Labour can’t shake off the unions’ grip

THE Labour Party’s high command, metropolitan Europhile liberals, wish they did not have to rely on their millions of working-class supporters.

As Gordon Brown showed in his unfortunate recorded encounter with Rochdale’s Gillian Duffy, the party’s elite secretly regard such people as ‘bigots’, especially because of their views on mass immigration and the European Union. But without these voters, Labour has no chance of forming a government.

The same problem emerges in a different guise when the trade unions engage in strike action.

This is a grave nuisance to Sir Keir Starmer, whose background is among London lawyers, not among miners or railwaymen. But he needs union money to keep his party going, and union manpower to get out the vote at election time.

So it is no great surprise to learn that Sir Keir trod very carefully on the rail strike issue at a recent meeting of

Labour’s National Executive. He is plainly more sympathetic to the railway unions than he will ever admit in public.

Those Shadow Cabinet members who have expressed even mild public support for the rail militants have been slapped down, or at least this is what we have been told. Who can say how serious this really was?

This ambiguity is all very understandable. Sir Keir is in the business of winning votes and raising funds, and you do not achieve such aims by deliberately annoying people. But exactly the same pressures will operate if he wins office.

And, while Labour has become expert in ignoring its largely powerless voters on the migration and EU issues, and still gets away with it most of the time, the unions have a far tighter hold.

Those tempted to lend their votes to Labour in a future election should grasp that the party is still very much in hock to union power and likely to remain so.