Promote working people fighting in their own class interests, back those in dispute, build fighting organisations, build for actions against the anti-union laws. That all takes time and money, you know. Fuck Labour. It's another party of the bosses.
Maybe it will, Probably it won't. It definitely won't if it is being funded by rich individuals.
as a unison member i'd like our lot to take note!
Excellent answer not a realistic one but certainly a heartfelt one.
Realistic one for a union to try though, surely.
Yes. In Wales it's difficult to overstate how cosy the relationship is between the major unions and the Senedd. Meanwhile working conditions for most people get steadily worse. Partnership with Labour has delivered a hairs breath Fabian wet wipe of a 'better deal' for people here. An extra annual leave day for NHS staff, but no pay rise. Fuck it.
If a sense of what is realistic is developed only within the narrow confines of the current status quo then whats the point?
I'm not criticising him, he can dream as big as he wants and maybe one day it will happen but here and now reality still as to be dealt with. I can't imagine that Unite trying to blackmail the Labour Party will end it anything but failure for them both.
Councils don't control their finances. They generally have no choice but to do most of that. Their only room for decision making is how acrimoniously they do it. I imagine Birmingham is much like most London boroughs - over 2/3ds of the budget is caring for the vulnerable and everything else has to be stripped to the bone or even more people will start falling through the cracks. The fault for all this lies in Westminster, not Birmingham.
Wouldn't argue with you but at the moment I can't imagine it will work since a) Starmer's actual authority is nll and b) he really can't afford the public perception of being accused of giving into union blackmail even if it wasn't.
Indeed. The whole point of the exercise is to make local politics a farce and powerless. It already makes very little difference who runs the council (outside of utterly corrupt ones like Croydon).
There is the alternative of focusing the various resources of the union on industrial organising, rather than relying on the Labour Party to support working people, something which they've never really been any good at doing when it came to the crunch.
It'll never be realistic with that attitude. If bring realistic means workers' organisations being nowt but a funding source for an anti working class party, then we're sunk.
As a Unison member, the list of things our lot could learn from Unite could probably fill a book.
This always confuses me, the use of "here and now reality" as a point arguing in favour of... hoping a hypothetical future Labour government elected at some unknown point might have better policies?
I mean, Labour's supposed to be a formal political organisation with some ability to discipline its members and elected representatives, not some loose grouping of hippies. If the Coventry councillors had posted "I reckon that Jeremy Corbyn seems like a nice man" on twitter, Labour central office would have had something to say about it.
I don't think he can really afford to lose that much money in donations either.
Not arguing for or against it, there was if you recall a hypothetical past Labour Government that did have policies you would approve of, it didn't come about that's not to say that it can't come about in the future however unlikely that may currently look.
Yes it is but it can't dictate how the council is run to local councillors, the law of the land does that. It could throw them out of the Labour party of course but what would that achieve they would still be councillors just not Labour ones and they would still be liable for any penalties that might come from not following the law. The last time local authority councillors tried defiance on a large scale it failed miserably.
Yes I'm sure you're right there are no easy choices for him here, not get involved and lose a shitload of cash or get involved, achieve nothing and potentially lose loads of votes that he needs. I think he might see the first as the lesser of two evils.
Liverpool Council initially won concessions and money from the Conservative government and there was a growing national campaign across left-wing councils. Labour refused to back its own councils against Thatcher and the start of the decades-long squeeze on local autonomy went into full swing.
Excellent point however the Labour left and Labour right are a single entity, currently the right is in the ascendant whereas the left was three years ago.
I mean, I hate having to say it, but Conservative governments definitely have made changes that I approved of, bringing in gay marriage under Cameron for instance, or the restrictions on evictions in 2020, or making u-turns on some of their vile policies like scrapping Mandatory Work Activity. Or, going back a bit further, Major dropping the poll tax. I'm not saying this as an argument for voting tory (honest!), I'm just saying that you can still win crumbs under the Conservatives as well as under Labour.
Well, throwing them out of the Labour party would certainly help get him out of trouble with Unite, and more importantly, the threat of getting thrown out of the party, and so probably losing their seats the next time around, might well help convince the councillors in question to back down. As for potentially losing loads of votes, is the anti-bin-worker vote really that strong? I'd think a competent politician should be able to spin standing up for low-paid workers coping with the cost of living as a plus rather than a minus.
Yeah, and over that past three years and more the Labour right have shown themselves to not be shy about doing whatever it takes to get what they want, including sabotaging Labour's electoral chances. Fair enough, but I reckon turnaround is fair play and all that.
I don't think there is an anti-bin worker vote at all or a pro-bin worker vote for that matter. I think the core Labour vote is simply smaller than the core Tory one, any Labour Leader has to negotiate a somewhat tricky path between not pissing off left leaning voters enough that they stay home and right leaning voters don't vote for someone else. No leader since Blair has managed it and I don't think Starmer is the man to succeed either but I do think he veers more to worrying about losing centrist votes than left-leaning ones.
It's not that far fetched. Look at what IWGB, UVW and CAIWU are doing literally on a shoestring. If Unite put the money splurged on Labour into proper on the job organising and campaigning, then there's no reason similar couldn't happen on much a larger scale (though I have my doubts about Unite seriously having the wherewithall to do this as they are still too tied into long defeated models of mainstream trade unionism). The first step in moving towards a more effective model would be to bin off the Labour scum.
'Blackmail' is a interesting word to use in this context.
