired by modern politics than the rest of the public. Indeed, if our unions were to catalyse greater engagement, British politics, on left and right, would be all the richer for it.
But, of course, those deeper issues of how we reignite passion in our politics and faith in our ability to build a more equitable economy doesn’t sell papers or serve Tory propaganda. Better to stick to tired clichés about Labour leaders and the union barons, exhumed from the cuttings archives and the Tebbit playbook circa 1982. Ed Miliband and the Labour leadership will not be deflected by such attacks, nor, as his actions have demonstrated, will he put up with any corruption of the democratic processes of the Labour Party. But neither will we allow any isolated incident to erode the historic strength of our party as part of a wider movement representing working people, or our determination to work alongside our trade union colleagues to defeat this Tory-led coalition and deliver a Britain worthy of its people.
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