The labour union link has been broke for some time now workers need a political voice

T New labour had it in their mind to end the trade union link with the party and they almost succeeded in doing so. After the scandal in Falkirk questions have come up again from some within labour if they should sever the link for good. Owen Jones in his Colum today in the independent writes one of his best articles in sometime. Yet still hasn’t been able to draw the conclusions that labour is dead to working people and has been for a very long time. Owen is a worshiper of the accomplished fact and can’t see something is happening or has happened until it has showed itself to be so. So this current dispute between labour and unite must be playing very much on young Owens’s feelings of the labour party he always told us he’d remain in the labour party until the union link is no more so could this be a turning point for Owen ? “At the weekend, key Labor figures briefed favored Guardian journalists about a proposed final break with the trade unions, since disavowed by Ed Miliband. We cannot be sure who they are. What we do know is that there is a hardened Blairite axis within the Shadow Cabinet, led by former David Miliband campaign managers Jim Murphy and Douglas Alexander, and including Caroline Flint and Ivan Lewis. To give an illustration of their politics, the four privately demanded that Labour should support the Tories’ Welfare Uprating Bill earlier this year, which inflicted real-terms cuts on in-work and out-of-work benefits. None of them ever reconciled themselves to Ed Miliband as leader; whenever he has faced political trouble, Alexander and Murphy’s operations have spun into overdrive. Their expectations of what Ed Miliband must do constantly shift and can never be satisfied. Now that David Miliband has crossed the Atlantic, Murphy is positioning himself as holder of the Blairite flame, plotting to take the leadership should Ed Miliband ever fall. Murphy’s approach to politics was honed from his days in Labour Students, in practice long a recruiting ground for the sort of desperate political careerist who practises party conference speeches in front of bathroom mirrors from the age of six. It is a murky world where positions of power are decided in bars and through private, secretive conversations. When these student hacks evolve into senior politicians, they debate who should be the candidate in what constituency over Islington dinner parties. When Tony Blair attempted to dilute Labour’s reliance on union funds, it ended in the cash-for-honours scandal and a sitting prime minister being questioned by police in Downing Street. Before Labour’s 1997 election victory, the key Blairite ally Stephen Byers floated severing the union link: he ended his political career offering himself as a “taxi for hire” to corporate lobbyists. These union-bashers are completely beholden to private interests, and they want Labour to be, too. Owen Finnish’s by saying The tragedy is that unions are getting precious little from the Labour Party. The irony of David Cameron’s hysterical claims that Miliband is in the pocket of Unite’s Len McCluskey is that it comes just as Labour’s leaders have moved even further from offering a genuine alternative to Tory policies. Even after 13 years of a Labour government, Britain was left with one of the worst records on workers’ rights in the Western world. It was still one of the unequal developed nations, where workers’ wages were falling even before Lehman Brothers crashed, and where a dogmatic attachment to free-market economics ended in a catastrophic financial crash. Public spending was the great break from Thatcherism, and is now being decimated. If unions did not try to get candidates selected in the party they founded who want to stand up for working people, they might as well pack up and become footnotes in history books. It is a sad truth that there are those in the highest echelons of the Labour Party who want to extinguish what limited political voice working people still have. They would wreck a party they owe everything to for their own crude personal ambitions. They must not win.” So Owen there is an alternative and TUSC is building one. We hope to stand a record amount of anti cuts candidates at the next local elections. Those good well meaning and all opposed to the cuts in labour should be considering their membership this morning. Do consider TUSC and help us build an political voice again for workers in this country. Do check out more about TUSC at www.tusc.org.uk