We'll need the trade unions to win in 2012 - guest blog by Louise Haigh, London Young Labour TULO officer

The row that erupted yesterday over Labour’s links with the unions following the Total Politics report of Oona King’s shindig at Canary Wharf is more revealing than just the comments of a person at a party.

Total Politics reported Oona supporters complaining about the selection system and timetable for choosing Labour’s candidate for mayor, including this: 

"The problem with the trade-union system is that it is rather outdated," replied one person on Oona's team. He continued: "Unions don't really do anything except give money... I shouldn't say that."

Oona King’s campaign team were in damage-limitation mode all day but Total Politics stood by its story. The reporter, Jess Freeman posted again:

“To just confirm my journalistic integrity and that of Total Politics, I will confront any criticisms right now. I have not misquoted a team member, I did not mishear and nor am I blatantly lying. And, to clarify, to assume that I can forget two brief lines about trade unions is a little bit rich. In fact, I held sustained conversations about unions all night.”

It is not at all a surprise that such a comment could be made by someone to a reporter at an Oona King party. It is consistent with the line of the campaign from the outset.

There is an old phrase the fish rots from the head down. In the case of the Oona King campaign, the rot started very early on, with the chair of the campaign Jim Fitzpatrick MP seriously proposing to remove the trade unions from the electoral college altogether, in a letter to the general secretary leaked to Labourlist.

The views reportedly expressed at Oona’s party flow naturally from that thinking.

Trade union members pay their subs to the Labour party and make it viable. That alone entitles them to a say. In a time of opposition, when most of the big private money will flow to the party of government, that is even more vital.

But more than that they are our link to millions of people giving us an invaluable connection to issues in the workplace and on those things that affect peoples’ lives directly, such as childcare or pensions. Trade union members have a democratic right to participate in this selection, just as in the leadership. We need to defend the union link, not concede to Tory arguments about it.

In London the trade union agenda directly contributed to policies under Ken as mayor like the living wage, the importance of protecting the pension rights of transport workers and the recognition of risks faced by construction workers.

The value of the unions’ contribution is equally in the campaigns that Ken Livingstone has taken up in this selection. His economic policy statement develops a number of points flowing from the work of the unions, such as the need to deepen the promotion of the living wage. Alongside the Unite union he recently met with Billingsgate fish porters whose licenses are under threat; and his campaign to promote and protect London’s valued pubs was launched with the GMB union.

It also meant that, unlike Oona King, when asked about the threat of Royal Mail privatisation he gave an unequivocal answer against this threat - rejecting rather than accepting the underlying arguments for privatisation.

It’s for these reasons that Ken is building up such big support.

Of the nine affiliated trade unions in London, seven are now recommending Ken Livingstone to their members. This is even more clearly the case when one looks at the relative weight of the trade union affiliates backing Ken: Unite has 120,000 affiliated members in London; Unison 63,000; the CWU 54,842; GMB London 47,142;  GMB Southern 21,000; UCATT 5,000; and TSSA 4,750.

Oona King will be recommended to the members of USDAW and Community with 25,021 affiliated members and 1,739 respectively. 

Oona King’s campaign has regularly briefed on issues of process in the selection.  Oona King’s problem is not the selection system but the significant support for Ken Livingstone in the London Labour party.

The differences on the unions are indicative of the choices more broadly in this campaign – between one that is seeking to unite the London labour movement as a whole in order to maximise the opposition to the cuts and higher fares of Boris Johnson’s administration and the ConDem government, and the other that would weaken our campaign between now and 2012 by conceding territory to the Tories, on Royal Mail privatisation, means testing and cuts.

We need the London trade unions if we are going to win in 2012 and remove Boris Johnson.

Louise tweets at @LouHaigh