What would constitute trade union freedom to you, exactly? Do you mean the freedom to prevent people from working or to harass people who are going about their business? That wouldn’t strike me as particularly liberal so what exactly are you asking for?

Oh how we miss the good old days when communities were forged in the pits and foundries!

When it was the sign of a real man not to shirk the privations of a lost limb or death at 50 from various forms of health concerns. And marriages were built to last on the uncomplaining backs of waiting for yer pa to roll in from the pub and beat yer ma senseless having wasted the weeks rent on boozing, gambling and whoring.

Oh the happy days of grand old union power fighting for the workers against capitalism!

Of course we want progress, but not if it means living longer, in safer conditions, for improvements in our prosperity – Bah!

I’m a little lost by the theme of this article.

In part it seems to be a criticism against the democratic credentials of a Labour Leadership that supported ‘one member one vote’ – but it doesn’t mention that suggesting this isn’t really what the writer cares about.

It also seems in part to be a criticism of an anti-union agenda among labour leaders who provide unions with state funding through the modernisation fund, and who have granted workers a new right to trade union membership, and who have used labour regulations to create thousands and thousands of Union training reps in workplaces across the country. – and yet it mentions none of those things either.

—

So in the end this seems to be nothing but another “look at me, I hate new labour and so must be morally sound and intelligent too” article.

frankly the left could do without such mentality.

Question: Are you supposed to be using that picture, given that it has “Not for public use” watermarked across it?

Margin4error – are you against secondary picketing rules?

Tony – good point. Heh.

Why has my comment been deleted?

Any chance of a ruling on where i broke the terms?

Otherwise I can keep re-posting the comment, we can do it that way…

ok…

Tony Kennick

“Question: Are you supposed to be using that picture, given that it has “Not for public use” watermarked across it?”

Read the article:

“Trade union freedom, a revitalized activist base, a new internationalism to fight capitalist globalisation. These are the elementary components of a struggle where we can actually compete with the bosses associations and the CBIs of the world on a level pegging.”

Is someone who thinks this way likely to be a big fan of property rights?

Let’s be honest…

@ Nick: Trade union freedom, if you would like it reduced to a set list of demands, would be the re-legalisation of solidarity action and secondary picketing, re-introduction of unballoted action, mass picketing, union disciplinary rules…I can go on but I’m sure you see where this is going?

As for harassing people going about their business, workers have a right to protect their terms and conditions: people crossing picket lines is effectively theft because it is directly taking money out of the mouths of workers and their families who aren’t being paid not because they are lazy but because their employers aren’t paying them fairly. If your definition of liberal is permissive of such behaviour, well that’s your call and we disagree.

@ Thomas: I’m so glad you picked up on the tongue in cheek nature of certain elements of the post and decided to contribute.

@ Margin4Error: It’s easy to look radical when you’re targeting the lightweight stuff like the seven day notification rules. It’s even easier to look radical when you completely destroy any system of internal democracy through appeal to a formless, disorganised mass the opinion of which can change with the wind rather than a system of delegates which weights the contribution of each to the Party and their support among the active members of their local constituencies. OMOV is about as anti-democratic as it gets. Sure, everyone gets to decide certain issues, but look at the imbalance between Grassroots Alliance slates and their expenditure and the leadership-backed slates. You call that democratic?

As for state-funded unions, so what? We may be on the cusp of state-funded political parties; I don’t see it making a difference to the average person working a ten hour shift on a shop floor, except insofar as their taxes are now doubly funding the overpaid windbags hogging the news.

Almost forgot:

@AC256, of course I’m not ‘a big fan of property rights,’ well spotted.

As for state-funded unions, so what? We may be on the cusp of state-funded political parties; I don’t see it making a difference to the average person working a ten hour shift on a shop floor, except insofar as their taxes are now doubly funding the overpaid windbags hogging the news.

Jesus. Can we please get rid of state funding for parties, unions, whatever else should be contributed to privately by the interested individual…

“Not for nothing does Tony Benn regularly compare the attitude of Blairism towards workers with that of Stalinism.”

There are lots of good reasons. Delusion. Providing a pithy yet meaningless quote. Nostalgia for the good old days. Etc.

Luckily enough, at least in the developed world, the unions are reforming a few decades too late. So long, and thanks for all the fish.

@11 This is the nub of the issue – it goes to the heart of the role of the state and its relationship with society.

Libertarian volunteerism is all well and good on paper, but that assumes economic conditions never turn sour.

The reality is that the state must somehow ensure a basic/minimum standard, for which it has at its disposal the legitimate use of force to coerce/initiate action. This is what provides for the existence of the BBC, for example, as well as the armed services, emergency services and universal availability of social services etc.

The question that must be faced is how to ensure adequate funding for the provision of service without requiring state intervention.

It’s rise as an issue reflects the failure of the New Labour project, which tried to answer this problem by removing dependance on support from the unions, but instead became subject to the bidding of other vested interests. Can the Conservatives avoid similar questions of integrity while their activity is funded by massive individual injections of cash?

I think the outcome of this debate is some way off yet, as it will be greatly influenced by the fall of the Conservatives (or does the financial impropriety of Cameron/Osbourne/Spelman/Chichester/Dover/Lewis provide sufficient evidence as to the liklihood of this outcome?).

Personally, I’d be for ‘public funding’ over ‘state funding’ if an adequate mechanism could be found and agreed, but here isn’t the time or the place (and nor am I the person) for that.

Maybe someone could remind me of the name of the nineteenth century Liberal woman who said something like “an attack on the trade unions is an attack on the free market”.

thomas, normally I find you entirely reasonable but I’m struggling to see any reasonable comparison between unions, political parties and other self-interested organisations and the provision of the armed and emergency services. As far as I’m concerned the former can go hang.

My frustration is born from the claim that they in particular are necessary to the proper functioning of our society. I doubt you support that notion but that is a claim they make every time the topic of party funding returns to the spotlight.

I don’t have any problem at all with the unions funding Labour – indeed I’m surprised they haven’t formed their own party given how unhappy they claim to be, perhaps its because the unions would struggle to build an effective competing brand. Just keep it above board.

I don’t have a problem with rich people funding parties so long as everything is above board and we can say Smith gave the Wotsit party £1m so let’s keep an eye on them.

Problem is of course that they don’t want to keep everything above board.

Political party funding problems are twofold:

1. Party outgoings are more than their incomings (if I recall correctly the only parties who lived within their means in 2005 were Sinn Féin, the Social Democratic & Labour Party, Plaid Cymru, Respect, the Democratic Unionist Party, and the Scottish Green Party);

2. Party incomings are a lot lower than they used to be, because their Joe Public supporters are fed up with them and have stopped joining and contributing, and their large donors are fed up with them too.

It bears repeating that Labour party membership has halved since coming to power in 1997. Some of this may be down to, yay, we don’t have to contribute any more, Labour are in power – but I suggest the majority is because Labour have annoyed their supporters.

John Redwood pointed out in December 2006 that

If you persuade every member to give £10 for an election — not a big ask — you can have a £7.5 million campaign from just 750,000 supporters, far fewer than used to belong to the Conservative Party. That’s still more than enough money to annoy voters if you spend it badly.

750,000! Labour can but dream.

I remain to be persuaded that my hard-earned cash should fund those whose ideas I oppose, particularly in sour economic conditions, especially when they are financially incompetent and secretive.

And another thing!

So, you support the idea of rebuilding the link between funding and the representative function… interesting, now how do you propose to do that without removing the voluntary consideration?

I don’t think parties are particularly necessary, rather that they are helpful and we shouldn’t let our frustrations dictate our decisions.

“As for harassing people going about their business, workers have a right to protect their terms and conditions: people crossing picket lines is effectively theft because it is directly taking money out of the mouths of workers and their families who aren’t being paid not because they are lazy but because their employers aren’t paying them fairly. If your definition of liberal is permissive of such behaviour, well that’s your call and we disagree.”

If the employers were paying them unfairly, why would anyone cross the picket lines? Why would a worker stop anyone else from taking a job that he or she feels isn’t paying THEM enough. Surely this is a matter of personal choice and if they don’t want to do it, someone else has the right to do it?

And what do you think ought to happen (given your optimal legislation) to people who cross picket lines. Are you saying they should be detained and imprisoned? For wanting to work? What if they have a family feed (quite often through a remittance to another country where social protections aren’t as advanced). Will you let their family starve for the sake of a payrise for another worker?

So, you support the idea of rebuilding the link between funding and the representative function… interesting, now how do you propose to do that without removing the voluntary consideration?

I don’t understand that sentence.

Perhaps a reasonable compromise would be a voucher system or something proportional to the number of votes the party received in the previous election.

workers have a right to protect their terms and conditions: people crossing picket lines is effectively theft because it is directly taking money out of the mouths of workers and their families who aren’t being paid….

This is an interesting sentence because on the one hand we have ‘workers’ picketing and on the other ‘people’ crossing picket lines… what are the latter doing after they cross the picket lines, filing their nails?

And by the way it isn’t theft at all.

Referencing the points:
1)* Taxpayers should not be compelled to contribute to the support of political parties with whose outlook and policies they strongly disagree
2)* Public funding could cause an existing party system – any existing party system – to ossify, with the existing parties handsomely supported out of the public purse
3)* The parties might abandon efforts to raise money at the grassroots…the power of party headquarters vis-à-vis the grassroots might be considerably increased
4)* Instead of representing the citizens vis-à-vis the state, the parties would be tempted to represent the state vis-à-vis the citizens; they would, in effect, have been ‘captured’ by the state. On the continent, there is talk of ‘cartel parties’, which use state funding and the state apparatus increasingly to further their own ends rather than those of the citizens they claim to represent.

By introducing a per-vote funding allocation (using the 40p/20p rule suggested by Phillips) complaint 1) is alleviated by the encouragement this provides to parties to campaign positively rather than negatively or tactically, while complaints 2)-4) above can be dealt with by distributing any monies decentrally to the level at which they were gained.

The important point is to distribute any money equally to losers and winners in order to reflect the choice of the voters and to manage the transition from Short Money without providing any unnecessary shocks thereby building confidence in the newly decentralised system.

If we take the H&H by-election as a case study for implementation current rules could be shown to be hugely inadequate by a low turnout. It has been previously discussed how the large number of speculative candidates could easily distract from the active progression of debate by splitting the pro-civil liberties constituency and disrupting any focus for campaigning. As such this would be directly reflected in the funding by the inability of many campaign candidates to recoup the amout spent during the election.

Currently the barrier for losing the £500 deposit is 5% of votes, so the prospect of 26 candidates amounts to a money-spinning exercise for somone! So, even with a simple 40p/vote funding guarantee differential turnout becomes an irrelevance against total votes gained.

Unfortunately I think the critics of popular funding have allowed their assumptions of centralised control to run away with themselves.

Furthermore the complaint that parliamentary expenses are used to support local campaigning efforts is entirely limited to the elected incumbent, so I wonder what thought has been given to the state of local parties where they exist in opposition – especially where in a closely fought election the losers are then forced back out into the wilderness, despite the legitimacy gained from the votes recieved – should these count for nothing?

a new internationalism to fight capitalist globalisation

The people of the world should unite against trading with each other?

to: David Semple and ac256

I really don’t think it matters what your personal opinions of property rights, intellectual or otherwise, are. Recently, to pick a couple of examples, this collective blog has gone after Nadine Dorries and how she conducts her online business and Andrew Gilligan’s journalistic integrity.
The only way liberal conspiracy can acquire and maintain a reputation as a serious force is not to indulge in hypocritical bending of the rules. If you want to campaign for your rights online go join a group like ORG

Any chance of a ruling on where i broke the terms?

Do you ever post anything intelligent ac256? If you’re just going to be sarcastic all the time, there’s no need to bother posting to be honest. The rules policy is clear.

I’m changing the image anyways…

Thanks for your time, thomas. In reference to points two and three, surely the more money available from public funding, the less need there is to appeal to grassroots.

I did think the 40p/20p seemed reasonable apart from Phillips’ suggestion that parties with less than two elected representatives to Parliament, the Scottish Parliament, the National Assembly for Wales, or the European Parliament, would not be eligible for the money.

I don’t know if this is a hangover from Short Money (from 2007 £13,356 for every seat won at the last election plus £26.67 for every 200 votes gained by the party), which parties are entitled to only if they have two or more elected representatives, or one seat and more than 150,000 votes, or what the reasoning is; on the face of it seems rather unfair that Independent Kidderminster Hospital and Health Concern, for example, which got its candidate (Richard Taylor) into Parliament with 18,739 votes, would have not been given £7,495 it might otherwise have enjoyed from the 40p per vote, had the rule been in place for 2005, every year until the next general election, or indeed the £15,854 they would otherwise be entitled to now.

My opinion is that a democratic Labour Party requires freedom from the Unions, and that democratic Unions (i.e., that represent all of their members politically if we wish Unions to have a political role) require freedom from the Labour Party – or at least to treat all parties equitably.

But I’m not getting into a long argument today.

Matt

Sunny

nope

I think it would be a valuable back-up to the right to a trade union – given that one unionised section of a workforce could then picket to prevent bosses blocking unionisation of colleagues under the employ of contractors. (think nurses supporting hospital cleaners for example)

Mr Semple

I didn’t say your article appeared radical David, I implied that it appeared petty and self righteous. (that being the mentality the left could do without)

and your response to me wreaks of “its not fair because i don’t get my way”

After all, how else can some one interpret your labelling the public (in this case membership) a ‘formless, disorganised, mass’?

How else can some one interpret your argument that giving members a vote on their leadership ‘as undemocratic as it gets’?

and then finally your attack on state funded parties after claiming in the previous sentance that inbalances in spending power were undemocratic.

As one of those people who works ten hours a day, five days a week (and sometimes more with no overtime pay), I can only conclude your weak argument and obvious hypocricy is born from the fact this is just another “please think I’m clever because I’m blindly negative” merchant.

Trade Unionism is Democracy, until the Trade Unionism movement organised and produced viable political candidacies, political power in this country was held by the tiny minority that had the real wealth.

Nowadays, because of that organisation, people like m’Lord Ashcroft still have huge political weight due to that wealth, but it is now balanced in some part by the collectivised wealth of the working classes.

As for Trade Union excesses, the tyranny of the majority is just as bad as the tyranny of the few but you only have to look to the recent example of Argentina. Where the liquid hard currency was rushed out of the country overnight and the resultant depression used as a hammer against the poor to see why Trade Unionism is needed as a balance against the tyranny of the few.

Trade Unionism gives the majority of people, the lowest earners, a full voice in the political debate. Without the Trade Unions, the tiny minority that is the rich have a democratic weight far in excess of their numbers.

ukliberty, exactly.

The criticisms need addressing, and all sides should be treated equally. I recall somewhere a quote about taxation and representation (maybe someone cares to refresh my memery) which draws the direct link between the two.

With a per vote funding mechanism voters will be fully conscious that they are providing the minimum donation (ie hypothecated taxation) to that cause or collection of causes represented by that individual or party and therefore all decisions can be better respected.

Political funding simply requires the extension of this principle so that it can be applied consistently.

Where the relationship between trade unions and the Labour party fall into difficulty is how to reflect and measure the democratic legitimacy on both sides without negating the other. My feeling is that this can easily be rectified by official decoupling of the link as part of future reform of the House of Lords, so that a council of TUC leaders can express their mandated voices in that place without taking overtly partisan sides.

“Trade Unionism is Democracy, until the Trade Unionism movement organised and produced viable political candidacies, political power in this country was held by the tiny minority that had the real wealth.”

I agree that trade unionism played a part in the development of modern democracy, but I fail to see how, other than thanking them in history books, it’s relevant today.

“Trade Unionism gives the majority of people, the lowest earners, a full voice in the political debate.”

I don’t quite follow this point. The poorest people in our country are those a) without a job, or b) with a very low paid one, generally economic immigrant doing jobs around or under the minimum wage. Neither of those are unionised, for reasonably obvious reasons. The current unions “benefit”, if that’s the right word, a rather narrow strata of certain jobs and incomes. To say trade unions directly and widely benefit “the lowest earners” seems rather misleading.

Trade Unionism is Democracy….

I wish people wouldn’t engage in such hyperbole, it doesn’t do us any favours.

I’ll go along with “Trade Unions helped our democracy” (I wouldn’t know either way) – they aren’t equivalent to, or the backbone of, democracy.

@ Margin 4 Error

I wasn’t claiming that my article was radical; I was mentioning some of the policies of Labour pre-1997, in their attempt to seem like a real full-on alternative to the Tories, as they finally mobilised years of discontent to win a huge majority. They tried to seem radical – and my point was that in order to create the socially just Britain we all want to see, it is necessary to go beyond talking a good show and actually pass some radical laws. All the things you mentioned are so much window dressing when compared with the measures I outlined in my first reply on this thread.

And your responses to me reek (for that is the word I think you’re looking for) of baiting – but as I’m so much better than you I’m not going to rise to it.

On the substantive issues which you try to use to paint me as throwing a tantrum because the party doesn’t vote my way, I think you’ll find that there are socialists who have been debating the issue of what should and should not constitute a member of a political party for over a hundred years. This isn’t a new line of argument in response to some tactical defeats within the Labour Party. It might also surprise you to know that I’m 100% against the trade union block vote at Labour Conference and in elections because frankly it’s harmful to the broader unity of the working class.

I’m in favour of every member having a say – I think it would be infinitely more accountable and therefore more democratic if the definition of membership was considerably narrowed from ‘anyone who pays money’ to those who are consistently active within the organs of the Party and voting for policy and leaders was done via a delegate-based conference. If you think my argument is biased because this would favour candidates I like, then I wonder do you also think that the Labour leadership chose OMOV because they knew it would produce candidates they like – especially with the expenditure disparities?

Actually I don’t wonder that because your parting shots about my ‘hypocrisy’ and ‘weak argument’ really just dismiss any such consideration because you evidently can’t find the braincells to work up a proper critique, when you have to resort to name calling. Incidentally, a two word piece of advice – spell check.

David

Ah – I misunderstood. Your first paragraph being the case I should point out that didn’t intend to argue that the labour leadership was radical either – just that completely ignoring their pro-union efforts undermined your article completely. I also question your “they tried to seem radical” opinion. Surely the entire basis of new labour was to ensure labour was seen as moderate in all things?

—

As for the rest of your response – you seem to have an internal conflict to overcome.

to show superiority by rising above something means finding an inner strength and confidence that means you care little for how you are percieved. Of course declaring you won’t rise to something because you are better than me – is in itself evidence that you are not superior enough to rise above.

This internal conflict is just as evident when you ignore the large part of my critique that there is inconsistency in disliking both state funded parties and the unequal power within democacy of those with differing wealth, and the idiocy of claiming that people having votes is as undemocratic as it gets. (surely not having votes is, all else being equal, somewhat less democratic).

you ignore those points and attack my braincells – showing you in fact value winning approval and respect of strangers, and undermining the regard held for those you dislike, while sadly aspiring tand failing o be the standard of man who can simply rise above.

and of course you resort to the lowest defence of your self esteem available on blogs. You criticise spelling. (as though those who don’t spell well are inherrantly inferior to those who can spell check)

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btw

you’ll note now that I have said nothing of rising above. I enjoy putting people in their place and don’t mind who knows it. The fun of politics is that while civil debate can lead to improved understanding, a good argument can raise the spirits.