Ed Miliband plans to curb union hold over Labour

Party prepares for conference fight as unions promise to resist proposals aimed at reducing their voting power Labour leader Ed Miliband is facing a tense battle with trade union leaders after tabling plans to lessen their influence within the party, by reducing their voting power at party conference to below 50% and diluting their sway over leadership elections. The move, revealed to the Guardian by union sources, is part of a plan to democratise the party and make big union general secretaries more accountable. It will face stiff opposition over what unions see as an attempt to weaken their historic links to Labour. Discussions about the proposals, part of the Refounding Labour Project, will come to a head in the next month before the annual party conference opens in Liverpool on 25 September. The plans are likely to especially rankle with unions after it was their support that helped the younger Miliband defeat his brother David in the Labour leadership election. Miliband has told the unions that he is not going to back down on his plans to make the party more democratic, and maintains that to do so will require changes to Labour’s internal democracy and the role that unions play. A source involved in drawing up the proposals said: “We cannot go on with a system in which unions have 50% of the vote at conference, and just three general secretaries of three unions control four-fifths of that union vote. Currently, the union leaders are playing hard ball but they need to wake up. “Ed has said he wants to do this through consensus, but he is not going to give the unions a veto about change. We are not going to concede.” Miliband has already angered unions with proposals for members of the public to be allowed to register as individual party supporters, a new category, and be given a vote in the election of party leader. He is also facing resistance to a plan that affiliated unions hand over a list of their three million political levy payers so that the party, constituencies and future leadership candidates can contact them directly, and build stronger links between local parties and individual union members. The unions insist that the party should not communicate with their members directly, but instead through their representatives. In a submission to the Refounding Labour project, the affiliated unions cite data protection issues, claiming it might breach laws on political campaigning to hand over the data. The Refounding Labour project is being overseen by Peter Hain, the experienced shadow Welsh secretary. Leaders of affiliated trades unions have put forward rival plans to restore the power of Labour’s annual conference as the sovereign policy-making body, and remove MPs’ separate voting section for the party leadership. Union resistance is so set that Miliband may be forced to postpone plans to put some key reforms to conference, and wait for a report into the future funding of political parties due to be published in October by the committee on standards in public life. That report, commissioned by the government, could propose caps as low as £50,000 on individual donations to political parties, so having radical implications for relations with the unions. A senior union figure involved in the talks said: “We are fed up with being treated as an embarrassment by successive Labour leaders. We have put forward our own proposals to make conference the source of legitimate party policy.” The unions are proposing a small change that would allow more groups to be affiliated to the party and vote in the union section at conference. Miliband has put a range of proposals to union leaders, including giving the 102-strong national policy forum a third or a fifth of the vote at conference, so reducing the union share to 40%. Alternatively, he has suggested informally, there could be a voting role at conference for elected representatives – MPs or councillors. Since 1993, the unions have held half the conference vote, constituencies the other half. Three giant unions – Unison, the GMB and Unite – together hold almost four-fifths of the union section of the vote. Miliband’s negotiators are also suggesting that union delegates to party conference be elected, or allowed to vote only if they have a union mandate. A party negotiator said: “If we are going to have a conference which has more power, then it has to come to decisions in a way that the leader feels he can defend. The easiest thing to do would be to leave everything as it is, let the unions defeat us, and continue to ignore the vote.” As well as suggesting the new membership category of registered supporter, Miliband also wants a ban on people having multiple votes in a leadership contest by virtue of being both a party member and political levy payer. The unions, through the Trade Union and Labour Party Liaison Organisation (Tulo), which brings together unions affiliated to the party, opposes the concept of registered supporters. “We should not widen participation by creating a lower class of membership,” it said. The liaison organisation instead suggests that MPs lose the right to a third of the vote in the electoral college that elects the Labour leader, and claims this “should not be considered an attempt to downgrade the role of parliamentarians in a leadership election”. It insists that union executives be allowed to retain the right to recommend a leadership candidate to their membership. But Tulo is also opposing to direct communication between Labour representatives and members of affiliated trades unions. It said: “Whilst superficially attractive this fails to account for the legal and cultural factors that make such an arrangement extremely difficult … a direct relationship would call into question the legal separation between trade union political activity and the Labour party with unknown consequences.” It adds: “A relationship of that kind sits uneasily with notions of collective engagement.” Tulo also claims that “while many political levy payers are are happy to support the political activities of their union, they share the same antipathy towards politics as the public in general”. Miliband cannot afford a politically high profile defeat on the issue since he has already suffered one setback when he was outvoted on the national executive committee in his choice of party general secretary. Miliband’s aides say he is going to be able to work effectively with the victorious candidate Iain McNicol, the GMB’s political officer. But the contest left bad blood over how the two sides lobbied hard for their candidate, including in the case of national executive members, the threatened loss of union funding. Ed Miliband Labour Trade unions Patrick Wintour guardian.co.uk

Posted by on August 2, 2011. Filed under News, Politics, World News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.