It is almost reassuring to see the Labour Party commemorate the colour of the people’s flag in some small way, if only by being around £24m in the red.
Over the next five weeks, Labour will need to come up with around £7.45m to pay off the loans from banks and wealthy businessmen secured by Lord Levy to pay for the 2005 general election, or face insolvency.
If that happened, Gordon Brown and the rest of the National Executive Committee would find themselves individually and severally liable for all debts.
Political parties are not businesses, of course. But given New Labour’s propensity to measure all things by business yardsticks, a performance like that hardly qualifies as an entrepreneurial success story.
In reality, it is hardly likely that Britain’s governing party will be allowed collapse. It may be that a private sector rescue package is being lined up even as I write.
Perhaps a football club-style sponsorship deal can be worked out, even if that involves a spot of rebranding; the Carling Black Label Labour Party has a certain ring to it, with Brown in future referring to himself as the Barclays Premier premier. Sorry, only trying to be helpful.
But it is rather more likely that the unions will step in. The real question is how far they will seek a policy payback. The Daily Telegraph reverts to type this morning, and predicts that the TUC is about to order a latter day re-run of the bolshevization of the Comintern:
Britain’s biggest unions are to demand a ‘lurch to the Left’ from Gordon Brown as their price for rescuing Labour from bankruptcy. The main unions, including Unite, the GMB and Unison, are drawing up secret ‘shopping lists’. Their push for new rights for workers and equal pay for women comes as Labour’s financial state has left it at the mercy of its traditional paymasters …
Among a string of demands that the unions will table at the July National Policy Forum are that rules on balloting for industrial action be changed, that companies are legally obliged to carry out ‘equal pay audits’ and that new rules are introduced to ensure employees in companies subject to private equity takeovers have their rights protected.
Mmmmm. Not quite nationalise the top 200 monopolies, is it? On a more sober assessment, arguing that employees should be treated decently in the workplace is not so much a lurch to the left as a lurch to doing what trade unions exist to do.
And after all, to use a phrase coined by one-time leftist union official Baron Sawyer prior to the lobotomy that is seemingly a prerequisite for elevation to the House of Lords, ‘no say, no pay’.
Union leaders will also be mindful of the potential difficulties in convincing activists, many of whom are not Labour supporters, of the case for spending political funds on a transparent bail-out, and for a party likely to lose the next general election at that. Unison, the Communications Workers Union and GMB all face disaffiliation motions at conferences next month.
My guess is that Labour will offer just enough to give the bureaucrats something to take back to the membership to sell the deal, pocket the cash, and then carry on in its own sweet way.
Meanwhile, we now know once and for all what motivated the succession of businessmen who have written seven-figure cheques to New Labour over the past decade. Forget all the protestations about sincere conversion to Blair-style social democracy lite; they really did just want passports, peerages and the right to advertise cigarettes on the side of formula one racing cars after all.
Comments (12)
Strange isn't it, Dave?
The Labour Party, after their business fair weather friends melt away, are left with the labour unions.
Oh wait on... Perhaps it's in the name: the Labour Party.
Of course the notion that organisations representing working people want something back from the political party they fund is deeply, deeply shocking.
When I was a young 'un I thought that the Labour Party must somehow be related to pregnancy. It would have made more sense to call it the Workers Party, though this might have made Kinnock and Bliar's efforts to merge with the Tories much harder...
Dave
It also depends how insistant the unions get. They should demand a timeline to get pro worker policies into effect before the next election.
How much though can the press rely on propoganda that left wing policies lead to a left party wandering in the wilderness for years?
That view may have had an effect in the 80s and 90s but will it hold any water with the electorate now with rising prices and inequality?
Also if Labour did swing to the left by union pressure is it too little too late; Cameron gets in , in 2010 and everyone blames left wing policies.
Your all forgetting a little bit of slight of hand that Labour have carried out, all political Levy's are to be sent direct to Labour HQ and not the Unions. Thats why I've just had my levy sent to the red cross.
Labour has annoyed the Unions so yes I'm sure some of the Unions who will gain from Labour staying in power, you know for getting a general secretary appointed from a Union.
But even still it will not be anywhere near the £20 million the government wants, and then you have another elections coming up fast. I still fancy the government will do a deal to have extra cash donated from tax payers.
Obviously a case for Blair's new Faith Foundation to step in and give a hand. Its aims (modest in the extreme) are: to tackle global poverty (Labour Party funding obviously a case for aid), and to unite the world's religions (again a plea for Holy Willie Brown to get some kinda subvention).
Now Blair may be described a vain deluded pretty thick war-mongering smirking tea-leaf, and his wife, according to reliable reports (from Rory Bremmer) is so grasping that she cut off the light bulbs when the left Number Ten - to install them at their new multi-million pounds gaffs.
Yet a man with the ambitions of a Jesus Christ, Mohammed, Budda, Abraham, Krishna, and Guru Nanak, all combined, will surely come up with a solution to this problem with funds.
[...]all combined, will surely come up with a solution to this problem with funds.
A "miracle", you mean?
Or alternatively the unions may just cough up the cash for absolutely nothing in return other than vague promises of jam tomorrow because the last thing Labour's spin doctors want is to hand Cameron a "soft on the unions" stick to beat Brown with.
Just a thought.
2 things - eddie is right- we will bail our party out for nowt or v little in return.
The only people on the nec that are indemnified are the union members.
The TUC went into the negotiations holding all the cards and still come out with a shoddy deal that may never happen anyway.
And 2 dave UNISON, don't have. Disaffiliation motion on the agenda - we can't debate whether or not to remain affiliated at our national conference - that would be too democratic! ;p
We do though have a motion called new labour what do we get for our money from a sp led branch - but it doesn't call for and we won't be able to make a decision to disaffiliate.
That should have read, look at agency workers the TUC went into the negotiations holding all the cards and still come out with a shoddy deal that may never happen anyway.
The TUC will have what it wants a New General secretary who will be a Union man, and a possible few seats after the general elections , we will have a few seats spare once we have lost.
No doubt if Labour go running the unions for more cash, it will come at a political price in terms of more power for the unions.
Mind you, I can't see how else Labour are going to dig themselves out of this one.
Lord Sainsbury has said he will give the remainder of his estimated £1bn fortune to charity before his death.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2007/apr/15/theobserver.observerbusiness2
He is 68.