Tony Benn always famously says that politics is not about personalities - but policy. So let's remind ourselves WHY many of us opposed Gordon Brown becoming Leader . It wasn't his lack of charisma, his prudent Presbyterian ways ( of which being a Northern Ireland hybrid I know plenty) or any other personal deficiencies.
It was the fact we knew that the path Gordon Brown was going to take, pro business and anti trade union, was not a Labour agenda which would win back our core supporters. Now, at a time when the trade unions are basically propping Labour up from bankruptcy, and appealing in very reasonable terms for some modest reforms at Warwick 2 , here's his answer.
If it sounds familiar, that is because it is the same neo-liberal guff he was spouting when he debated with John McDonnell and Michael Meacher . Now, as then, it's simply unacceptable rhetoric from a Labour Prime Minister
"Successful governments are those whose eyes are fixed on the future not harking back to the past. The countries that prosper in the future will be those that combine fairness with flexibility to achieve full employment.
"So there will be no return to the 1970s, the 1980s or even the 1990s when it comes to union rights, no retreat from continued modernisation and there can be no question of any re-introduction of secondary picketing rights.
"While we will push ahead with our family-friendly agenda we will do nothing that puts employment and future prosperity at risk."
Monday, 7 July 2008
TRADE UNIONS GET COLD SHOULDER
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3 comments:
Guff it might be, but you still have to do better. How would you sell the return of secondary picketing to the electorate, especially in the current climate?
If Labour or the unions had been able to justify and defend these practices in the first place, the Tories might not have been able to sweep them away so completely.
'So there will be no return to the 1970s, the 1980s or even the 1990s when it comes to union rights, no retreat from continued
what a strange comment, so even policies from the Tory?early Blair years are now too radical, what next
Secondary action enables stronger trade unionists to take action to help weaker ones; facilitates some levelling up of the playing field in industrial negotiations on behalf of weaker workers, which are currently grotesquely skewed in favour of managements.
But it's no surprise that opponents of it can't but help invoking, in their tired old ways, the Seventies. And yet it's US that's supposed to be living in the past - we're talking about basic democratic rights in the workplace; you're stuck with your outdated Seventies bogeymen.
And I don't know why Brown included the 90s in his "no going back" spiel - trade unionists had FEWER rights then than now, so the message sounds confused and historically ignorant. Which of course is par for the New Labour course.
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