THE BATTLE OF FALKIRK
At the 2013 Progress conference there was much complaint that Progress candidates had not been selected in certain constituencies, and accusations that the trade unions had been too successful. The closing session of the conference saw the battle between Progress and the unions suddenly burst into the open.
The session featured a panel discussion with Peter Mandelson, Times columnist and Blair loyalist David Aaronovitch and Blairite former MP Oona King, and they were asked what could unite Progress and the trade union Unite. It appeared that nothing at all could achieve this.
Aaronovitch spoke first, laying into the new Unite general secretary Len McCluskey with a vehemence and ferocity that seemed to startle his audience. He attacked the validity of McCluskey’s election, which McCluskey won by 2–1, because there was a poor turnout, though this is probably at least partly explained by the fact that most people saw the election as a foregone conclusion. The attack echoed, in its arguments and its ferocity, the bitter attacks made on unions by Conservative ministers such as Lord (Norman) Tebbit over the years.
Then Mandelson took up the story, as though on cue, and said that McCluskey had been responsible for manipulating the selection battle for a new Labour candidate for Falkirk. That was the first most of the audience had heard of the battle, which was quickly to become headline news. Aaronovitch came back at once and said, ‘I think all the media here have their headline for tomorrow.’ Indeed they did. They probably arrived expecting it.
It was a carefully staged media event, and successfully laid the groundwork for the Progress narrative about the selection of a Labour parliamentary candidate for Falkirk: that the unions manipulated the selection and tried to steal the candidature. The real story is rather different, and shines at least as much light on the Progress modus operandi as those of the trade unions.
The Falkirk selection issue was one of the most divisive affecting Labour in 2013. The sitting MP Eric Joyce was deselected by Labour after being involved in a drunken brawl in a House of Commons bar. This was followed by another incident at Edinburgh Airport, where he was accused of abusive and threatening behaviour over a mobile phone and racist comments after being arrested by police. He admitted a breach-of-the-peace charge at Edinburgh Sheriff Court in March 2014, was fined £1,500 and ordered to pay compensation. He pleaded not guilty to two charges relating to obstruction and making offensive remarks, and his plea was accepted without trial.
For the media, what followed after his deselection was a gift, but it was seriously misrepresented. The media and Progress saw it as an opportunity to attack trade-union power in general, and Unite in particular, over the manipulation of a Labour candidate selection in a Scottish town.
In fact it was a battle for the heart and soul of Labour between the unions on the one hand and Progress and the Blairite modernising wing of the party on the other. What was little more than the normal rivalry of various groups fighting to get their candidate selected as an MP was turned into a national battle for the future of the party.
That it was really a battle of ideas was publicly confirmed by the Blairite former cabinet minister John Reid, who told the BBC, ‘It is at heart an ideological battle, a political battle between those who want to take Labour back to the seventies and eighties, as Len McCluskey does, where we represented the sectional voice, the weak echo of every industrial demand of the trade unions, and those like Ed Miliband, who want to see us move increasingly towards an open party which reaches across class, across geography, across gender in which ordinary trade unionists can play their part, along with many others.’19
Of course every commander draws battle lines where he would like them to be, not where they necessarily are. Reid’s description of the two sides is a partisan one, and his assumption that Ed Miliband is a fully paid-up Blairite moderniser is more what he hopes than what he believes. But the statement is useful as confirmation that Progress and the Blairites are at least as much engaged in the battle as the unions.
The scandal – such as it was – seems to have arisen out of two separate incidents. One involved the union Unite, and the other the local chairman of the Labour constituency party, Stevie Deans, who is also a Unite convener at Grangemouth Oil Refinery. Stevie Deans took two decisions. As chairman of the local party he decided to recruit some of his relations as members, particularly the Kane family. This is hardly a criminal offence, as the police would later realise. The problem arose because some of the family members hadn’t realised they had been signed up.
Also, Unite decided to copy a very successful campaign run by the shop workers’ union USDAW to recruit new Labour members free of charge for a year so long as they also signed a direct debit to start paying in a year’s time. The problem was that they didn’t get them to sign direct-debit mandates, and, when they realised their mistake after they submitted the new members to Labour HQ, they hurriedly went round and got people to sign the mandates. These arrived at Labour HQ in a big plastic bag; but some of the direct debits were signed by partners.
All this got Labour HQ worried – particularly as the leading candidate for the constituency was Kari Murphy, office manager for Tom Watson MP, Labour’s campaign director for the general election, a prominent member of Unite and a close friend of Len McCluskey, the union’s general secretary.
So a very experienced constitutional officer, Eric Wilson, based in the north of England, investigated the state of affairs and sent a memorandum to HQ.
At the same time – though this was not reported until well after the event by Rajeev Syal of the Guardian – Progress was doing the same thing, or rather worse. As Syal reported,20 Gregor Poynton, who wanted to challenge Unite from the right, paid the membership fees of eleven new members.
‘Gregor Poynton told the Guardian that he paid for the new recruits with a single cheque of £137 in July last year [2012] – a move which raised concerns with Labour officials. Two new members say their joining fees were paid for by Poynton or members of his family in the expectation they would vote for him at a future selection meeting.’
Poynton, like Kari Murphy, is a well-connected young Labour Party member. He is a former party election-strategy manager and Scottish Labour Party organiser who is married to the MP and shadow Defence Minister Gemma Doyle. He is from Falkirk and his parents still live in the town. Gemma Doyle is connected to Jim Murphy, who was later moved by Ed Miliband from the role of shadow Defence Secretary, and is also on the Blairite wing of the party.
The Guardian reported:
One of those recruited last July, who asked to remain anonymous, joined because of a long-standing friendship with the Poynton family. ‘I wanted to help them and ensure the town is represented by someone local,’ the source said.
The source said the joining fees were paid by Poynton or a member of his family from July 2012 until sometime in 2013.
Now all of this, we understand, was conveyed to Labour HQ with a recommendation that it should be sorted out locally by long-serving official Eric Wilson.
But Labour HQ rejected this and decided to set up a high-level investigation under Jane Shaw, an experienced compliance officer. This move appeared to be backed by Iain McNicol, the party’s general secretary. But more importantly, figures close to Ed Miliband wanted firm action. They are said to have included Torsten Bell and Bob Roberts, the former Mirror journalist who is now the Labour Party’s executive director of communications.
So a separate report was prepared but, before it could be published, some of its contents were leaked to the Mail on Sunday, concentrating entirely on the role of the Unite union. Ed Miliband put the local party under special measures.
The party, not knowing whether the paper had the report, acted by calling in the police after a Tory MP, Henry Smith, had also reported them. Unite retaliated by bringing in its own lawyers, who interviewed all the families involved and produced their own twelve-page report, saying that there had been no fraud, only some mistakes, and Milib
and backed down over the charges against Unite. The police also found no evidence of fraud.
But it was not without cost. Campaign director Tom Watson, who had been implicated by the press in the scandal, resigned from the shadow cabinet. His office manager, Kari Murphy, withdrew as candidate and the party decided on an all-women shortlist and said none of the members recruited from the day Joyce was deselected could vote for a successor, reducing the constituency party to a rump of about 120 members.
General Secretary Iain McNicol was moved sideways. Never Miliband’s choice, this former GMB union official lost any major say in the general election campaign to Spencer Livermore, a former head of strategy to Gordon Brown, under the chairmanship of another Blairite, Douglas Alexander, as Labour Party chairman.
More significantly, and despite Miliband’s agreeing that Unite had not committed electoral fraud, the way was opened for a special conference to discuss whether to change the whole relationship between the unions and the party, reducing further the trade union link. And one leading official at a barbecue in Miliband’s private north London home in July called for Unite to be disaffiliated.
In context, the whole issue was blown up for other purposes. It was used as a catalyst to reform union-party relations and power and to allow reform of party funding. Miliband agreed to limit union contributions, which would inevitably lead to his committing himself to funding political parties from the taxpayer if he wins the 2015 general election.
One idea being studied by Labour is to end taxpayer funding for free election addresses – which costs £63 million for Westminster and European elections – and transfer the cash directly to the political parties. That way, Miliband can claim that in an age of austerity no extra taxpayer funding is being given to political parties.
But the Progress agenda in the whole affair was clear: further reforms along Blairite lines with the aim of separating the unions from major decision-making inside the Labour Party, as well as more Labour MPs from Progress and fewer from the unions. It’s the agenda that was laid down clearly by Peter Mandelson, carefully prompted by David Aaronovitch, on the last day of the 2013 Progress conference.
Miliband badly wants to avoid another Unite-versus-Progress bloodletting, Falkirk style. He almost got one, in Bootle on Merseyside, but it was averted by the local Labour Party. This one centred on the man who once, as Blair’s head of communications, trained candidates for selection battles, Matthew Doyle – once head of communications and broadcasting for the Labour Party and for five years, until 2012, political director at the Office of Tony Blair.
In 2014 he tried to get selected for the safe Labour seat of Bootle when veteran Labour MP Joe Benton announced he was standing down at the 2015 general election. Doyle entered a field that included Peter Dowd, Labour leader of Sefton Council and also Bootle born-and-bred Alex Flynn, Unite’s director of communications.
The stage was set for another bruising battle between Unite and Progress, but Bootle Labour Party tried to take matters into their own hands. By September 2014 Dowd was way ahead, with Flynn as his most likely challenger. Doyle failed to get a single nomination from a Labour ward. He was hoping for support from USDAW, the shop workers’ union, which ultimately mainly supported Dowd.
In desperation, he tried to enlist support from Angela Eagle, Labour MP for Wallasey and shadow Leader of the Commons. But she told him that he didn’t stand a chance and it wasn’t worth her trying to get him support. She says, ‘If you are not from Bootle, the fiercely independent constituency Labour Party is not even interested. He should have known this before he stood.’
Bootle Labour Party compiled a shortlist that included neither Doyle nor Flynn. A complaint was made to the National Executive Committee, which instructed Bootle Labour Party to include both Flynn and Doyle on the shortlist. But in the end the formidable local party machine made sure that by hook or by crook Peter Dowd, the favoured son, got the nomination. Alex Flynn came second while Matthew Doyle, despite his work for Progress in advising how their candidates could win seats, came nowhere – as Angela Eagle had earlier predicted.
The Blairites normally operate within the Labour Party under the camouflage of Progress. But Blair’s occasional public interventions are carefully timed.
BLAIR’S SPEAKING INCOME
Normally, of course, Blair speaks in public for money, not for political ends. Public speaking has earned him £9 million,21 as he charges up to £200,000 per lecture, mostly through the Washington Speakers Bureau, of which George W. Bush is also a client. He signed with the bureau in October 2007, four months after ceasing to be PM, taking a $600,000 signing bonus. He has also signed up with the All American Speakers Bureau, whose website gives his fee as $200,000 upwards.
Yet, for a man once considered an orator, he has turned into a stiflingly boring speaker, frequently appearing to do little more than read out his host’s PR handout, but sometimes producing a breathtakingly banal observation of his own. ‘When things are in the balance, when you cannot be sure, when others are uncertain or hesitate, when the very point is that the outcome is in doubt – that is when a leader steps forward,’ was the insight he shared with a Beijing audience in 2008. At a conference on Africa in 2013 he said that there was ‘something wonderful, vibrant and exciting’ about the continent’s culture and traditions; and, speaking of economic development, helpfully pointed out, ‘With electricity, given the technology we now have at our fingertips, everything is possible. Without it, progress will be depressingly slow. Likewise with roads and often ports.’ At Ateneo de Manila University in the Philippines he said that the main problems President Obama faces ‘are essentially global in nature’.22
The All American Speakers Bureau is one of several agencies that have also represented Blair, and they listed his minimum fee as $200,000 – twice the rate of Donald Trump.
However, the huge sums that he commands are something of a mystery, given the content of his private-sector lectures. ‘The reason I am in Dongguan now is because I was told that everything that was happening here was amazing,’ Blair said during a 2007 speech at a VIP banquet in China, for which his fee was in the region of $200,000. ‘Dongguan’s future is immeasurable.’ Actually, the future is always immeasurable, in Dongguan as everywhere else; the title of the speech was ‘From Greatness to Brilliance’. Such twaddle infuriated Chinese newspapers, which said Blair’s empty remarks showed he was interested only in ‘digging for gold’ and ‘money-sucking’. Deng Qingbo wrote in the China Youth Daily, ‘Why pay such a high price to hear the same thing? Is it worth the money? Do these thoughts multiply in value because they come from the mouth of a retired prime minister?’23
Dongguan is a city of 1.7 million permanent residents and 10 million migrant labourers, mostly living eight or more to a room in the workers’ dormitories that are attached to the city’s industrial estates. Typical wages range from £40 to £100 per month.
In 2010 Blair published his autobiography, A Journey. He took three years to write it and donated the £4.6 million advance and all royalties to a sports centre for injured soldiers. The donation was dubbed ‘blood money’ by some of Blair’s critics, who said he gave the sum to assuage his guilt for taking the UK to war against Iraq in 2003.
Even this autobiography appears to be aimed at the US market. ‘Tony Blair is an extremely popular figure in North America,’ said Sonny Mehta, his publisher. ‘His memoir is refreshing, both for its candour and vivid portrayal of political life.’24
But, from time to time, Tony Blair speaks about British politics to a British audience, and is not paid for doing so. Almost always it is because an opportunity has arisen to undermine Ed Miliband.
Notes
1 Tony Blair, A Journey (Arrow, 2011)
2 Ibid
3 The Guardian, 22 October 2013: http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/
oct/22/john-major-windfall-tax-energy
4 London Evening Standard, 27 September 2013: http://www.standard.co.uk
miliband-on-energy-price-freeze-8841475.html
5 Daily Mail, 27 September 2013: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-
2435751/Red-Eds-pledge-bring-socialism-homage-
Marxist-father-Ralph-Miliband-says-GEOFFREY-LEVY.html
6 http://www.mjrharris.co.uk/?s=azerbaijan
7 www.socialistunity.com, 14 March 2012: http://socialistunity.com/progress-
a-party-within-a-party/; www.progressonline.co.uk, 21 February 2012: http://www.progressonline.org.uk/2012/02/
21/response-to-the-recent-document-concerning-progress/; http://www.progressonline.org.uk/about-progress/
how-progress-is-funded/
8 www.leftfutures.org, 13 March 2011: http://www.leftfutures.org/2011/
03/welcome-to-the-blairite-party-within-a-party/
9 Tribune, 27 July 2012
10 www.politics.co.uk, 7 May 2012: http://www.politics.co.uk/news/
2012/05/07/comment-leave-us-alone-tony-blair
11 London Evening Standard, 22 January 2014: http://www.standard.co.uk/
comment/matthew-dancona-tony-blairs-instincts-
on-iraq-were-right--and-syria-proves-it-9077015.html
12 http://www.iraqinquiry.org.uk/
13 The Economist, 30 December 2014: http://www.economist.com/news/
britain/21637431-former-labour-leader-casts-
doubt-his-partys-chances-winning-next-election-dont-go
14 The Guardian, 31 December 2014: http://www.theguardian.com/
politics/2014/dec/31/tony-blair-denies-report-
saying-ed-miliband-cant-win-2015-election
15 Daily Telegraph, 13 January 2015. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/
politics/ed-miliband/11341667/Voters-must-decide-if-
Ed-Miliband-has-a-problem-says-Tony-Blair.html
Blair Inc--The Man Behind the Mask Page 37