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'Trade unions have to deliver the change we want to see ourselves'

Ben Chacko speaks to CWU leader DAVE WARD about Brexit, Labour and the New Deal for Workers

CWU leader Dave Ward is unsurprised at the amplification of attacks on Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn this summer — and pleased that the party’s response has become more combative.

“I’m very pleased Jennie [Formby] came out as our general secretary and told Tom Watson he had stepped over the line” (when, knowing she was undergoing chemotherapy, he launched a public attack on her and demanded she release the party’s submissions to the Equality and Human Rights Commission over anti-semitism — information he had already been offered).

“The critics don’t go through proper channels but straight to the media. What that tells you is they aren’t genuine about bringing about a Labour government, they have another agenda.

“As we get nearer to a general election, Establishment people and the financial and state institutions are getting fearful of the reality of Jeremy Corbyn’s agenda and the manifesto we all put together and which we all have to deliver.

“That has revealed that within Labour there are people who would rather get Corbyn out than win that election. They want to take us back to Blair. But the common denominator for all these people is that they have no solutions to the problems people in Britain face.”

The Labour leadership, by contrast, has clearly looked hard at solutions. This week shadow chancellor John McDonnell unveiled a detailed approach to ending in-work poverty that involved a shake-up of the benefits system, raising the minimum wage, revoking the anti-union laws to strengthen unions’ hand when bargaining with employers and significant investment in community assets such as libraries and leisure centres. 

It was merely one in a long line of ambitious projects. Labour’s plans to nationalise the National Grid and reshape it to drive a green energy revolution, its regional investment banks aimed at rebalancing the economy and reducing its reliance on an out-of-control financial centre in the City of London, a revived and modernised public transport system based on publicly owned rail and bus services, an end to energy and water rip-offs by nationalising utilities — the party doesn’t lack detailed policies aimed at improving people’s lives and building a sustainable future. 

No other party can compete with that. The Tory leadership hustings showed both its candidates for PM are wedded to more of the same — privatisation, tax cuts and more war in the Middle East. The Lib Dem vision — like that of the Labour right — consists of hoping the EU referendum was just a bad dream and stopping Brexit without addressing any of the country’s social and economic problems.

The Greens at least oppose austerity as well as Brexit but have nothing like the range of transformational policies that Labour is offering, even on tackling climate change.

But is Brexit Labour’s Achilles heel? Most of the party’s target seats voted Leave in 2016 and its shift towards support for a second referendum if faced with a no-deal or “bad-deal” offer from the government hasn’t gone down well in Leave areas. Has it abandoned working-class voters?

“I think it’s true that Labour can’t win if we end up fighting a Remain-Leave election as the party of Remain,” Ward says.

“Johnson would do a deal with Farage, and we’d lose.

“But we haven’t adopted a Remain position. What’s our position at the next election? To unite Leavers and Remainers around a soft Brexit, essentially. It’s not perfect but we were able to get unions agreeing on it and I think that unity come an election will be important.”

Ward has long felt trade unions should be playing a bigger role in pushing for a transformation of the world of work every bit as ambitious as the political revolution promised by Corbyn.

One of the CWU’s motions to the TUC Congress calls on it to “re-evaluate” its priorities and start looking to build a more militant trade union movement.

“Frankly I’m fed up of being called to meetings about Brexit,” he says. “That’s not my job, my job is to stand up for workers whether they were Leave or Remain.

“The whole Brexit debate seems to be do we want the status quo or worse. My issue is that when you look at the problems in the world of work today — the insecurity, the in-work poverty, the intensification of work schedules — and you look at what’s coming down the line, I don’t see how things get any better.

“We can’t wait for 50 years till the work till you drop culture has destroyed even more lives, we have to fight for a different future right now. There’s no point tinkering at the edges. Our ambition has to match the scale of the issues working people face.

“That’s why it’s good the TUC is starting to call for a reduction in the working week. We need earlier retirement and less intense daily work schedules. We can achieve these things democratically. 

“To me the campaign for a new deal for workers is one that can take off in this country. We want a real debate at TUC on what type of action we can take collectively to promote the new deal.

“We’ve made progress — the TUC is already talking about a manifesto for workers. Each union will have the flexibility to take that and apply it to their number one issue, which could be an industrial dispute or simply a range of issues facing their members. We can ask the members what their number one issue is.

“Then we need that collective show of strength to take the campaign forward. Some might think that can be done through initiatives like Heart Unions Week, though that’s not my view.

“I am one of those who’d rather see us pick a single day on which unions undertake a whole range of eye-catching promotional activities using all our different communications and organising strengths to send a message — crucially a message that is directed at the 70 per cent of workers who are not organised.

“I think that should be May Day. Make May Day the day that we all come together and take action, industrially or otherwise. It’s not a win or lose day but a step on the way to putting the campaign on the popular map.

“And we should tell it straight that we aren’t waiting for political change, though we support Labour’s efforts to deliver it. We have to deliver something ourselves.

“If you look at the Change the Rules campaign” (an Australian trade union campaign aimed at winning a Labour victory at the country’s recent election) “it was too exclusively political, about changing the government. It lacked an industrial focus, but that is where unions are or can be and that is where we can make a difference.

“We have to deliver the change we want to see ourselves.”

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