OMOV among party members and members of affiliated organisations would make the most sense to me. The MPs get enough influence in narrowing the shortlist before it even gets put to the rank-and-file.

Unions should support MPs who support them in specific cases, not support parties who simply leech off them. The relationship between Labour and the unions is parasitic, not symbiotic.

I was also quite delighted that AJ was advocating that the vote of an MP should only be worth as much as that of the ordinary member or affiliated trade unionist (nudge nudge etc.). I only joined the party after the election (the first general election I was able to vote) and I’d have to seriously reconsider if I wanted to be a part of the party if they ditched the unions. Like you say, they’re one of the precious things stopping Labour from turning into a party of Stephen Byerses. That said, seeing as a ‘virtual party’ along the eviscerated US lines (stuff leaflets and vote) was also a goal of this bunch of hopeless idiots they may be happy to see the back of a good deal of the Labour membership. Though why on earth Labour would want to be like the Democrats is beyond me.

Would the Unions be better off supporting Andy Burnham or Carolyn Lucas?

I see that the truly loathesome Alan Johnson is reported to support one member one vote for any future leadership election. Now that is very interesting indeed because in 2007 he opposed anybody having a vote at all in the choice of leader.
By signing Gordon Brown’s nomination papers he was instrumental in helping to ensure that there was no election,

“For many individual members of the Labour Party, and not just those on the left, any set up that excluded trade unionists would be entirely unacceptable.”

Of course you might also argue that if the party had done the same with the Union link as it did with Clause 4, it might have been in a better place than it is now?

Absent some “Bad Godesburg” moment for the Labour party like that undergone by the SPD in Germany, Labour has always had a bit of an identity crisis between the social democrats and the socialists hasn’t it?

I’m not sure cleaving to the Unions and singing the Internationale wrapped in a red flag is going to result in electoral success tho!

@4: Do you mean Caroline Lucas, the Green Party MP? If so could you expand the question? Support in what way?

Just give membership cards to the levy payers (provided they are not members of other parties). I can’t see why they would object. After all a levy payer’s vote under the current arrangements counts for less than that of an ordinary member. The college arrangement has made very little sense since the scrapping of the block vote.

I always reckoned that the relationship between New Labour and the unions was like that between wife-batterer and battered wife. The unions ddint seem to get the fact that the the party despised them and only wanted them for their money. They just kept hoping that the party would change and saying that no-one else really understood the party.

It is only too obvious what Labour get from the unions. What the unions get is a mystery to me. Why don’t they leave or at least seriously threaten to do so?

I agree with James from Durham. Unions seem to get little from their continued support of the Labour Party apart from contempt. Of course that does not stop Britain’s preposterous press from monotonously droning about the party being “in hock” to the unions but those of us in the reality-based community just roll our eyes at such nonsense.

Of course you might also argue that if the party had done the same with the Union link as it did with Clause 4, it might have been in a better place than it is now?

Really? Perhaps you could explain how ditching the unions would have placed Labour in ‘a better place’.

The problem is, with the influence from ‘their’ party removed, won’t the unions take their money elsewhere?

A lot of unions have already unaffliated themselves from the Labour Party, but this could be a step too far, and the TUC could reasonably afford to fund either another party (the Greens?) or set up its own, as per Bob Crow’s attempts during the last set of Euro/General Elections.

11

Because the links to the union movment serve to put a lot of people off, generally those you would want to persuade to vote for you. It should have been done decades ago, as should public financing of parties based on the % of vote they receive.

The Unions could also then use the money they contribute to Labour for the good of their members, or to fund other projects their members approved of.

Good losers aren’t they these Blairites!

If these people get their way, the Labour Party will effectively cease to exist. It’s an idea infinitely more dangerous to Britain than the Tory spending cuts.

surely the reason for the editorial’s tone is that it’s written by a hardline blairite, Oliver Kamm…?

@13 Galen 10

Letting the Right set the agenda, surely? Labour should have stood up for the unions. The proper operation of the Left can only be through collectivism. We don’t have that many millionaires, do we?

At some point Labour are going to have to start facing up to the lies of the tory press instead of acting all embarassed in case they alienate themselves from some imagined middle-ground voter.

Aw, give over the lot of you, especially with these distasteful battered wife analogies setting – which one is it to be? The Labour Party or the unions? – as the poor battered wife.

Like all marriages there is a mutuality of common interest. In this case the “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” is foaming Tory-hating.

Give it a full year out of power and I’d bet you’ll be in each other’s arms, Labour as the Parliamentary wing of opposition to baby-eating, faces-of-the-poor-grinding and the unions as (part of) the extra-Parliamentary muscle. With a nice dash of self-righteous rage, fomented not of any genuine slights, but out of fury that the Tory Party still even exists, let alone is in Government.

Luckily for the Coalition, the only real fury will be generated from Muswell Hill dwellers over quintessentially middle class issues, like with student fees, or indeed tube redundancies (at £40k pa, they’re middle class if they like it or not).

Things like the minimum wage won’t provoke smashings-up at CCHQ or indeed even peaceful marches on Parliament Square. But I can see Malcolm and Cressida (or more likely the upper sixth-sons and daughters of Malcolm and Cressida) smashing up CCHQ or occupying Leadenhall Street over the failure of multi-national climate change conferences and the continued anti-Taliban campaign in Afghanistan.

So the news agenda will essentially be driven by whether Milipede minor endorses the Holloway Smug Latest-Causes Club or not. I predict much chat about “dithering Ed”, one way or the other. And in many ways, rightly – there’s a debate to be had as to whether the Labour Party is ready to embrace its Bad Godesberg and social democracy, rather than the latest passing fads of bobo metropolitans who’ve no principles other than pathologically hating those in blue rosettes even when they themselves were members of the baby-eaters’ coalition partners in May.

Gaw, it’ll be just like ye olden times of Kinnock, if not those of Foot. And whatever happened to those blokes, anyway?

Ok we will go if you give us back all the money we gave you over the last 13 years.

It must be a price worth paying……..?

Thought not!!

@18 yawn!!! Sorry mate did you say something? I wasn’t really paying attention.

17

Labour shouldn’t have to depend on the Unions to finance itself, anymore than other parties should have to rely on rich individuals. Financing parties centrally gets round the problem; sadly New Labour didn’t have the guts to introduce it.

Similarly the Tory press ought to have been tackled by ensuring that robber barons weren’t able to build up the kind of influence they have; again New Labour was too busy toadying to them.

Labour aren’t going to win by appealing only to the hard left, as was amply demonstrated in the 80′s. Re-inventing itself by becoming more collectivist, strengthening union links etc in an electoral cul-de-sac.

The alternative isn’t New Labour, or Newer Labour…but still less is it Old Labour.

Here’s an idea for party funding: every registered voter should pay £2 per year to a party of their choice, and the parties should have no other funding from any source.

The average party would get several million per year from such a scheme.* They’d pretty much all have more to spend than now, but how much more would reflect the numbers rather than the wealth of their supporters.

* There are 45.6 million voters in the UK. 48 parties fielded candidates at the last election, but only 37 did so in more than one constituency, and only 10 won any seats.