Unite: We’ve been around 118 years – and we’re not going anywhere now

Today has seen many of us in the trade union movement rally to the defence of our historic link to the Labour Party, as alarming calls for disaffiliation filled the airwaves. I had planned to write for LabourList this week on some of Unite’s ongoing industrial battles, and the support we’ve been receiving from Labour’s top team. Instead, and with regret, I felt it crucial to use this opportunity to mark the very relationship that has allowed working people a voice in politics.

Formed more than a century ago, following a motion moved by a railway worker to the Trades Union Congress; our party would not have been built, nor would it have survived, without our unions. As Keir Hardie said at Labour’s inception, “the trade union movement is the real movement of the working class”.

Our unions’ representative function in the workplace is crucial: it is how we organise, build leverage and win for our members on pay, conditions and more. Without a political representative structure though, in parliament and local government, we would be fighting with one arm behind our backs. The relationship between industrial and political is vital to working peoples’ representation and power.

Contrary to claims made by some, trade union members are not counterposed to the Labour Party’s ‘mass membership’. We are the Labour Party’s mass membership. The hundreds of thousands of working people – from my union and others – who affiliate to Labour are the lifeblood of our party. They contribute to our policy-making, they donate to our campaigns and they are crucial to electing our councillors, Assembly Members and MPs. In fact – plenty become them, and we want to see more.

Any move to disenfranchise union members is not progressive, not socialist and certainly not democratic. Trade unions are this country’s largest democratic force. From whether we go on strike, to the policies we suggest for Labour’s manifesto, the decisions Unite makes are led by our members. We provide the Labour Party with an explicit link to workplaces, through our affiliations from union branches to constituency Labour Parties. We platform the voices of working people at the sovereign body of the party: with our lay member-led delegation to Labour’s annual conference.

Those who wish the unions ill wish the Labour Party ill – and by extension can be said not to have the interests of the British people at heart. Labour’s record is what it is because of trade unions, not in spite of us. As our general secretary Len McCluskey said today: “the clue is in the name”. If members want to be a part of a party that is not connected to the organised working class, they may do well to look elsewhere.

While the Tories are bankrolled by excessively rich donors, Labour relies on the modest donation from working class rank-and-file members who pay their subs to their union. Those members fund leaflets, office spaces and all the other resources we rely on to even come within a chance of forming an opposition to the vested interests of the establishment and ruling class represented by the Conservative Party.

Labour would be unrecognisable without the voices of trade union members. It would be a far less pluralistic, diverse or representative of our class: the class we were founded to fight for. We would not have some of our finest MPs in Parliament. We could not boast some of our finest achievements: the NHS, the National Minimum Wage or the Equal Pay Act, were it not for our unions. At crucial points in Labour’s history, when Labour has faced difficult times, it has been the unions that have held the party together.

This disagreement could not come at a more urgent time. A time when our entire movement should be uniting in our campaigns to reverse the regressive Trade Union Act, or opposing the use of precarious employment and festering wages. This government’s attacks on working people have led to the highest rate of private sector strikes since before the 1997 Labour government. Now is not a time to turn on ourselves. It is not a time to obsess over minutiae, navel gaze or undermine the greatest hope this country has of establishing a socialist government in our lifetimes. It is a time to come together and deliver it.

We’ve been around 118 years and counting – we’re not going anywhere now.

Anneliese Midgley is political director of Unite.

*If you’re interested in learning more about the historic link between our party and trade unions, and how you can strengthen that link locally, you can join an online webinar tomorrow evening at 6pm, hosted by Unions Together (the collective organisation of Labour’s affiliates) on Membersnet here.