Alan Johnson’s comments today to The Times that Labour should consider breaking Labour’s trade-union link suffered a quick backlash today.

Tom Watson MP said on Labour Uncut

But that’s not really what people like Alan are saying. When they say “one member one vote” they really mean “one Labour party member one vote”. They want to abolish the system that elected Tony Blair back in 1994 when Alan was a trade union general secretary.

And they want to abolish the trade union section all together. This would remove hundreds of thousands of people from participating in the election of a Labour leader. Many would think that a regressive and illogical position to take, but there you go.
…
If we want the simplest, fairest and widest possible ballot to elect a leader we should abolish the electoral college all together and let the votes in all sections of the party have equal weight. Had we done this in May and everyone voted the same way, Ed Miliband would have got the job and won the contest by a country mile. He’d have won by 28, 299 votes.

Hackney Councillor Luke Akehurst, on Labour’s NEC, was similarly dismissive:

Apparently it would be more democratic to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of political levy paying union members and deny them a vote in Labour leadership contests, opine the various ex-Ministers quoted.

One even says that the unions are “increasingly an irrelevant structure in British society anyway”. I find this deeply distasteful. Actually I find it offensive. There are echoes of some of the bitter anti-union talk that was doing the rounds at Annual Conference, which on probing turned out to be rooted in a contempt not just for the union role in the Party but for their industrial role defending workers against employers.

Former Labour MP and minister Tony McNulty took to Twitter and said:

We are consolidating on 40%+ in the polls, the new Shadow Cabinet is starting to find it’s feet, the fightback is on – so let’s have a row…

…and start fighting each other!!!! Is that really a good idea and the best we can offer the country?? Labour – unite and fight back!!!

We’re still waiting for a reaction from the unions.