UNITE’S general secretary Len McCluskey has said he is delighted the union has been ‘vindicated’ over the Falkirk ‘vote-rigging’ allegations
Labour has decided no individual or organisation broke the party rules, and the police have decided that there was no breach of the law of the land.
This exoneration comes after Miliband, on hearing of the allegations, called the police on Unite, who questioned all those concerned, turning the issue into whether the Unite leadership were guilty of criminal actions or not, and deserved fining or jailing.
The Falkirk Labour Party was also placed under ‘Special Measures’ ie under the bureaucratic diktat of the Labour Party central office.
Miliband full of self-righteous indignation at what he alleged to have happened and egged on by the whole of the Tory Party and the bourgeois media, then announced that he was going to put an end to the power that the trade unions have as organisations inside the Labour Party.
This is no small thing, as the Tories well know. There would be no Labour Party without the trade unions, who founded it after Taff Vale and then organised it and financed it.
It was the party of the organised trade union conscious working class, who controlled it through the bloc vote.
All the opportunists who flocked into the Labour Party for jobs, accepted the dictatorship of the trade unions as a necessary evil, since it provided them with a living and political careers, and even high office, while the right-wing trade union bureaucracy could always be relied upon to vote the right way in a crisis.
Blair managed to weaken the bloc vote, and now Miliband – in a period of capitalist crisis, when right-wing trade union leaders stand to lose their jobs – wants to abolish it.
The Tories are the cheerleaders for the manoeuvre since a Labour Party, minus the organised working class, would make perfect coalition partners, or provide the basis for a Ramsay Mac mark 11 national government.
Miliband would like to continue to gratefully accept the unions’ cash, but only welcome trade unionists into the ranks of the Labour Party as individual members.
Miliband has even revealed the kind of Labour Party that he wants.
His ideal party turns out to be the US Democratic Party which elects its leaders at primaries where non-party members can vote, accepts large sums of money from the trade unions while having no obligations to them of any kind, and are regarded by the unions as the lesser evil to the Republicans.
This is the kind of party, and relationship with the unions, that Miliband wants.
This is why the reaction of Harriet Harman-Miliband to the collapse of the ballot rigging scenario is instructive and worthy of the Bourbons.
Harman has said that Miliband is right to refuse to apologise for calling the police on Unite, while Miliband has said, through his front men, that he is going to carry on with his ‘reform policy’, and even lecture the TUC Congress on it, despite the collapse of the scenario that he used to launch it.
Meanwhile, the Falkirk Labour Party remains ‘suspect’ and the special measures regime remains in force.
The Miliband-Balls-Harman led Labour Party supports 99% of the Tory austerity programme and is pledged to intensify it to save capitalism. It is determined to dump the trade unions out of the Labour Party so that it can do this.
At this TUC Congress Miliband must be told that he won’t get another penny of union money until he opposes the Tory austerity programme, stops the witch-hunt of the trade unions, and adopts a socialist programme of renationalisation of the energy industries and the railways.
If he will not, the TUC must use union funds to finance anti-austerity socialist candidates who will oppose Labour candidates who are not willing to stand on a socialist programme.
Having had a year to consider the practicalities of calling a general strike it is obvious that now is the time for the TUC to call an indefinite general strike to bring down the coalition and bring in a workers government and socialism.
