Gove and Pickles’ Nasty Party reprise falls flat with voters

The Paul Richards Column

Throughout the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, including the three years when David Cameron worked there, the Conservative Research Department pumped out pamphlets called ‘Politics Today’. They were propaganda rags arguing in favour of the poll tax, privatisation, Clause 28, the sale of council houses, or whatever the controversy of the day was. I used to have a box of them until my wife made me throw them out.

Every few weeks a new one would appear arguing that Labour was riddled with extremism and unfit to govern. A reoccurring theme was Labour’s links to the trade unions.

The February 1987 edition warned that ‘Labour intend to shift the balance of power between trade unions and employers decisively in favour of their union paymasters. In return for their financial assistance to the party, Labour would seek the agreement of the trade unions for every item of economic policy: investment, public spending, regional policy, exchange rates and taxation.’

The February 1994 edition warned ‘despite all the talk of change, Labour remains a wholly-owned subsidiary of the trade union movement’ and revealed that unions sponsored every MP in the shadow cabinet, and 163 out of Labour’s 269 MPs.

There was nostalgia in the air this week when Michael Gove took to the stage to launch Charlie Whelan’s New Militant Tendency. It was just like the bad old days, when swivel-eyed, adulterous, avaricious, right-wing Tory ministers, armed with half-backed factoids and out-of-context quotes, supplied by eager posh researchers like Cameron, would bash the unions, and other thought-crimes such as opposing apartheid or supporting gay rights. For a moment, the Nasty Party was back, and had the trade unions in its sights once again.

Today’s YouGov tracker, with the Tory lead on four points, suggests that the voters didn’t pay much attention to Mr Gove’s document. It reveals an essential truth about political communication: it only works if it goes with the grain of what people already think and feel. It has to hit a nerve. Most people do not consider the trade unions to be a big issue in the coming election, to be called within the next few weeks. They have not heard of Derek Simpson or Tony Woodley. Most of the voters do not care whether unions give money to the Labour Party or not. The Tories are playing their old familiar tunes, but no-one is singing along.

As the more asute commentators pointed out this week, there is no Unite takeover of the Labour Party. This is because of a simple fact: the Unite union is not a single, unified force within the Labour Party, capable of acting in concert. Gove’s analogy with Militant Tendency (which did behave in a unified, disciplined way) is wrong. The idea that Unite is united is as sound as the Titanic being unsinkable or the Maginot Line impregnable. Unite is the sum of its parts: the smaller unions AEEU, MSF, TGWU and GMPU (each in their turn amalgamations of even smaller unions). Its merger has been painful and is incomplete. There are still two general secretaries. For the Tories to point to the 111 members of the Unite parliamentary group as proof of a takeover is laughable. The bigger the parliamentary group got, the less unified it became. It includes MPs from the whole spectrum of Labour opinion, from the old Right, to New Labour modernisers, to the hard-left Campaign Group. The latest crop of Unite-supported candidates range from the traditional right-winger Michael Dugher, who cut his teeth with the AEEU when it was run by Sir Ken Jackson, to the traditional left-winger John Cryer, who was a T&GWU man and member of the Campaign Group. The fact that the Prime Minister’s political secretary and the party general secretary are ex-T&G, or that Charlie Whelan is ex-AEEU, or that Gordon Brown’s constituency was sponsored by the T&G is simply a reflection of the links between the trade unions and the Labour Party, which are transparent, regulated by law, and above board.

But the Tory strategy is slightly more cunning than simple union-bashing, as you might expect from the wily Mr Gove. The Tories know how damaged they are by the Ashcroft revelations, and they know there’s more to emerge in coming weeks. Ashcroft’s influence at Tory HQ, and impact in marginal seats, is concerning because of its secrecy. No one likes the idea of wealthy individuals ‘buying’ parliamentary seats. So the Tories needed a smokescreen, and fast. They hope that shouting ‘Unite’ every time Labour shouts ‘Ashcroft’ will be an effective blocking move. That’s why it may have been a tactical error for Charlie Whelan to give media interviews this week, because it risked falling into the Tory trap. It brings a back-room boy into the limelight, which seldom ends well. Labour election campaigns are like sausages: it’s best not to see how they’re put together.

Far more effective would be to step up the campaign against the Tories’ economic policies, to hammer them on economic competence, and to drive a wedge between Cameron and Osborne. If we sound defensive about the party’s union links, the Tory attacks will gain traction. If we go on the offensive over the Tories’ proposals to obliterate large sections of Britain’s public services (and their slavering excitement at the prospect), we will sound like a party preparing to win a general election.