The new head of the British Labour Party is moving to sever financial ties with unions and to diminish their influence in decision making:
Ed Miliband is to distance Labour from its trade union paymasters by diluting the party’s financial dependence on them and reducing their role in electing the party leader.
Labour has proposed introducing a ceiling on donations to any political party which could be as low as £500, The Independent has learnt. The move could break the long-running deadlock between the parties on agreeing a new system of financing politics.
Seems reasonable, if he can get the Tories to forswear big money from the rich bankers who fund them, but there is also this:
He also wants to change Labour’s culture by allowing the public a vote when the party chooses its leader. He plans to give 25 per cent of the votes to non-party members who register as Labour supporters. MPs, trade unionists and party members would also each have a quarter of the votes in Labour’s electoral college. At present, MPs, union and party members each have a third of those votes.
Mr Miliband’s moves are bound to cause tensions with the unions. They are all the more surprising because he depended on union support to defeat his brother, David, for the Labour leadership in September.
So, it appears that Milibrand’s vision of the Labour Party is one in which actual labo(u)r has a significantly diminished role.
I suggest that he look south and east to Israel, where the Israeli Labor party most recently polled in 4th place in elections, as compared to a party, ad its predecessors, that controlled the government for the first 29 years of Israel’s existence.
Basically, if you take labor out of a labor party, you have nothing left.