‘The total number of working days lost in the first three months of the year was almost four times the total for the whole of 2005. In the first quarter, 616,000 equivalent work days were lost, compared with 158,000 days for the whole of last year, the lowest on record.’

OK, hardly a return to the glory days of Red Robbo addressing mass meetings in the car park. But given that working-class disaffection with New Labour is clearly on the rise, it could just represent another small pointer to a change in the prevailing mood music. Consider these statistics, too:

‘Only 5% of all working days lost to strikes in the first quarter of this year were in the private sector, with 95% being lost in the public sector, according to official figures … The public sector accounts for about 20% of employment.’

The message here is that there is still a massive job of work for the labour movement to do when it comes to rebuilding itself. On the other hand, today’s front page lead in the Guardian reports on Gordon Brown’s call for a public sector wage freeze. That isn’t going to be popular, and is likely to harden attitudes, both in the workplace and at the ballot box.

UPDATE: Here's the Labour left/trade union take on the pay freeze, contained in a press release from Public Services Not Private Profit campaign:

'John McDonnell MP, Chair of the Public Services Not Private Profit campaign, said:

'“The Government’s programme of job cuts and privatisation is undermining its own investment in our public services and is having a devastating effect on the morale of public sector workers. Rather than listening to big business, the Prime Minister should listen to the workers who are delivering services if he wants advice on how to run public services.

'“Brown’s call for a pay freeze for workers in our public services is yet another blow to staff morale which is already at breaking point."'

When Tommy Sheridan and Rosemary Byrne quit the Scottish Socialist Party three months ago, they also pulled out of the collective agreement under which the SSP’s caseworkers, researchers and parliamentary assistants are employed.

The two Solidarity MSPs also withdrew £48,000 from the pooled account that paid the wages. As a result, the jobs are under threat.

OK, it’s natural that when launching a breakaway political party, the leaders will seek to secure the resources necessary for it to function. But that should be achieved by negotiating an equitable division of assets with the political party they are leaving.

It is unacceptable for socialist elected representatives to put these people’s jobs on the line in such a fashion.

Unsurprisingly, the employees are now in an dispute with Sheridan - pictured above - and Byrne. My own union, the National Union of Journalists, is giving them official backing. I wonder if Socialist Worker supporters in Solidarity will do the same?

You can read the SSP’s take here. And you can sign a petition in support of the SSP parliamentary team here.

[Hat tip: Harry’s Place]

It’s a really good day for lefties being elected to things today. According to a press release from RMT, tubeworker John Leach has been voted in as the union’s new president, beating Ray Knight by 6,865 to 5,141 after the redistribution of votes from three eliminated candidates.

Bristol-based Alex Gordon, another leftwinger, was elected unopposed to represent South Wales and the West on the RMT executive. Congratulations to both.

But according to The Times this morning, the two sides get on so badly that they cannot even agree what to call the joint venture.

So instead, the two million members are being asked to vote on a name. The shortlist is pretty uninspiring: OneUnion, Union@work or AmicusT&G. As Christine Buckley notes:

'Amicus prefers OneUnion. The T&G put forward Union@work. The third option is one that both can live with, but if it is chosen it will keep alive the Amicus name, which few in the union had been keen on.'

But this is where it gets worrying. Apparently, Amicus shelled out ten grand on hiring a consultant to advise on a new moniker. It then rejected all of the suggestions as inappropriate.

'Two of its list of 200 rejected names were Voice and Accommodate, as it pursued a theme of partnership. Also discarded from the final list were Spectrum and United.'

Accomodate? Accomo-bleeding-date? Well, Amicus always has enjoyed a reputation for being a tad employer-friendly, dating back to its roots in EETPU under the leadership of Frank Chapple. Perhaps it wouldn't have been such a bad choice after all.

TGWU and Amicus readers are invited to tell us how they will be voting on this burning issue in the British labour movement.

Bob Crow has been re-elected unopposed as leader of transport union RMT, in what looks awfully like a vote of confidence for one of Britain’s most leftwing general secretaries. Crow received nominations from 131 of the union’s 225 branches.

Financially speaking, New Labour remains a long way up a well-known creek without any paddle. Fortunately for the Blairites, the unions have come to the rescue with a £500,000 bail-out. Today's FT reports:

'The need for an emergency cash boost underlines the scale of the party's financial problems. Saddled with debts of £23m, owed for the most part to a dozen businessmen who financed its election campaign and commercial bankers, Labour has been struggling to meet daily running costs, insiders say.

'Analysis of Electoral Commission filings shows that donations from the rich who bankrolled election campaigns in the past have all but dried up this year.

'Individual donors who once gave generously have been deterred by the negative publicity surrounding the police investigation into whether Tony Blair re-warded lenders by nominating then for peerages. They have given just £1.4m in the first nine months of this year, compared with £7.6m for the whole of 2005, an election year.

'Trade union donations have also fallen in 2006, but not by as much. They accounted for 78 per cent of the total in the first nine months, a far bigger proportion than the 57 per cent for 2005. When Mr Blair became Labour leader in 1994, unions accounted for a third of overall annual income. Now they contribute nearer half.'

Sir Hayden Phillips' review of party funding is now expected in the early part of next year, and is likely to recommend further state support, on top of the already generous amounts the taxpayer already hands over. This is something the left should oppose politically.

For a start, state funding could only tackle sleaze if all other donations were banned. Otherwise, it would amount to little more than a handy little top-up. But party members and supporters should have the right to put their money where their mouth is.

So should trade unions, if their memberships mandate them to do so. And - let's be consistent here - businesses should be allowed to make political donations too, provided they ballot their shareholders before doing so.

State funding would in practice be tantamount to state licensing of political parties, based on past electoral performance. Legitimate newcomers would be severely disadvantaged.

Worst of all, state funding infringes basic democratic principles. Political parties are voluntary organisations. They do not have any preordained right to exist. If people want to support them, they do. If they don't want to, they don't.

This is how it should be. There can be no justification for forcing taxpayers to pay for parties they are at best indifferent towards, and at worst heartily despise. That is tantamount to extortion. There is no good reason that a single penny that I pay in taxes should end up in Tory coffers, or any good reason why Tory taxpayers should subsidise Respect.

A democratic socialist party with an enthusiastic mass membership and labour movement affiliations could raise all the money it needed from people that actually support democratic policies.

If New Labour had a million members - Blair's stated aim ten years ago, and a goal that should not be unattainable - it wouldn't be forced cadge questionable loans off ex-Tory businessmen desperate for a seat in the House of Lords.

Listen up, Willie Walsh. Unilateral attempts to impose major changes in working practices in this way are just not acceptable. Employees should be able to negotiate these issues in good faith, with an employer who respects their rights and concerns.

Yet resort to industrial action in Britain is increasingly rare. As another blogger has pointed out this week, there are fewer strikes now than during world war two, when patriotic fervour was high and both Labour and the then-influential Communist Party worked flat out to prevent them.

Liam Mac Uaid summarises the current situation well when he argues that the working class is suffering from a crisis of confidence in its own ability to fight and win, and puts forward three main reasons in support of that conclusion.

The first is that it has still not recovered from the Tory attacks of the 1980s. The second is the fear of outsourcing either to private companies or overseas. The third is the continuing effect of the anti-union laws.

Meanwhile, I’d like to look at some of the political dimensions of the question, particularly the relationship between the labour movement and New Labour.

Britain’s trade unions remain by far the largest organisations in civil society today. Yet after a decade of New Labour government, they are marginalised to the point where they have become - at best - one lobby among many others, with the auxiliary role of unpaid health and safety inspectors.

Blair’s supporters point to the national minimum wage, the European social charter, union rights at GCHQ and the Employment Relations Act. Yet there is no getting away from the fact that Britons still have substantially fewer rights at work that workers in any other industrialised country.

Welcome to UK plc, where workers can be sacked by text message. That’s what happens when you have the most lightly regulated labour market in Europe - and the most tightly regulated trade unions.

Understandably, some of the smaller unions revile New Labour. Witness the expulsion of the RMT and the disaffiliation of the FBU. But the continuing failure of the left to build a credible socialist political formation has ensured that neither have a realistic organisational alternative to join.

It is not immediately apparent to me that disaffiliation has strengthened these unions politically. True, they are saving the cost of the affiliation cheques. But otherwise, what are they now able to do that they could not do previously? I’d be especially interested in opinions from activists in either of them in the comments box.

Meanwhile, the biggest and most important players – TGWU/Amicus, GMB, Unison – are heavily committed to support for Labour, albeit critical of Blairism. Their leaderships will be solidly behind Brown, public sector pay freeze or not.

The key strategic perspective for the serious left remains what it has been for the last two decades, namely a fight to secure a charter of positive employment rights. Popularising such a demand is probably the first step. Any other ideas?

The Alliance for Workers' Liberty website reports:

'Hunt led on the first round 7605 to 6151, but Kline would have won if a big majority of the 2494 votes cast for maverick left candidate Peter Jones had transferred to him.

'Instead, surprisingly, the Jones vote split three ways almost evenly on transfer, 966 votes going to Kline, 858 to Hunt, and 670 not transferring at all. Hunt won after transfers by 8463 to 7117.'

This outcome will be a setback for UCU lefties, as by all accounts Kline remains a socialist, at least by the standards generally applied to the trade union bureaucracy. I mean, if a wussy white collar outfit such as the National Union of Journalists can secure the top job for a Trot, there's no reason why lecturers shouldn't manage that as well.

So it's encouraging to hear that employees of Airbus UK in north Wales last Friday downed tools in response to the threat of 1,600 redundancies. And unsurprising that their union, Amicus, is washing it hands over the fightback:

'Hundreds of staff at the Airbus UK factory in north Wales have walked out in unofficial strike action over proposed job cuts.

'Unions at the plant said they were not supporting the action and have urged their members to return to work.'

I picked this story up from the Permanent Revolution website. The reality-based wing of Workers' Power comments:

'From the outside it is not possible to gauge the level of anger and determination among strikers. It could all be over on Saturday morning, but in the meantime militants at Broughton (and there are clearly at least a few) should do their level best to sustain the wildcat action in defiance both of the class laws that force unions to jump through hoops for six weeks or more to mount official action and their own union leadership.

'They should appeal to their fellow workers at the Filton plant, near Bristol, where jobs are also on the line to mount similar action. Admittedly, Amicus organisation at Filton sustained a serious blow in 2005 with the victimisation of long-standing convenor, Gerry Hicks, despite unofficial action in his support, which full-time officials swiftly disowned. But the Broughton strike just might prove the catalyst to rekindle the fighting spirit of the historically more militant Filton workforce.'

I can't claim any knowledge of the dispute or its background, beyond media reports.But it's encouraging to see that the class struggle at the point of production is not quite dead yet.

UPDATE: The International Marxist Tendency - supporters of the late Ted Grant - are calling for the 'nationalisation' of Airbus. It is of course a joint venture between private sector concerns in several European countries. But let that pass.

‘The country's biggest teaching union has started legal proceedings against Alan Johnson, the education secretary, over the government's decision to freeze it out of national discussions.

‘It was even claimed this week that Beverley Hughes, a junior education minister, refused to meet one NUT activist to discuss mental health problems in the teaching profession because the union is not part of the agreement.’

I’m afraid I don’t know too much about the background to this issue. But I know that there are NUT activists among the readers of this blog, and I’d be grateful for further details.

But I do know this. Before entering parliament, former Trotskyist Johnson was general secretary of the CWU postal union. His transformation from the leader of a militant blue-collar outfit into a high-handed employer of the worst order, refusing even to talk to organised workers, is truly a story of our New Labour times.

The lead story on page four of the Financial Times this morning reads ‘Working days lost to strikes soar’. Finally … the upturn? Not quite.

True, the total number of strike-days in Britain last year rose to 754,500. That’s obviously a massive increase on the 157,400 seen in 2005. But the small print makes it plain that we are not witnessing the re-emergence of a confident and class conscious proletariat in the UK:

The outcome, in spite of the upsurge in public sector strikes, was still well below the number of days lost through strikes in the 1970s when an average of 12.9m days were lost annually and in the 1980s when 7.2m days a year were lost through stoppages, says the ONS. It compared with 29.47m days lost in 1979 during the "winter of discontent" and a record 162m days lost in 1926, the year of the General Strike …

The UK lost only 25 days a year per 1,000 workers on average between 1995 to 2004. This compared with 40 days lost in the US; 200 in Spain; 172 in Denmark; 100 in Italy, 193 in Canada and 68 in Australia. The average for the 12 EU countries for which statistics were available was 59 days and 48 days for OECD countries.

In other words, even though we are now almost a generation removed in time from the defeat of the miners’ strike, the British working class remains intimidated and frightened to act collectively, and is considerably less militant even than its US counterpart. And for the far left, there is just no way round that.

One of Gordon Brown's first acts as prime minister will be to scrap rules - introduced in 2004 - that were designed to speed up the resolution of disputes in the workplace. Unnecessary bureaucracy, we are told.

This is likely to be bad news for those on short-term contracts, who may no longer get access to grievance procedures, according to one major union:

UCCAT ,[sic] the construction union, argues that the statutory procedures give much-needed protection for building workers on short-term or temporary contracts. Before statutory rights existed, "grievances of UCATT members were usually ignored", said the union.

Alan Ritchie, UCATT general secretary, said: "It is outrageous that the government could even consider denying workers guaranteed access to grievance procedures. Thousands of my members work on short-term contracts, on a temporary basis or through an employment agency. Voluntary arrangements previously failed these workers and will do so in the future."

And who decided that these rules should go? Well, the boss of a major company, who believes that they generate needless red tape for employers:

The consultation period, which ends tomorrow, was ordered after a "root and branch" review of the regulations, headed by Michael Gibbons, a former director of Powergen, concluded that, rather than encouraging early resolution, the rules had "led to the use of formal processes to deal with problems which could have been resolved informally".

UCATT's lawyers counter:

Trade union lawyers OH Parsons, who have been advising UCATT, claim that the procedures "have provided valuable protection to many construction workers who have been disciplined or have wanted to raise employment rights issues with their employer".

Parsons say: "These procedures are not simply technical matters for lawyers, they provide genuine support for workers' rights in the workplace. Their removal would create injustice, and deny many workers the means of expressing legitimate concerns at work."

But the TUC is backing the government's move. General secretary Brendan Barber argues:

"The TUC is firmly committed to the principle that workplace disputes should be resolved through effective internal procedures. But we have concerns with the 2004 legislation - in particular, rules relating to employment tribunals have proved complicated and have restricted access to justice. There's been a tendency for employers to focus on process as opposed to dealing with issues at stake."

Based purely on reading this story in today's Financial Times, I tend to agree with the UCATT position. But then again, I'm no expert on this stuff. However, I do know that some employment lawyers and many workplace union reps read this blog. So let me appeal for information. Who is right on this one?

And here’s the finely-crafted peroration:

"For the first time in my life I am seeing the sort of social divisions, the sort of wealth gap, here in our own country that I saw in other parts of the world when I was a teenager in the merchant navy.

"And let it be the last Labour government which takes this country into an illegal, unjust and devastating war against world and British opinion."

Excellent. Except for one little thing. Woodley is in a position to do something about all this.

Yet as leader of the TGWU, he acquiesced with Blairism each step of the way. Even now, he is talking up the chances of a "positive new agenda" under Brown, which he knows in reality just isn’t going to come about.

There’s no point in taking the rhetoric seriously unless it is somehow operationalised.

In the comments box for the post below, Doug takes me to task for not saying anything about Saturday's RMT-organised cross-union shop stewards' event. Fair enough. But as I wasn't actually there, there's not very much I can constructively write, except, er, it strikes me as a good idea in principle.

Interesting, too, that a union should now be undertaking the sort of exercise once the preserve of the far left. Anybody remember the All Trades Union Alliance, the WRP front in the seventies, and the various IS/SWP rank and file conferences from the same period?

The only account of Saturday's gathering I have seen on leftwing websites comes from Workers' Liberty, which reports 270 in attendance, many from the Socialist Party. The write-up is less than glowing.

But I'm sure some readers were at the meeting, and many of you will have opinions on the way forward for trade unions in the workplace anyway. So the comments box is open.

If the Trade Union Congress - which kicks off in Brighton today – is ever again to become anything more than a worthy annual talkfest, the labour movement needs to renew its relevance to working people in an environment very different to the one in which most activists grew up.

Last time I saw the stats - in 2003, to be precise - union density was just 29.1% of workforce, down from 58% in 1979. The rate of decline leveled out in the nineties, but the trend is still heading south.

The remaining pockets of strength are in the public sector, where two-thirds of employees are unionised. In the private sector, fewer than one in four carry a union card.

Industrially, most employers don’t listen to unions. They don’t have to.

At the political level – and this after a decade of Labour governments – unions have little clout, even among the ministers of a political party for which unions come up with 60% of total donations.

The blunt truth is that they have been relegated to little more than one lobby among many others, with the auxiliary role of unpaid health and safety inspectors.

There is still a wide swathe of far left opinion that remains nostalgic for the Fred Kite era. That is gone forever. Britain’s economic structure – and social structure, come to that – has permanently changed.

Even the SWP has largely abandoned the romantic view of dinner ladies’ strikes as the first step to world revolution, based on a pamphlet written in Germany over 100 years ago.

Working constructively with employers on issues such as health and safety or training is not automatically tantamount to class collaboration.

But industrial action remains a vital component of the labour movement’s tool-kit. For instance, unilateral attempts to bring in major changes in working practices without negotiation or to impose pay cuts are simply not acceptable and have to be fought.

Yet the working class continues to suffer from a crisis of confidence in its own ability to fight and win. There are three main reasons for this. The first is that it has still not recovered from the Tory blitzkrieg of the 1980s. The second is the fear of outsourcing either to private companies or overseas. The third is the effect of the anti-union laws. None of this will be easy to overcome.

There has been a shift away from Labour in the leadership of some smaller unions, and some may disaffiliate or broaden the range of political forces that benefit from their political funds. But the biggest and most important are still firmly committed to support for Labour.

I’m not sure their love is entirely requited. Welcome to UK plc, where workers can be sacked by text message. Britain continues to live with the most lightly regulated labour market in Europe … and the most tightly regulated labour movement.

Government supporters point to such advances as the national minimum wage, the European social charter, union rights at GCHQ, the Employment Relations Act and the introduction of maternity and paternity benefits. Yet Britons still have substantially fewer rights at work than workers in any other industrialised country.

Trade union recognition is just that - recognition. Effectively, it only commits an employer to talk to genuinely independent elected representatives of their employees. What’s so wrong with that?

Meanwhile, the left needs to come up with proposals to extend union influence in the private sector, especially in smaller concerns, in a form that can be sold to the wider public. After all, it is not only chief executives and shareholders who should be rewarded where a company is successful. So should those that work for it.

I’m certain that he deliberately used to turn up to meetings in the uniform that went with his job, just so the rest of the lads never stood a chance with the women comrades.

For two decades I did not see him again, until he turned up on the platform of a meeting in Hackney during the John McDonnell campaign, in his role as general secretary of the Fire Brigades Union. That's him, pictured left.

Hearing what he had to say, I was shocked by how far he has moved to the right in the intervening period. I mean, it was the first time I had ever heard him make a speech without demanding the nationalisation of the top 200 monopolies once.

If the real Matt Wrack could have been in the room that night, he would have had to denounce himself for selling out to the trade union bureaucracy.

Only joking, of course. I am pleased to see that my old mucker has now been elected to the general council of the Trades Union Congress, in the block of 11 places reserved for smaller affiliates.

Also on is another ex-Millie acquaintance of mine from the old days, Jeremy Dear of the National Union of Journalists. But Bob Crow, once again, did not make the cut. Here are the results, nicked from Luke Akehurst’s blog. Asterisks next to the name indicate successful candidates:

Jonathan Baume* FDA 431,000
Brian Caton* POA 594,000
Bob Crow RMT 328,000
Jeremy Dear* NUJ 382,000
Gerry Doherty* TSSA 498,000
Michael Leahy* Community 416,000
Joe Marino BFAWU 245,000
Judy McKnight* NAPO 330,000
Robert F Monks URTU 60,000
Ged Nichols* Accord 408,000
Keith Norman ASLEF 191,000
Brian Orrell* Nautilus UK 429,000
Tim Poil* NGSU 412,000
John Smith* MU 459,000
Matt Wrack* FBU 376,000

The comments box is open for the skinny on the political past of any of the above. Meanwhile, the BBC website is carrying some vox pops from TUC delegates on whether or not they favour strikes in the public sector. Among those interviewed are Unison stalwarts Jon Rogers and Andrew Berry. Guess what their opinions are?

I remember being slightly shocked when, at one point during the many, many industrial defeats of the Thatcherite eighties, a union activist friend of mind told me that he and his workmates were frustrated with the usual negotiating channels.

They’d had enough sitting around the negotiating table and getting nowhere. So they were plotting to purchase balaclavas and baseball bats and administer a severe beating to a particularly unpleasant manager.

Nothing ever came of the threat. But it’s interesting that even a politically worked-out Marxist could be driven to consider thuggery as a tactic. The surprising thing is that this sort of stuff doesn’t happen rather frequently in the UK, a country where even union representation often means little in practice.

But sabotage is a feature of the current French rail dispute, according to many media reports, including this one in The Times:

Saboteurs raised the stakes in the stand-off over President Sarkozy’s reforms yesterday, staging a series of attacks on France's high-speed rail network that further disrupted services already crippled by a week-long transport strike.

Vandalism to signal systems around Paris, Lille and other cities delayed TGV express trains for up to three hours, adding to disruption from the strike on the SNCF railways and the RATP Paris transport authority …

Much of the French press blames the far left, which denies any involvement:

Christian Mahieux, boss of the Trotskyite Sud-Rail union, which is supported by 14 per cent of railway workers, insisted that no railwaymen would have committed the sabotage. France should ask: “Who profits from the crime?”, he said.

Guilty or not guilty? I’ve got no idea. But the situation does raise some interesting questions about the limits of direct action. Any effective rail sabotage presumably has to put the travelling public at risk.

So can it ever be justified? And what about lumping the boss? Your opinions, please.

Yet even with the following week’s food money riding on it, it was only a certain innate talent for hackery that enabled me to complete the task. The peroration stands out in my mind to this day as one of the most tedious I have ever heard at a labour movement conference.

Not only was it essentially devoid of any content whatsoever, but the delivery was can only be compared to a sloth on mogadon.

Obviously, all this could only mean that Barber was bound for great things in the trade union bureaucracy, and on the spot I made a memo to myself to watch his progress. He has since risen from deputy general secretary of the TUC to general secretary. Sheer dynamism.

So I’m naturally shocked to read the contents of Barber’s New Year message. OK, neither the substance nor the rhetoric is quite up there with Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a dream’ speech. But it makes a number of indisputable points about the class divisions in British society today:

A union leader has called for greater equality in society, saying the "soar-away super-rich" are becoming cut off from the rest.

Mr Barber said tax loopholes should be closed so the rich pay a "fair share".

No, not the transitional programme, is it? Simply milquetoast social democracy of the type that would have been commonplace before Thatcherism and New Labourism, the sort of things the head of the TUC is supposed to say.

And of course the supine union leadership typified by Mr Barber will do nothing to act on the declaration, except perhaps by whinging privately to the few remaining Labour ministers suspected of atavistic sympathy for organised workers.

But it is some time since a mainstream figure in political life has said these undeniably true things. That would be encouraging for the class struggle left, if only it were capable of building rank and file pressure from below.

But for those schooled in the quasi-syndicalist Marxism that sees industrial action as the first step to world revolution, co-ordinated public sector stoppages involving 350,000 workers (some of them pictured left) does have a pleasing seventies retro ring. Just in time for the Rock Against Racism 30th anniversary gig, too.

Of course the truth is rather more complex than we once liked to think. There is little hard evidence for the notion – once popular on the far left - that a few hours on a picket line instantly overcomes sexist or racist prejudices and kills 99.9% of all ‘reformist illusions’ dead, instantly transforming the average timid workplace rep into an incipient Bolshevik.

Although today’s mini strike wave might fool you into thinking otherwise, the overall level of industrial disputes – which can be seen as a rough ‘n’ ready barometer of the state of class consciousness - remains historically low.

Even though we are now a generation removed in time from the defeat of the miners’ strike, the British working class remains intimidated and frightened to act collectively, and is considerably less militant even than its US counterpart.

As savvy commentators note elsewhere, even an extended series of 24-hour strikes is not in itself a particularly effective weapon. New Labour can easily get away with ignoring what is for most practical purposes nothing more than a gesture. And just try selling an all-out indefinite stoppage in a workplace where the majority of union members have got mortgages to pay.

In many quarters, the full extent of the setbacks hasn’t really sunk in yet. The Socialist Party, for instance, points to recent industrial action in defiance of a Greek court injunction ‘an illustration of how workers in Britain will sweep aside our anti-trade union laws in the future’. Just like that, as Tommy Cooper used to say.

The trouble is, as the National Union of Seamen found to its cost in the late eighties, the British state is sufficiently vindictive to destroy a trade union if necessary. Repeal of the anti-union laws needs to be a priority political campaign for the left. In the meantime, forget about any return to Fred Kite tactics.

Even with New Labour now in urgent need of a major bail-out from the unions simply to stay solvent, Gordon Brown has apparently decided that he has better things to do than attend next week’s GMB conference.

Most delegates will privately be relieved not to have to sit through the inert expanse of boilerplate, platitudes and waffle that passes for a prime ministerial speech on these occasions. But the arrogance of the snub is both palpable and somewhat distasteful.

Perhaps one of the reasons for Brown’s no show is that a call for disaffiliation from the Labour Party is on the GMB’s agenda. Meanwhile, the Communications Workers Union will discuss the issue at its annual get-together, also planned for next week. Smaller unions such as RMT and FBU are already out of the fold, of course.

Union involvement in politics – for over a century channelled exclusively through the Labour Party – could well see major change over the next few years, with ramifications that everyone interested in the future of working class organisation would do well to think through before acting precipitately.

This whole question is especially crucial for those engaged in various projects to build a new political formation to the left of Labour. Union backing is the only possible development that could give these outfits meaningful traction; without it, they will remain isolated utopians, with only the most minimal base in the class they claim to represent.

Of course, if the couple previously described as ‘the two wings of the labour movement’ stood before a divorce court, the unions would clearly have New Labour bang to rights for unreasonable behaviour. They have suffered 14 years of slights that no spouse would tolerate. But sociologically, the roots of the divergence were evident long before Blair and Brown arrived on the scene.

I haven’t got the figures in front of me, but if I remember correctly, back in the 1960s over 70% of the membership of TUC affiliates voted Labour. That statistic fell to below 50% in 1979, the year of Thatcher’s triumph, and has never since risen above the half-way mark.

Yet in 1984, the Conservatives passed legislation compelling unions to ballot on the principle of maintaining a political fund every ten years. To the surprise of the government and the trade union leadership alike, the move backfired; ordinary members of most unions do see the point of having a political voice, and have consistently voted accordingly.

It’s just that they are no longer unanimous that this voice should speak in favour of New Labour, which has taken little more than a decade to trash loyalties that took ten decades to build.

Even as a Labour Party member, I can understand why many activists feel angry. But the tactical question that the far left needs to ask itself is whether or not disaffiliation would work to its advantage.

The danger is that, in the absence of any credible alternative socialist pole of attractions, most unions would either drop out of politics altogether or at best back candidates on a pick-and-mix basis, perhaps even including Liberals and Tories. That would ultimately push the prospect of a new workers’ party even further away.

It’s true that a handful of general secretaries – Bob Crow and Mark Serwotka are the most obvious examples – are openly Marxist and personally would have no problem with the idea of backing an alternative to New Labour. But even the most leftwing union leaders are entirely conscious of the difficulty in taking their memberships with them.

Crow, for instance, was an individual member of the Socialist Labour Party, and stood his ground when Labour expelled RMT for allowing its Scottish region to affiliate to the Scottish Socialist Party.

But it is simultaneously notable and unsurprising that he knocked back George Galloway’s overtures prior to London elections. What could he or his union possibly have gained from signing up to such a vanity candidacy?

And although the PCS enjoys/is subject to – delete according to preference - a greater degree of Trotskyist influence than any other major union in Britain, its civil service composition still includes many on the right of the political spectrum. Any political activity beyond that which can be presented as directly in the members’ interest is effectively precluded.

Finally, it’s worth pointing out that the GMB and CWU disaffiliation calls are considered certain to fall. Meanwhile, RMT continues to sponsor 21 MPs. All of them are Labour MPs.

If SWP/Left List, Respect, the Campaign for a New Workers’ Party, the SSP or Solidarity are remotely serious about winning union support they will frankly have to raise their game. The persistence of five joke mini-parties will continue to meet the derision such fissiparousness richly deserves.

Probably the biggest reason for the ongoing debilitation and theoretical disorientation of the British far left is the secular decline of wider working class organisation in the wake of the defeat of the miners’ strike.

There are three main reasons for this. The first is that the labour movement frankly still has not recovered from the Thatcherite onslaught of the 1980s. The second is the fear of outsourcing, either to private companies or overseas. The third is the continuing effect of the anti-union laws.

The upshot is that unions remain marginalised, amounting to little more than one lobby among many others, with the auxiliary role of unpaid health and safety inspectors.

Marxists used to regard class struggle at the point of production as the key mechanism through which socialist ideas could find a mass audience. Without it, any number of communalist appeals to religious minorities on a non-class basis, or any amount of effort to recruit teenagers from the anti-globalisation milieu, will not succeeded in rebuilding our depleted strength.

To get some idea of just how tough times are, consider this story from today’s Financial Times:

The proportion of workers who are trade union members has continued to slide and is almost a quarter lower than it was 16 years ago, according to official figures published yesterday.

A higher proportion of women were union members at 29.6 per cent, compared with 26.4 per cent for men. More worrying for unions was the fact that less than 10 per cent of young people aged between 16 and 24 were in unions compared with more than 35 per cent of employees aged over 50.

It’s the last paragraph that is the most worrying. The over 50s are not going to be in the workforce that much longer. If unions fail to recruit young workers in the years ahead, the damage could be irreparable.

It is said to mark the dividing line between the decades of social democracy, Keynesian consensus, full employment and a comprehensive welfare state and the advent of the leaner and fitter years of ‘no such thing as society’ neoliberalism, monetarism, and ever lengthening dole queues.

To the extent that New Labourism represents Thatcherism lite rather than the full strength version of the creed, at one level we can still be said to be living with the long-term political continuity of those fraught few months.

I’m never going to forget the period at a personal level, either. These were my years of young adulthood; first job, first dole cheque, first serious girlfriend and a dawning political awareness, all set to the unforgettable soundtrack of the Pistols, the Clash, the Buzzcocks and the Damned. All that, and proper class struggle too. So yes, I am nostalgic for it.

Perhaps the watershed was more apparent than real, anyway; what in retrospect more than anything else marked the transition from a kinder, gentler and all round more decent Britain than the one we have lived in for the last 30 years was Denis Healey’s forced turn to monetarism after the International Monetary Fund loan of 1977. Everything else rather flows from that.

Fast forward to 2008, and Britain’s union – who meet in Brighton today for the start of the Trades Union Congress annual conference – are once again seeking to overcome a Labour government-imposed pay cap. Some of them are even considering industrial action as part of the fight.

Ergo, we must – as in really, really must – ineluctably be heading for WoD II. Just check out the papers this morning. In a rare display of unanimity, the Daily Telegraph and the Times agree with the Guardian on this, while the Daily Mirror is at one with the Daily Express. Surely, then, the matter is beyond doubt?

Well, maybe not. Now that the trade union beat is no longer worth a full-time reporter on most newspapers, those writing about these things typically come with little real understanding of the history and the dynamics of modern trade unionism.

‘Unions threaten return to the Winter of Discontent’ must be the lamest cliché in all of industrial relations coverage. You hear it repeated endlessly on each occasion more than one strike is on the cards at any given time. Yet the threat never somehow comes to fruition.

I know that no remake movie is ever as good as the original, but there are as yet no real grounds to believe that whatever plans assorted general secretaries are hatching while down by the seaside over the next few days will come anywhere near to deserving comparison to the events of all those years ago.

The British working class is still suffering from a crisis of confidence in its own ability to fight and win. There are four main reasons for this. The first is that it has still not recovered from the Tory blitzkrieg of the 1980s. The second is the fear of outsourcing either to private companies or overseas. The third is the effect of the anti-union laws. The fourth is the depoliticisation of the few young recruits the unions have managed to secure.

Unions are marginalised, and have become little more than one lobby among many others, with the auxiliary role of unpaid health and safety inspectors. Whatever the fluctuations in the statistics from year to year, two facts remain true in broad brush terms: union membership is at a multi-decade low, while there are fewer days lost through industrial action than at any point since the 1890s.

A series of well-mannered symbolic 24-hour or 48-hour walk-outs are not going to overcome those obstacles, and do not a Winter of Discontent make. The government knows that, and employer organisations know that. That is why neither of them are in the least bit nervous about the months ahead.

In 2008, no group of workers has the clout unilaterally to bust a pay cap in the same way Ford employees did in 1978 when they secured a 17% pay increase, opening up the gap into which many other unions were able to pour. With unofficial strikes now against the law, nobody will take on the role ambulance drivers played in forcing the pace of the fight.

The TUC is well aware of all this, too. That is presumably why the conference has already voted down calls for a 24-hour public sector wide stoppage, in the full awareness that it is unlikely that they could make the call stick.

So what are the prospects for WoD II? Until the rubbish is piling up in Leicester Square and you can actually see the unburied dead in your local mortuary, forget about it.

THOSE of us old enough to remember the early 1980s and the early 1990s have been here before; a cumulative total of 17,000 workers – including 10,000 at BT - lost their jobs this week.

Forget the GDP and all that stuff about ‘two consecutive quarters of negative growth’. In human terms, this is what a recession looks like.

Construction equipment giant JCB – whose founder Sir Anthony Bamford was an early member of the businessmen for Blair brigade – has given 400 employees the boot, even after they voted for pay cuts. Richard Branson has underlined the lack of difference between hippy capitalism and the more conventional kind by sacking 2,200 at Virgin Media.

Taylor Wimpey, the housebuilder, is putting 1,000 people on the dole, while 1,300 will go at Yell and 620 at GlaxoSmithKline. Leyland, the truckmaker, will follow suit with 250 redundancies by Christmas. Compliments of the season and all that.

On official figures, there are now 1.82m unemployed, the highest level since Labour came to power in 1997, and City economists are forecasting that total will rise to 2.7m by 2010.

Once, rocketing joblessness stats would have led to many people asking what the government intended to do about it. Full employment was always considered a basic tenet of the post-war consensus, not a transitional demand. Full employment was what Labour governments were supposed to be for.

That’s why the Tory ‘Labour isn’t working’ poster in the 1979 general election campaign – rolled out when 1m were on the dole, a tally that seemed staggering at the time - is rightly hailed as one of the most effective political advertisements ever.

Almost 30 years on, it is both odd and alarming how depoliticised the matter of overall employment levels has become. Such as been the dominance of market ideology over the last three decades that making sure that there is work for those that need it no longer falls within a government’s remit.

The market, we have long been told, ‘provides jobs’; not only that, it would automatically clear if only such distortions as the minimum wage or organised labour could be taken out of the equation.

It is important for the left to challenge these kinds of ideas. The labour market is as much a social institution as an economic institution. Jobs get destroyed through financially-driven mergers and acquisitions, downsizing, low investment, bad training, the pursuit of short-term profit goals, high dividend payments, poor management and the recessions that have consistently blighted capitalism since its inception.

It is now the free market that isn’t working. Supposed ‘laws’ have simply been set aside to enable the financial services bail-out, with erstwhile free marketers leading the clamour for this to happen. Why shouldn’t the labour movement demand at least as much?

There are many obvious policies that would both counter joblessness and work for the social good, including further boosts for education and training; more social housing, to facilitate greater mobility; investment in better public transport, so that people can more easily get to work; and social provision of public goods.

Industrial action against job losses can be hard to organise, given the inevitable demoralisation that sets in on receipt of a redundancy notice. But where there is nothing to lose, the argument is probably easier to win.

Why not insist that companies that would otherwise go bust be taken into social ownership under workers’ control? The demonstration effect of an assertive response could probably prove considerable.

Trade union leaders – especially the leaders of Labour Party affiliates – have an elementary duty to press this case, both to the government and to the general public.

Yes, a serious response to what is happening right now will inevitably involve countering market logic, and with just a few exceptions, unions seem to have long ago lost the imagination necessary to do that. But the penalty for not reviving the tradition of fighting back rather than taking things lying down should be obvious to everyone in the labour movement.

CORUS - in UK terms, basically what’s left of once mighty state-owned British Steel - is nowadays part of Indian conglomerate Tata Group. It makes a lot steel, and makes a lot of cash, too. Only last month, Tata Steel chief executive B. Muthuraman told the Financial Times that the outfit is looking to triple profit margins over the next five years.

It has since turned out that one of the ways it intends to do that is by pushing for cuts in the pay of its 25,000-strong British workforce. Tata bosses are seeking temporarily to reduce salaries by 10%, and threatening redundancies if they don’t get their way. Unions have - rather half-heartedly, as once commentator makes clear - rightly rejected the blackmail.

Not so on the other side of the Atlantic, where the United Auto Workers have agreed a series of concessions on healthcare and pensions at General Motors. While nominal salaries for existing employees have been preserved, they have been halved in real terms for new hires. In effect, the clock has been turned back four decades; two generations of progress have been bargained away

As ever, if you want an analysis of what is going on in capitalism today, the best place to start is with the work of an economist who died 125 years ago. Much of what Karl Marx wrote in volume one of Capital centres on the system’s relentless drive to increase the rate of surplus value, or to use an alternative designation, the rate of exploitation.

Many books have been written on Marxian economics. But the central idea does not need any lengthy academic exegesis, and will be intuitively self-evident to anybody who has ever done a working-class job.

There’s a fight on in every workplace over the division of the value produced. The boss constantly pushes for a bigger cut; unions try to resist, and occasionally even go on the offensive themselves. Never is this more blindingly obvious than in the early days of a recession.

As Marx himself remarks elsewhere: During the phase of sinking market prices and the phases of crisis and stagnation, the working man, if not thrown out of employment altogether, is sure to have his wages lowered.

If the notion takes hold that pay cuts are an acceptable means of averting job losses - and a concerted campaign in favour of the proposition is only to be expected - it will mark the start of a dangerous dynamic. This is one line the unions simply have to hold.

REHASHING a 1970s National Front slogan represents a particularly crass attempt at triangulation, even by New Labour standards. But that is precisely what Gordon Brown was doing when he dropped the ‘British jobs for British workers’ soundbite into his 2007 conference speech.

Unsurprisingly, the words are now being quoted back to the prime minister in the wake of the unofficial walkout at Lindsey oil refinery in Lincolnshire, which has triggered a wave of wildcat stoppages up and down the country.

I’m trying hard to remember if any other issue has provoked a similar response in this country at any point over the last quarter of century; if it has, I'd be at a loss to tell you what it was.

For Marxists, full support for what Marx called ‘the self-activity of the working class’ is central to our political thinking. When workers move into struggle against their employers, we are clear on which side we stand. So naturally we are in full solidarity with everyone taking part in today’s action.

The trouble is, the far left is not the only strand of political opinion that is backing the Lindsey dispute, which centres on the decision of an Italian subcontractor to use foreign workers on a construction project at the site.

As the Times reports:

The British National Party was trying to hijack the unofficial strikes today sending activists to join the picket line as the Unite union, which did not sanction the strikes, attempted to retain its influence over members who are angry that British jobs have been lost to European competitors.

“Yesterday was a great day for British nationalism,” said a spokesman for the far-right BNP. As workers addressed a crowd of around 600 outside Lindsey one of the workers shouted: “Get the BNP rep up there” but he was quickly shouted down.

As Socialist Party blogger Phil BC points out in a fine post here, overt racism is thankfully not the dominant mood right now. But a certain nationalist undercurrent is unmistakeably there, present in the logic of the strikers' chief slogan..Brown’s cheap flirtation with a racist catchphrase the year before last may have far greater consequences than anyone could have predicted at the time.

PERHAPS the single most ugly page in post-war industrial relations history is the story of how some sections of the working class reacted to Enoch Powell’s ‘rivers of blood’ speech in 1968.

London dockers, Smithfield meat porters, builders and workforces at several small factories warmly responded to the Tory MP’s deliberate attempt to incite racial hatred against black people in this country, showing their enthusiasm with a wave of unofficial stoppages.

Comparisons have been drawn by some parts of the left between this episode and the events of the last few days, which have seen a dispute against the use of foreign labour at Lindsey oil refinery spark a wave of wildcat strikes across the construction industry.

I’ve been trying to think the issue through this morning, and have concluded that the cases are simply not analogous. Let me give some of the reasons.

First, the Powell walkouts were an expression of political support for the incendiary rhetoric this man directed against the Race Relations Bill, including his argument that Britons were becoming ‘strangers in their own country’, and his prediction of widespread bloodshed unless the government turned to voluntary repatriation.

The underlying issue in the current wildcats is a genuine industrial grievance. The reality is that tensions have been building in British workplaces over the last quarter of a century of management triumphalism. Things always were going to blow at some point; the issue that provides the detonator is thus completely incidental.

Second, there is the scale and geographical spread of the stoppages. The Powell strikes were overwhelmingly based in East London and involved relatively small layers. Various books in my library give different figures for how many dockers joined in, but the estimates range from a low of 200 to a high of 1,000. The Smithfield participants were just a few dozen. By contrast, the 2009 strikewave extends nationwide, and has already won the backing of greater numbers.

Third, while the principal slogan - ‘British jobs for British workers’ - is clearly misguided, wrong-headed and of infelicitous provenance, today’s context is thankfully very different to the one in which the National Front launched the catchphrase in the 1970s. The category of ‘British workers’ now firmly includes British workers of black or Asian origin. That makes it qualitatively different from ‘Don’t knock Enoch’ or ‘Back Britain, not black Britain’.

This is not to say that it is a demand the left would have chosen, or even that its overtly nationalist implications are not divisive. Of course it represents a propaganda godsend for the British National Party. And yes - to borrow the phrase Greg Dyke used in relation to the BBC - the photographs of the picket line look hideously white.

But the call does not seem to me to be consciously racist in motivation. As the old joke goes, I wouldn't start from here. But to use that as an excuse for indifference or inaction would be a tactical error.

Oh, and here’s one further thing to bear in mind; just nine years after London dockers marched in praise of Powell, they were marching in solidarity with low-paid Asian women at the Grunwick film processing plant.

But it is up to the left to ensure that the new militancy draws the right political conclusions. What is more, we should be fully aware of what will happen if we fail.

2 MILLION STRONG – BRITAIN’S BIGGEST UNION, or so it says next to the logo on the home page of Unite. But that might be something of an exaggeration, according to Jim Pickard of the Financial Times, who has been analysing its annual report:

The group has reported a fall in its membership from 1.95m to 1.64m, equivalent to a drop of 310,000, in its annual report published this week. It later clarified this as mainly a “tidying-up exercise” as officials excised the names of former members who had left or died years earlier.

Privately, officials expect the loss of as many as 150,000 members during the course of the year for the super-union, which was created through the merger of the T&G and Amicus. UK membership was reported to be 1.54m, down from 1.84m a year earlier.

There have also been unfavourable developments on the financial front:

Unite has reported a £19.5m deficit for the past year after writing down investments in property and shares that were damaged by the financial downturn.

Unite’s financial position is of wider political importance because the group is Labour’s biggest donor. The party now receives more than 90 per cent of its annual donations from unions.

OK, statistics such as these are never decisive, in the sense of representing the last word about the balance of forces in the workplace.

But they should certainly be set against the rather optimistic prognoses that have been produced by some sections of the far left in recent weeks. Victories at Lindsey, Visteon and Linamar notwithstanding, the British labour movement remains on the defensive.

BRITAIN ‘could return to crippling 1970s strikes’, according to a headline in Britain’s biggest-selling rightwing broadsheet yesterday. And note how the Daily Telegraph says that like it’s a bad thing.

My first response is not to get my hopes up too high. Newspaper commentators have been predicting an imminent rerun of the Winter of Discontent every year for at least the last two decades, and have somehow managed to get it wrong every single sodding time.

Trot sect gurus have tended to agree, insisting that dramatic shifts in class consciousness can come suddenly and unexpectedly. Typically they buttress their case with the example of country X in year Y, as if the prospects for UK 2009 could directly be read off from, say, France 1936.

Yet it is interesting just how memories of Red Robbo and the miners’ strike still stalk the collective consciousness of the British bourgeoisie. Even today, the mere mention of trade unionism can still evoke Dirty Harry-style responses from the Heir to Blair, who only days ago told one interviewer:

Mr Cameron added: "My message to union leaders who think they can take me on is simple: don't do it.

But the outfit usually described as Cameron’s favourite think tank suspects that some of the punks will soon be feeling lucky:

Mass walkouts could be commonplace in a new "age of militancy" as pay deals are curbed, according to Policy Exchange.

"This could be a taste of things to come. A possible new age of militancy. When we suddenly go from a very very rapid increase in pay to huge pressure on public spending, it is possible that we could have something develop like the 1970s."

Let me run that logic past you again, slowly. What ‘very very rapid increase in pay’ are we talking about here, exactly? Unless O’Brien is generalising from the special case of FTSE 100 directors, or the National Union of Free Market Think Tank Policy Wonks has done him proud of late, I’m not entirely sure to whom he is referring.

My pay rise this year wasn’t bad, I have to admit. But it comes after several settlements in which my salary hasn’t kept pace with inflation, and doesn’t make up for the lost ground. It’s the same story with most other people I know, unless they’ve had a promotion or something.

The giveaway is O’Brien’s ritual invocation of the 1970s. As the catalyst that brought Thatcher to power, the Winter of Discontent – as we have come to call the strike wave of late 1978 and early 1979 – enjoys iconic status as the most important turning point in all of Britain’s post-war history.

It is said to mark the dividing line between the decades of social democracy, Keynesian consensus, full employment and a comprehensive welfare state and the advent of the leaner and fitter years of ‘no such thing as society’ neoliberalism, monetarism, and ever lengthening dole queues.

To the extent that New Labourism represents Thatcherism lite rather than the full strength version of the creed, at one level we can still be said to be living with the long-term political continuity of those fraught few months.

Perhaps the watershed was more apparent than real; what in retrospect more than anything else marked the transition from a kinder, gentler and all round more decent Britain than the one we have lived in for the last 30 years was Denis Healey’s forced turn to monetarism after the International Monetary Fund loan of 1977. Everything else rather flows from that.

The British working class is still suffering from a crisis of confidence in its own ability to fight and win. There are four main reasons for this. The first is that it has still not recovered from the subsequent Tory blitzkrieg of the 1980s. The second is the fear of outsourcing either to private companies or overseas. The third is the effect of the anti-union laws. The fourth is the depoliticisation of the few young recruits the unions have managed to secure.

Unions are marginalised, and have become little more than one lobby among many others, with the auxiliary role of unpaid health and safety inspectors. Whatever the fluctuations in the statistics from year to year, two facts remain true in broad brush terms: union membership is at a multi-decade low, while there are fewer days lost through industrial action than at any point since the 1890s.

In 2009, no group of workers has the clout unilaterally to bust a pay cap in the same way Ford employees did in 1978 when they secured a 17% pay increase, opening up the gap into which many other unions were able to pour. With unofficial strikes now against the law, there is no obvious candidate to take on the role ambulance drivers played in forcing the pace of the fight.

All that said, the recent wave of workplace occupations and wildcat strikes - bad slogans notwithstanding - do seem to signify that at least a section of the working class is up for a scrap, if only in a defensive mode as yet.

What’s more, I haven’t seen so many young people at far left events since the 1980s, which is another good sign. One Trot group is insisting that the current sit-in at Vestas on the Isle of Wight essentially results from the intervention of its youth members in a previously unorganised factory. Unless this account is substantially overblown, the AWL kids deserve shedloads of revolutionary socialist brownie points for kicking the whole thing off.

Bottom line? Until the rubbish is piling up in Leicester Square and there is verifiable television news footage of unburied dead in your local mortuary, don’t believe the hype. The odds against overcoming decades of inertia are considerable.

Then again, if Ladbrokes would give me a price on the return of serious class struggle, I might just be tempted to have a tenner on the proposition.

IF YOUR boss sacks you for wearing a crucifix to work, you may have a case the Employment Equality (Religion or Belief) Regulations 2003. Clock on clad in a hammer and sickle lapel badge, and she can freely tell you to pick up your P45, you dirty little commie. Or so I had assumed, anyway.

But shortly we will find out whether or not Trotskyism is deemed legally equivalent to religion, after the decision of Socialist Party members Brian Debus, Onay Kasab, Glenn Kelly and Suzanne Muna to take one of Britain’s largest trade unions to an employment tribunal under these very regs.

All four have been banned from holding office in Unison for between three and five years. Mabledon Place says that is because they are racists; the activist quartet believes that they are being singled out because they are Trots.

It is almost always a bad thing to hand jurisdiction of internal labour movement democracy over to the legal system. But the situation in Unison has unfortunately reached the point were such a move must be seen as justified.

Even to an outsider, it is is readily apparent that the union’s leadership is systematically targeting its critics by taking out disciplinary proceedings on transparently spurious grounds. Two prominent members of the Socialist Workers’ Party have already been expelled.

There are a number of pertinent considerations here. Unions are voluntary organisations in civil society. In principle, they should be open to all those working in the sectors in which they organise.

They should also be able to determine whom they wish to have as members and equally whom they wish to exclude. I have no problems with them keeping British National Party supporters out, for instance.

Should the far left face the same strictures as the far right? Unison’s barrister at the tribunal has reportedly accused Debus, Kasab, Kelly and Muna of ‘infiltrating’ the organisation. This is ludicrous; all four work, for low or average pay, in routine public sector employment, and are entitled to join the biggest relevant union.

If they give extensively of their free time to maintain workplace organisation – and these people do – they should positively be welcomed.

Moreover, Marxism has always been an intrinsic part of the organised labour movement. Trade unionism in Britain, at least in the shape in which it has evolved, would not exist without the efforts of the far left.

The four men and women taking out the case – together with another activist called Matthew Waterfall – were ostensibly disciplined for producing and distributing a leaflet at the 2007 Unison conference, which featured a cartoon of the three wise monkies popular in Japanese folklore.

This is held somehow to be ‘racist’, a case for which I am unaware of even minimal evidence. The accusation is rendered all the more perverse by the exemplary anti-racist track records of some of those it is levelled against. Moreover, Unison has itself produced literature featuring the motif.

The real reason for the proscriptions and expulsions is that Unison believes it can best advance its members’ interests through dialogue with the government, and is consequently embarrassed by the strong criticism of New Labour emanating from far left quarters.

In particular, those aligned to the Socialist Party have led the way in arguing that Unison should no longer provide the Labour Party with financial support. As a Labour Party member myself, I think this is a tactical mistake.

But it is hardly an outrageous position for rank and file public sector trade unionists to adopt. After all, they of all people will oppose as a matter of course the privatisation of public services perpetrated by Blair and Brown. Unison general secretary Dave Prentis and other New Labour fans should make the case for affiliation in political terms, not by silencing anyone who thinks otherwise.

On grounds of basic civil liberties alone, Debus, Kasab, Kelly and Muna have every right to push for and publicise their opinions inside labour movement structures. Unison should rethink its damaging course, which brings it only discredit.

THE far left is usually an uncritical supporter of industrial action in any and all circumstances, rightly adopting Rosa Luxemburg’s stance that ‘where the chains of capitalism are forged, there they must be broken’.

Yet the two rounds of ‘British jobs for British workers’ wildcats this year have been the only exception to this rule I can remember since the 1970s. As I argued at the time, it is vital to avoid confusing form and content; however unfortunate the formulations invoked, the substantive issue of upholding the rate for the job was surely supportable.

The controversy may now reignite, after 7,000 GMB members in oil refineries and power stations around Britain voted heavily in support of official strike action over the issue. The result of a ballot of 30,000 workers organised in the same sector by Unite is expected next week, with ‘yes’ very much on the cards.

The seven sites involved are BP's Forties pipeline facility at Grangemouth, the Ineos refinery at Grangemouth, Sellafield, Shell's refinery at Stanlow, RWE's power plants at Staythorpe in Nottinghamshire and Aberthaw in South Glamorgan and Chevron's refinery in Pembroke.

Any stoppages are likely to be co-ordinated, and the result could see power cuts across the country. This is shaping up to be the most important blue-collar strike for 20 years, and now is not the time for sterile sectarian abstentionism.

Thought for the day:
When workers rise against exploitation and oppression with nationalist slogans, you say: “The rising is correct; please change the slogans.” You do not say: “The rising is bad because the slogans are bad.”

- Ernest Mandel, in an entirely different context.

I DON’T know if Tony Woodley and Derek Simpson are particularly up on Søren Kierkegaard. But as the annual Trades Union Congress conference kicks off in Liverpool today, I reckon many union leaders could do worse than dust off their copies of Fear and Trembling.

The labour movement today is clearly facing what the Danish founder of existentialism would recognise as an existential crisis, a process said to occur when someone undergoes a deep questioning of the very foundations of his or her existence. People in this situation ask themselves whether their life has any meaning or purpose, and whether the values to which they adhere have any merit.

Now, I'm not sure if organisations as opposed to individuals can be so afflicted. But Britain’s trade union leaders really do need to ponder an obvious conundrum; what is the point of what they are doing? What, in short, is trade unionism for?

At bottom, unions are there to defend jobs and keep wages as high as possible. Over the last three decades, the ravages of first Thatcherism and then Blairism have seen them become increasingly ineffective at such core tasks.

Since the start of the recession, company after company has introduced savage mass lay-offs; whether there is symbolic consultation or not, unions have repeatedly been unable to extract even minor concessions.

A public sector pay cap has meant real-terms reduction in pay for millions of workers, many of them earning very little to begin with. Token stoppages will do nothing to challenge that.

By tradition, British unions have also promoted a social democratic agenda, using the Labour Party as their primary vehicle. Even that has not been possible since the rise of New Labour.

I have had a trade union card since I was 16, as much because of my upbringing as because of my political convictions, and have made a point of joining the relevant union in any job , whether recognised or not.

But trade union tribalism like that is dying out. Union members make up less than one in five of all workers aged under 30, and just 15% of private sector employees. Union leaders wonder why such people won’t join up; what is really at issue is, why on earth would they?

To add to the irrelevance problem, Labour is about to find itself out of office, in all likelihood for at least a decade. It’s all very well pointing out that unions get 30% of the votes when deciding who will replace Brown, but a one-third say in who gets to be leader of the opposition is hardly much of a return for the millions of pounds spent keeping Labour afloat.

Many on the left pin their hopes on the emergence of some electoral alliance around Bob Crow and the RMT. This is likely to happen, and Labour has little right to complain.

But whatever the merits of the idea, it is clear that such a formation does not enjoy good prospects in first past the post contests. The single figure in percentage points it is likely to poll in most Westminster constituencies could be enough to gift a number of seats to Cameron.

If it is to have a worthwhile future, trade unionism needs to reassert itself, both in the workplace and through political channels. That will entail greater militancy, and even a willingness to challenge the anti-union laws on occasion.

It is also going to mean actually using the Labour link, to the point where there are enough policy gains involved to sell the set up to a membership whose automatic support for Labourism cannot be taken for granted.

The alternative is continued drift, continued failure to recruit, and the fragmentation of labour movement political input in a manner that could keep the Tories in power for even longer than last time round.

SUCH is the harmless good guy reputation that the passage of time has granted the once widely hated Jack Jones that even Gordon Brown felt safe in hailing him as ‘a giant of the labour movement’ in a speech to the TUC conference in Liverpool last month.

In terms of leftie street cred, Jones really did have it all. Born into a socialist family of Liverpool dockers, he was even christened by the middle name of Larkin, in honour of the great Irish union leader.

Jones fought for the republic in Spain, and went on to become general secretary of the Transport and General Workers’ Union, allegedly making him ‘the most powerful man in the country’. Although that press-imposed designation was always an exaggeration, it does underline how influential unions were in the 1970s.

Even after retirement, Jones continued to campaign for pensioners’ rights. Although I only met him once, I found his company agreeable enough, and it was clear from the conversation that he was no particular fan of New Labour, privately at least.

Yet we must now presume that in his concern to get on the right side of today’s union leadership, the prime minister choose to overlook that a previous Labour government once branded Jones as an enemy of the state.

The revelation comes in Christopher Andrew’s new book The Defence of the Realm, an authorised history of MI5, which is currently being serialised in The Times. According to the author, the Soviet Union’s intelligence service KGB regarded Jones as an agent from 1964 to 1968.

Whether or not Jones – who was a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain between 1932 and 1941 - saw himself as such, and whether or not he was rewarded, the article does not say. In any event, contact was broken after the Prague Spring.

But Andrews further alleges that Jones continued to pass on confidential information to the CPGB, and that Labour home secretary James Callaghan authorised the tapping of his telephone. This practice continued under the Heath administration.

Andrews also confirms something that most of us on the left have believed for some time, namely that MI5 kept Thatcher closely briefed on the activities of Communists, Trotskyists and non-affiliated militants inside the unions. I'm shocked. Shocked, I tell you.

One interesting snippet is the state’s assessment of the far left’s work in the miners’ strike of 1984-85. Many groups to this day boast of their role in that struggle. Yet their activities apparently did not especially bother MI5. Far from it:

MI5 was less alarmed than the Prime Minister, reporting on April 4 that “subversive organisations were not making a significant impact on events”. Though the Service continued to monitor contacts between the Communist Party of Great Britain and the miners’ leader, Arthur Scargill, Director F believed that the party was seeking — unsuccessfully — to exert “a moderating influence” on him, rather than to inflame the dispute further …

It has been claimed that during the miners’ strike that “every single NUM branch and lodge secretary had his phone monitored along with the entire national and area union leaderships”. These claims are fanciful. Most phone tapping, authorised in every case by HOWs [Home Office Warrants], was limited to leading Communist and Trotskyist militants and those judged to have close links with them.

How close is this account to the truth? Let’s note that the book is an authorised history, and will therefore reflect MI5’s self-interest in presenting itself as essentially a law abiding outfit. It will thus discount in advance former operative Peter Wright’s famous contention that ‘we [MI5] bugged and burgled our way across London at the state's behest’.

On the other hand, it may just be that the far left was never as important as it once fondly imagined itself to be. Maybe I should simply suspend judgment until I have had the chance to read what sounds like an important book. But I think we can take it as read that tabs are being kept on us to this day, even if there isn't all that much worth keeping tabs on.

Finally, how should we judge the morality of passing on information to the USSR, if that is indeed what Jack Jones did? I think I can just about understand how the matter looked to leftists of Jones’ generation, including among many others the man who was my favourite uncle in my boyhood. If the Soviet Union wasn’t quite a workers’ paradise, they believed, it was at the very least the power that defeated fascism.

For socialists, the problem with spying for the KGB flows not from patriotism or any enthusiasm for the British state, but from what Russian Stalinism objectively represented; the USSR was an ugly and authoritarian dictatorship over the proletariat, and the left of decades past were wrong to regard it as any part of its projects to sustain the repression.

To his credit, Jones appears finally to have worked this one out after the tanks rolled over Czechoslovakia. Better late than never.

I’VE BEEN covering industrial relations as a hack for over 20 years now. Once it was my main specialism. These days the task takes maybe 25-30% of my typical working week, but I still keep an eye on a number of trade unions.

I write about Nautilus International and RMT, who organise seafarers, fairly regularly. In addition, Unite represents the majority of Britain’s dockworkers, and many employees at the Maritime and Coastguard Agency are in PCS or Prospect. I also keep tabs on the International Transport Workers' Federation, and report on strikes in countries where the newspaper I work for doesn't have a correspondent.

This entails staying friendly with a number of union officials. Occasionally I get to chat to them over an expense account beer, and hear all sorts of gossip, not least revelations about friendships between general secretaries and the proverbial ladies not their wives.

Generally, they are open about their political affiliations. Many are in the Labour Party, like me. A surprising number are in the Communist Party of Britain or are at least share a general tankie outlook without carrying a card. Few are paid-up cadre Trots, but plenty have been.

Anybody with the slightest interest in these things knows that political caucuses operate in a number of unions. Unite, RMT and PCS all have either ‘broad left’ or ‘rank and file’ formations. No secret, and no biggie, either. This stuff has been happening since the establishment of the National Minority Movement by the Communist Party in 1924, and is simply the way of the labour movement world.

So the idea that union officials and activists have political opinions, join parties to advance them and seek to get co-thinkers into union positions will surely shock few ordinary union members, and even fewer aspirants to union office.

I can only conclude that - for a big shot investigative journalist - Mark Watts has led a very sheltered life. Watts, you see, is one of the eight candidates for the £51,000 a year elected position of editor of the National Union of Journalists members’ magazine, Journalist.

Workers' wage aficionados should note that the wedge is at top end of the going rate for London-based magazine editorships, but not outlandishly so.

As part of his campaign, Watts has emailed all members to warn them about the clandestine Trotskyite threat to NUJ’s independence posed by a group called NUJ Left, which has had the temerity to nominate someone else for the position. His missive is the most unpleasant and incoherent piece of red baiting bullshit I have seen in years.

I have no personal animus against this bloke, whom I have never met. Indeed, I have high regard for his professional abilities; his byline has been over numerous damn good stories through the years, some of which I have followed up. But being an ace investigative reporter does not necessarily mean he would make a good magazine editor. These are entirely separate ends of the trade.

Nor am I a member of NUJ Left, for that matter. OK, nine times out of ten I vote for the NUJ Left slate in NUJ elections. Hey, I'm a socialist. But if for any reason I think a particular candidate is an idiot or an incorrigible sectarian arsehole, I back someone else instead. In the current contest, I happily endorsed NUJ Left nominee Rich Simcox, who happily falls into neither category.

You can read Watts' analysis in its entirety here. Ta to Will in the comments box for finding the link. Meanwhile, here are some extracts, just to give readers a flavour of the thing:

FROM MARK WATTS - THE INDEPENDENT JOURNALIST FOR EDITOR OF THE JOURNALIST

I have been astonished by what I’ve found out about the NUJ during this election. Since declaring my candidacy for the Journalist editorship just three weeks ago, I’ve uncovered what has gone wrong with our union. And I think you’ll be appalled too.

C’mon then Mark. Shock me. I do so want to be appalled.

This time, I wasn’t even looking for a story …

Possibly because there really isn’t much of one to be had. But I digress.

But with my experience heading up the investigations unit at Sunday Business for four years, in addition to working as an investigative journalist on several other national newspapers and television programmes, including World in Action, I guess it was never going to take me long to discover the shocking truth about our union.

I guess not. You grizzled old hack, you.

A political faction that calls itself "NUJ Left" is trying to take control of the NUJ. I bet you’ve never even heard of "NUJ Left".

OK. I’ll take the bet. Tenner?

Don’t get me wrong, the "NUJ Left" doesn’t have overall control of the national executive council (NEC) not yet.

That’s the verbatim quote. Better improve those proofing skills if you want the gig, mate.

But that’s what they want, and the same applies to other key policy-making bodies in our union. And this election is the key that will enable them to pull it off. They’re trying to put their man in charge of the Journalist. With that, they’ll be in an ideal position to take control of our union completely.

And they’re going to succeed, unless you vote. You probably do not realise it, but one of the candidates in this election for editor of the Journalist is part of this "NUJ Left" group. You need to vote in this election to save our union. Do it today.

So will the NUJ collapse if editorship of the mag falls into the hands of an evil leftie? It has been in the hands of Tim Gopsill, whom I suspect would cheerfully own up to that description, since at least the 1990s. That hasn’t stopped the NUJ growing healthily in recent years.

Right now, this faction controls a big chunk of the NEC and wields heavy influence over its decisions. They do this partly by working, in effect, as a political party, partly by some good old-fashioned tub-thumping. One senior NUJ source told me: "They just have the loudest voices, and other committee members feel cowed."

Except NUJ Left doesn’t work as a political party, as far as I am aware. It cannot do so, because its supporters are members of competing political organisations, each with differing policies.

That’s why we had that craziness about the NUJ trying to set up a "political fund", which was booted out by members in a referendum. That’s why we had a similar distraction about the NUJ calling for a boycott of Israeli goods. You probably thought long that the NUJ is run by "extreme lefties", but I bet you didn’t know that our union is being subjected to such an organised attempted hijack.

Given the restrictions placed on campaigning by reactionary Tory employment laws, political funds are necessary for any union that wishes to speak out on any issue that could be deemed political, from media ownership regulations to the libel laws. It’s a pity the vote was lost, as the NUJ is significantly handicapped as a result. Nor is there any reason why unions should not debate the Israel/Palestine issue.

So, what is "NUJ Left"? Several friends of mine have told me that it sounds like just the kind of group to which I would belong. I believe that some people have indeed been lured in by what, to many journalists, would seem an innocuous-sounding group. Ah, they might say to themselves, little, cuddly "NUJ Left".

Cuddly, it ain’t.

They call themselves a 'coalition'. Where I come from, we use a different c-word: to my mind, they’re a cabal.

Cabal, eh? Bloody yids. Always plotting secret takeovers.

This is clear evidence that "NUJ Left" is attempting to hijack our union. It is an astonishingly brazen and jackass attempt. In my many years of investigative journalism, I have never known a group of plotters simply to plonk their game-plan onto a website. Let’s just say, this "NUJ Left" crowd are not exactly clever. And yet, we’re on the verge of allowing this bunch to take over our union.

Here I am speechless. After all Mark’s years in investigative journalism, it really should occur to him that the game plan is on the website because it isn’t being hidden from anybody.

One of the candidates in the election for the Journalist editorship is from "NUJ Left” ... The "NUJ Left" candidate is Richard Simcox. You have a right to know.

Mind you, if you’d turned to page 15 of last week’s Socialist Worker, you would in fact have found out. What, not one your regular newspapers?

No, not one of my regular newspapers.

I’m told that "NUJ Left" can count on 400 hardcore votes in this election. Seems piddling, no? But, they’ll get their man in if the turnout is as low as expected. And if the Journalist effectively falls under the control of "NUJ Left", it’ll be much easier for this faction to fulfil its aims, as quoted above. In essence, they’ll be able to take control of our union.

Just 400 votes in a 19,000-strong union. That’s about 2%, roughly in line with the number of adults who define themselves as far left in most opinion polls. That’s a useful start for any candidate, especially as lefties are more likely to vote than apolitical people. But that’s democracy for you.

I know Jeremy Dear, our general secretary, and Michelle Stanistreet, our deputy general secretary, quite well … I call on our general secretary and deputy general secretary to condemn publicly the stated aims of "NUJ Left". I call on them to condemn publicly the fielding of a candidate by "NUJ Left" in this election in such a way as to limit the realistic likelihood of the electorate finding out about his political allegiance. And I call on them to state publicly that they will initiate and lead the process of establishing procedures to ensure that candidates in all future NUJ elections declare any political allegiances.

Earth calling Planet Watts. You obviously don’t know Jeremy as well as you make out. If you did, you would know that NUJ Left fully supported and helped to organise his election campaign. Nor is Jeremy – who speaks at public meetings organised by the Trotskyist group Socialist Appeal, with appearances openly advertised under his own name - some kind of political virgin. Some investigative journo you are.

NUJ friends and colleagues, I’m sorry to have been the bearer of bad news. Please don’t hold that against me. You needed to know what’s going on. Sorry for all the detail, but you needed to see the foundations because I reckon I could be due for something of a smear campaign.

Hey, could get interesting. I’ve already sent back my ballot paper, with Rich as my first preference. Anybody who wants the job to go to a socialist who already has experience of editing a magazine for union members should do the same.

MY NEXT door neighbour is standing for the council. Matt Hanley is a thoroughly nice bloke, on the socialist wing of the Green Party, a former union rep who has organised low-paid retail workers, an active anti-fascist, and a full-time campaigner for human rights. So obviously I won’t be voting for him.

I’m a Labour Party member, so I can’t; I will campaign for the Labour candidate instead. The point I am making here is that sometimes in politics, it is sometimes necessary to choose between good competing candidates for the same job.

This is very much the case for lefties considering who to back in the coming contest for general secretary of Unison. Once again, the left vote will be split, this time between three rather than the customary two leftwing challengers.

Those planning to run against £127,000-a-year incumbent Dave Prentis are Socialist Party member Roger Bannister, United Left and Labour Representation Committee man Paul Holmes, and little-known left independent Delroy Creary. The latter has garnered only minimal support, I gather.

I cannot pretend that I follow every nuances of the ongoing sparring between contending political factions in Britain’s largest public sector union. But time was when part of my pay cheque as a journalist was derived from keeping tabs on what was going on in Unison’s predecessor NALGO, and ever since then I have held Bannister in good regard.

He has a more than credible track record in past contests. Last time round, he secured 41,406 votes, easily trouncing the 18,000 or so secured by my sometime beer buddy Jon Rogers. [Note to Jon: pull your socks up, slacker.]

That said, political considerations are decisive, and on the key political issue at stake in this election, Holmes is advancing the better position. The principle dividing line, of course, is the attitude the candidates take to Unison’s ties to the Labour Party.

Bannister is openly campaigning for disaffiliation. Holmes argues for the union to affiliate in its entirety, not only in part as it does now, and wants to democratise the Labour Link structure so that Unison can use its political weight to full effect inside what is almost certainly the only party that will have socialist MPs in a few months time. But members will get an annual ballot on affiliation, which they don’t have now.

The reality, of course, is that neither Bannister nor Holmes will win, and that Prentis will be returned for another term. Effectively, the are contesting the right to spend thousands of pounds to be the runner up. In that sense, any divisions on the left are neither here nor there, although clearly a single agreed candidate would have been preferable to a multiplicity.

But if anyone in Unison is interested in the opinion from an admitted outsider, I reckon a vote for Holmes is the best way to signal support for greater political involvement by the base of the union. I’m happy to back him.