The Labour party is not a political party in the same sense as are the pluralist democratic parties in the UK and other European countries. It has highly formalized sectionalised structures each with an agenda and power hierarchies to which other party members have no access as party members. The most important of these separate structures is the trades unions and their power elite and agenda. This has formal and important ties, too, into an international trade union socialist movement that in no way responds to the interests and concerns of the UK electorate and UK interests.
Repeated attempts to recast the Labour party into a centre left party representing the social concerns, economic beliefs and limited state interventionism in their support views, of other centre left parties in advanced capitalist societies have been wrecked on the rock of the organised trade union interest.
Constituency Labour Parties, the mass party individual membership, are extremely vulnerable to affiliated groupings, such as co-operative movement and union memberships acting together against any deviation from the line adopted by the Executive, unions and their various sidekicks.
Any access to policy-making, or capacity to command answerability to the mass party by the Labour Executive, has now been completely closed down; indeed this week’s non-election, widely attributed to the Leader taking fright at the adverse opinion polls in marginal seats, was more the result of a threatened election being used to discipline the last Labour party Conference into abject acceptance of all and any policies from the leadership, “we are looking down the barrel of a general election... in the spirit of Party unity you must accept this policy and not push for divisive debate and votes..”, rather than any intention ever of throwing away three further years of power seized undemocratically from the last elected government.
The mass electorate that votes for the centre left both from interest, and from political and moral conviction, has no home but a party tightly, hierarchically organised around an, often non UK driven, agenda to which it has, most determinedly, no access. And the trade unions are not peopled now by productive workers in industry and mining and agriculture; that is the emotional image but the reality is that they are made up of those aparatchicks and members of the Labour nomenklatura who have their hands in your pay packet with their tax confiscations, and their authority derived from undemocratic, unscrutinised rules over your life.
The reciprocal cross-funding from trades unions to the Labour Executive elite, reciprocated by government policy and tax-funded financial resources to the union agenda is a closed vicious circle. It is also a reproach to any notion that the UK is a democratic country.
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"The reciprocal cross-funding from trades unions to the Labour Executive elite, reciprocated by government policy and tax-funded financial resources to the union agenda is a closed vicious circle."
Sure. And there was reciprocal cross-funding from Berlusconi-owned Mediaset and Forza Italia, reciprocated by government policy and tax-funded financial resources to Mediaset, in a closed vicious circle.
And from the Italian Co-operative movement to the centre-left parties, and from oil-companies to GWBush, etcetera, also lavishly reciprocated.
This is the somewhat general problem of financing democracy in an age in which the people's will is expressed by more than just writing a name on a shard (ostraka) and the government churns half of GDP.
All political parties have rewards from funding governing elites but Labour is different in that voting for Labour doesn't mean what the manifesto offers; voting for Labour gets what the principle Labour subgroups want and their agenda isn't in the public arena at all, never mind in the manifesto.
If I vote Republican I get the Republican programme and Bush; if I
vote for Labour I don't get the Labour manifesto and Blair, I get the union and other side factions delivering quite another Leader and programme and goodness knows what perpetuation in authority of the party's union based power and reward system.
No pluralist democratic party should have an inaccessible to the mass party membership dominant faction that is then confirmed in dominance by government- derived patronage and tax-funded furtherance of its programme which has not been put to the general electorate.
The rest is true C, the problems are as you say, but Labour is just like the socialist systems of eastern Europe and their pseudo democratic parties were, and infinitely worse because it denies and disrupts all attempts to get even as far as ordinary parties like the Conservatives or Liberals or Forza Italia, or the Republican party have.
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