Modernisation, Indeed

Oh, for pity's sake, get out of the Eighties. People do not now have fits of the vapours at the mention of a trade union. As much as anything else, a trade union is a body of people living, working and paying taxes in this country, who do not avoid the last by declaring another state to be their natural home.

Fully 14 Labour candidates have come from trade union employment. Three and a half times that number, 63, are the Tory candidates who are bankers. Who has done more damage more recently? And if public money really is being passed through the Union Modernisation Fund to the Labour Party (I am not convinced - that whole story has the feel of having been concocted by people perfectly, tribally ignorant of union and Labour financial arrangements), then that pales into the merest of insignificance compared to the funding of the Conservative Party by the bailed-out, taxpayer-dependent City.

No one has bailed out Ashok Kumar's Teesside constituents in what would be recognised as a marginal seat, since it was Tory until 1997, if it were in the gin and jag belt, which returned almost only Tories last time without changing the Government, that is inhabited by the people whom those constituents bailed out by paying the full whack of tax that they rightly had no option but to pay. Who do the Tories' paymasters and candidate factories think will bail them out next time?

When Margaret Thatcher broke the closed shop, made it possible to opt out of the political levy (as one fifth of Unite members do), and drove trade unionism out of the private sector by destroying that sector's manufacturing base, then she removed the leavening influence of millions of working-class Tories from the selection of the Labour candidates for the safe Labour seats in which they lived. Think on that.