Missiles and Milliband, Money and Power

What a shame! After what had seemed a kind of victory in the Commons, the GMB funding affair and then the exoneration of Unite make this an awful weekend for Ed Milliband. Of course the victory in the Commons was a fumbling, accidental sort of victory. Ed did not come back to the House to fight a principled battle against military intervention in Syria, but to hide behind a UN inspection result that he knew could only pose as many questions as it answered. He and Cameron had both read the mood of Parliament wrong: I don't think either of them had much of an eye for "the mood of the country", if that elusive quantity can ever be satisfactorily determined. In the end, Ed's speech was terrible, almost pathetic, and I suspect he was as amazed as Cameron at the result of the vote. Nevertheless, one was prepared to give him a cheer.

The GMB and Unite debacle - they belong together - is entirely different. An own goal if ever there was one. Having been goaded by Cameron, Ed proceeded to chew off his own foot. New Labour was always unhappy about Labour's links with the unions, and Ed has shown himself to be dyed-in-the-wool New Labour. The fight he picked with Unite was crass and cowardly, egged on by the taunting Flashman figure across the dispatch box. GMB's withdrawal of funding was the hens coming home to roost, and now the whole affair turns out to have been unnecessary and deeply damaging, both to Milliband and to Labour.

The relationship with the unions has long been fraught. Those of us whose actual memories go back to the 50s and 60s and beyond are fully aware that Britain's industrial relations back then were very much of the two-cats-in-a-bag variety, although the two sides sometimes did manage to collaborate, at the price of a lot of effort on both their parts when it happened. But the easy pickings for capital were always in the City, which, then as now, fed off the economy like a flock of bloated crows - no, unfair to crows, a fine and noble species: like an immense parasitic worm. There was no money for investment, and so the push for productivity was always fatally handicapped. After all, why should we bother with these embarrassing, fractious industrial dinosaurs when we could all make it hand over fist at the great casino on the Thames - or, failing that, clean each others' windows? Labour never managed, after the '51 defeat, to articulate the fundamental arguments. It always found itself playing catch-up, on criteria decided by the other side. And, of course, there is and always was another side. We have never been all in it together, despite the euphoria that brought Attlee to power. Great achievements by that government, but whittled away from within, almost from the outset. Perhaps Britain is fundamentally too deferential, too eager to tug at its cap. Another fatal legacy of Empire.

Now, if Labour loses the money of the unions, how will we ever have a meaningful opposition to the party of wealth? Will we ever grasp the nettle of state funding? A bigger question, though is: will we ever shake ourselves free from the lure of that glittering fun palace squatting between Wapping and Westminster? Will we ever see through the divisive mongering of hate and resentment that passes for politics in this country? Will we ever feel free to grasp the true benefits of new technology, which so far has enriched a few, impoverished many, and made hedonistic credit-slaves of the majority?