The government should talk to the voters, not the unions
The political year ends with a sequel. Labour leaders, trade unionists and party members gather at Warwick university for what is billed as Warwick Two. The original version took place at the same location shortly before the last election. Like many sequels the outlines of the narrative for Warwick Two are precisely the same as the original.
In essence here is the familiar story being played out for a second time. Desperate for cash, the Labour leadership needs the unions’ money. In return for their cash, the unions want policies that benefit their members. Thank you and good night.
Of course the actual story is far more complex and multi-layered. Some important and worthwhile reforms were implemented as a result of the first gathering in Warwick. The unions have a right to put the case for more changes now. After all, business leaders do not need the equivalent of a Warwick gathering to get a hearing. When they murmur, the government responds like a frightened rabbit. In the case of the unions the opposite applies. The government becomes a frightened rabbit if there is any sense that it is responding to union demands. Brown is as fearful as Tony Blair of a perception that Labour is returning to the old days. Do not forget his paralysing caution over taking Northern Rock into public ownership. Brown will do nothing that looks as if he is returning to the 1970s. As an added twist, the unions have no desire to make the return, even those shouting most loudly at the moment.
But this is no time for multi-layered stories. As far as Labour is concerned, voters notice only the outlines and are inclined to think the worst. They are being given some reason to do so. In advance of the second gathering in Warwick, unions were flexing what is left of their muscles and ministers were nervous. When I spoke to one ministerial aide he warned a little breathlessly: ‘We are not making a running commentary on the negotiations with the unions.’ At that point I had not asked for such an insight. He added that this was a policy forum consisting of many representatives beyond the unions and that the constituency parties were also submitting a range of proposals. All true, but note the defensiveness.
The ministerial sensitivity is understandable. For Labour, Warwick Two looks awful. At a time when voters have turned away from the government here is the governing party in what seems like a negotiation with one limited section of the country. Union leaders are quite open about it. Tony Woodley, the joint head of the Unite union, stated emphatically in the build-up: ‘We have to speak for our two million members. There is no point backing a Labour party that does not support Labour policies.’ There is much for the Labour leadership to worry about in those two sentences. Is a Labour government meant to represent Mr Woodley’s two million workers or should it have wider ambitions about who will be the beneficiaries of its policies? It can only win and keep power with wider ambitions.
The problem with the ‘Warwick’ approach to politics is that it divides the electorate into separate entities, as if each has their own distinct needs. We enter a dangerous fantasy world in which providers of services are not also consumers, and in which the broader direction of the economy matters less than an immediate policy gain for a few. This defeatist insularity is not limited to some union leaders. At a conference a few years ago Peter Mandelson observed that, ‘We have done a lot for our core vote in recent months. We must not forget our Middle England supporters.’ But Labour can only win convincingly and credibly when it finds a narrative and a set of policies that brings together these different groups.
This should not be difficult. Some of Mr Woodley’s members will have similar concerns to Mr Mandelson’s Middle England voters. Both will have kids that attend schools. Both will fume in lousy trains. Both might need to visit a GP or attend a hospital. It should be possible to bind groups together into a potentially potent vote-winning force. The Cabinet minister who gets closest is Ed Miliband, who talks about a ‘self-interested altruism’ lurking in most voters. Mr Miliband means that we should want to pay up for decent public services in order to tackle deprivation for entirely selfish reasons. There is something in this.
Beyond the deceptively heady days of 1997, New Labour has never got the relationship right between its core constituents and the broader electorate any more than so-called Old Labour managed to do. A few years ago its leaders claimed preposterously that the ‘entire country is our core constituency’, suggesting that there were no significant dividing lines anywhere. Now it is negotiating with a few trade union leaders over a set of policies that appear to be a closed matter within the narrow confines of Warwick university.
Tony Blair told me in 1995 that he would never lose interest in reforming and modernising Labour and that if he got too busy as Prime Minister he would ‘get others to reform the party’. It never happened. Britain still lacks a modern progressive party that has moved away from formal connections with trade union bases or old bastions of sadly decaying local government. Ironically, the lack of such a liberated vehicle makes it harder to win broader support for reforms that are on the unions’ wish list at Warwick.
Yet changing the structures of a party is almost impossible, especially when there is a big debate to be had on the future policy direction after the next election. If Mr Blair failed to make much headway in the sunny uplands of the mid-1990s, it is hard to imagine who will be able to do so in the near future. Stand by for Warwick Three in a few years’ time.
Steve Richards is chief political columnist for the Independent.
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