THERE has been a frenzied hue and cry raging for weeks now over the minor mistakes of Labour cabinet ministers over relatively minor donations to support their internal campaigns for leading positions within their party.
The Tory attempt to hunt down Brown and minor political figures such as Harriet Harman has been supported by a massive 24 hour coverage from the BBC, Sky TV, and the bourgeois press.
This onslaught has been supplemented by an officers’ revolt which suggested that the Labour government was responsible for Britain’s defeat in Iraq and Afghanistan, and demanded massive increases in the military budget.
However, it has now emerged that the real target of this witch-hunt is not the Labour politicians, but the working class and specifically the way that it has organised to take political action currently through the Labour Party, via the organisation of a political levy that has enabled that party to match the millions that big business gives to the Tories.
This became crystal clear during the debate on political funding in the House of Commons on Monday, when it emerged that the Tories had walked out of the earlier cross party talks on political funding because the trade unions’ political levy was not ‘on the table’ to come under political control, through a new anti-union law.
Tory MP Maude said in his opening speech: ‘A small minority of union members have succeeded in opting out of the levy, but polling has consistently shown that fewer than half of trade union members vote Labour.
‘More than half vote for parties other than Labour. It beggars belief that those people are cheerfully making a voluntary contribution to a party that they do not even vote for. . . .
‘It does not end there. In most unions, if someone does succeed in opting out of the political levy, they do not even get any money back. Their union subscription remains completely unchanged. The truth is that in most cases – not all – the money given to Labour under the guise of affiliation fees is entirely in the hands of the trade union barons. After all, it is the trade union leaders who decide how many affiliated members they are going to declare. . . We are expected to allow what are plainly block donations by the trade unions to be treated as individual voluntary donations. It is laughable. . . .’
The political levy, wielded by ‘trade union barons’ is too much like the dictatorship of the proletariat for the delicate Maude to take.
Instead he wants a different system. ‘We would rejoin the discussions tomorrow if the Prime Minister showed that he was serious about real reform, but so far he has not done so. . . . If union members had a clear, accessible choice of whether to pay the political levy, and a choice of which party should benefit from that political levy, it could be said with a straight face that the money was genuine individual donations . . .’
He wants the political levy to go via the choice of individuals to the Tory Party.
Thatcher’s ex-Chancellor and ex-Health Secretary Kenneth Clarke also urged Justice Minister Straw to ‘move on to the key point of how trade union block grants should be treated under any system?’
Like Maude he is for the ending of ‘trade union block grants’. Clarke said of Straw: ‘Is he content to say that members of trade unions should be allowed to contribute like anyone else, giving voluntary contributions, and subject to the same overall limits that every other individual ought to be subject to?
Ever since the working class formed the labour party the Tories have campaigned for the abolition of the political levy. They have always rightly seen it as the semblance of the dictatorship of the proletariat over society as a whole.
They have always sought to reduce the working class to helpless individuals. They fear that working class funding, and trade union influence in the Labour Party will make it impossible for that party to agree to the draconian cuts that will be required as the capitalist crisis develops.
The News Line urges the trade unions to defend the political levy against the Labour and Tory leaders.
It must be used as a weapon for the organisation of the political struggle for socialism, which concretely means the struggle to bring down the Brown government to go forward to a workers government.