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The Right’s Demise
In 1986, upwards of 2.5 million conference votes could regularly be delivered to the party’s right while the soft left — which by this time had long since broken with the Bennites — was also well represented by the T&G’s 1.3 million votes and National Union of Public Employees (NUPE)’s 600,000 votes. The Left, however, was marginalized. Indeed, in 1988 the unions delivered 99 percent of their votes, over 5.5 million in total, to Neil Kinnock following a leadership challenge by Tony Benn.
By comparison, today Usdaw and Community are the only Labour affiliates that could be described as on the party’s right. Meanwhile, Aslef, BFAWU, CWU, FBU, TSSA, and Unite are all on the Left, albeit with degrees of variance.
In part this comes down to changes in the industrial and political landscapes. Since 1979, trade union membership has more than halved and moderate unions have been forced to amalgamate, diluting their unique character and culture. Likewise, the end of the Cold War significantly weakened anti-communist trade unionism.
Throughout the postwar period, the Communist Party of Great Britain played a key role in British unions. Its conflicts with broad left and moderate groupings had an impact across the movement. With the fall of the Berlin Wall, such sharp political divisions have gradually diminished. So, too, has the folk memory of the general strike, increasingly replaced by a more strident and openly socialist approach to trade unionism.
But perhaps the most important factor in undermining the trade union right was the party management and industrial policies pursued by Tony Blair. Under Blair’s leadership a new right was born and actively sought to limit its association with old Labour, not least the trade union movement. It produced a generation of sharp-suited special advisors for whom trading favors with union officers was an alien concept. Labour was the party of “Cool Britannia” and trade unions were decidedly off-brand.
The suspicion was mutual. Blair’s decision to replace Clause IV caused concern among activists, as did his ambiguous suggestion that New Labour would “be respectful of the unions’ part in our past (but) have relations with them that are relevant for today.” Indeed, the modernizers went as far as “proposing that conference might be reformed to exclude trade unions altogether.”