Len McCluskey answers ConHome's question - his power over Labour will continue

By Mark Wallace
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Last week, writing up Ed Miliband's speech on Labour's trade union scandal, I raised a number of practical questions about how the reforms will work. Len McCluskey's interview in today's Guardian helpfully answers the first of them

I asked:

"Len McCluskey told the BBC Miliband is not calling for an opt-in to the union Political Funds generally. Does this mean unions could just split their Affiliation and Political Funds, allowing them to carry on automatically opting members in to finance hard left campaigns? Will Miliband pledge not to accept lump sum donations from such Political Funds?"

A week after Miliband's pledge to reduce union influence, the GMB boast of their Parliamentary power

By Mark Wallace
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Despite its practical flaws, Ed Miliband's speech on Labour's union links appears to have put off his party's crisis on the subject for now. The obscure nature of the proposals, combined with a clever attempt to bounce the issue back onto the Conservatives, mean that the scandal has simmered down.

But it hasn't gone away. While he carefully avoided committing himself to a timetable, at some point the press will expect to see results - and the unions are going to start squealing if he does take meaningful action to prevent their takeover attempts.

A measure of the unions' commitment to their campaign comes in the summer edition of the GMB's in-house magazine (which bizarrely appears to have stolen its logo design from Heat and Nuts). The London edition is called Candid - and it lives up to the name.

Strong Miliband, taking on the unions? Or Weak Miliband, incapable of doing so? Which will it be?

By Paul Goodman
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Ed Miliband's speech yesterday was a triumph for him.  The unions will resist his plan to decouple Labour Party membership from trade union membership.  Miliband will insist on it; ballot his Party and win; decouple Labour from the unions altogether (throwing them out of the electoral college that elects the Party's leader in the process) impress voters as a strong leader - and transform their view of him and his Party.  New members will flock to join Labour, the plan to widen participation in the selection of Labour's London Mayoral candidate will be a success, and the media spotlight will swing onto the Conservatives over their own funding and MPs' "second jobs".  Labour's lead in the polls will thus be cemented, and Miliband will go on to be Prime Minister after 2015.

Ed Miliband's speech yesterday was a disaster for him.  Whether or not the unions resist his plan to decouple Labour Party membership from trade union membership, their political funds will be untouched - which is what matters - and the unions will cling to their place in the electoral college.  Having sprung his cobbled-together plan on his Party because of Tory pressure, Miliband will see it slowly unravel - confirming voters' present view of him.  If he succeeds in the decoupling, Labour will lose masses of members and millions of pounds.  At any rate, nothing will have have happened to make future Falkirks less likely, and Unite and other unions will seize control of the selection of London's Mayoral candidate.  Labour's poll lead collapses and Cameron will be Prime Minister again after 2015.

WATCH: Labour grandee Lord Whitty rejected a role in Miliband's "unworkable" trade union reforms

By Mark Wallace
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It seems we aren't the only people concerned about the viability of Ed Miliband's trade union proposals.

The above video shows BBC News reporting that Lord Whitty, a former General Secretary of the Labour Party, rejected an invitation from Ed Miliband to oversee the implementation of the proposals on the grounds that they were "unworkable" and "the groundwork had not been done".

This explains the disparity between reports last night of Whitty's involvement and Miliband's announcement today that the job had in fact gone to former Unite official Ray Collins. Evidently Collins was the second choice - because Lord Whitty saw through the plans as soon as they were presented to him. Awkward.

New leaked documents show the scale of Miliband's union problem - but how might he solve it?

By Mark Wallace
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This Wordle shows the 50 most common words in the Sunday media summary prepared for Ed Miliband by Labour's press office, which was leaked to me yesterday. In effect, this is the news that landed on his breakfast table. As you can see, it did not make for happy reading.

The document allows us to see the world through Miliband's eyes. This is the information prioritised and summarised for his attention by his own media team, and therefore gives us a hint of the worldview which informs his thinking.

Out of thirteen pages, a full seven - the outright majority - are given over to coverage of the Falkirk/Unite scandal.

5,175 words are allotted to his party's internal problems, more than ten times the number used to cover the twin Middle Eastern crises in Syria and Egypt.

By my count only one word in the top 50 - "schools" - is not related to Labour's woes, and that is in there due to high profile coverage of Michael Gove's reforms.

The seriousness of the issue for Labour collectively and Miliband personally (the large "EM" in the graphic shows how regularly he features) is clear. The question is what can he possible do to make the crisis stop?

Miliband will want you to think that he’s broken from the unions – and Ken Livingstone to think that he hasn’t

By Peter Hoskin
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Yes, you did read that right. “Ed Miliband to explore historic break with trade unions.” That’s really what the Guardian headline says.

But, below that headline, the truth of the story is a little murkier. Apparently, “Miliband has made no decisions on whether to break Labour’s links with the trade unions.” And the idea that he should seems to have emerged from the shadows rather than from the Labour leader’s office. One “former Cabinet minister” tells the paper that “we need to have a commission that looks at the union link”.

And it gets murkier still when you consider a tweet that LBC Radio published earlier this morning. Turns out that, with the fires raging around him, Miliband took time to call Ken Livingstone – yes, Ken Livingstone – yesterday:

Tom Watson resigns - with an embittered letter to Ed Miliband

By Mark Wallace
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The Falkirk scandal, and the wider attempted union takeover of the Labour Party, has claimed its first scalp. Tom Watson has resigned as head of Ed Miliband's general election campaign.

There are various very good reasons for Watson to go over the various brazen attempts to fix Labour's selection process, as Dan Hodges recited earlier in the week.

Watson's resignation letter reveals that this is an increasingly sticky situation for Miliband - and it is evident that he is not resigning on good terms.

The tone speaks volumes - starting from the tongue-in-cheek reference to "Independence Day", through to the painful attempt to appear cool by pluggin his new favourite band (Drenge, since you ask), it doesn't seem like he's sad to be leaving the Miliband operation.

For that matter, his personal tribute to Ed as "Buddha-like" won't be in the running for most welcome epitaph of the year.

He quite deliberately does Miliband no favours with the facts he chooses to reveal, either. Only a day after Cameron castigated his opponent for lacking the guts to let Watson go, the letter says:

"As you know, I offered my resignation on Tuesday and you asked me to reconsider. I’ve thought about it and still feel it is better for you and the future unity of the party that I go now."

In doing so, he adds further fuel to a fire which he knows will cause the Labour leadership further discomfort in the next few days. The picture of the Opposition Leader begging a bruiser like Watson to stay is not an inspiring one.

Then we get to the meat of the matter - and an explanation as to why Watson appears so vengeful:

"Yet it’s not the unattributed shadow cabinet briefings around the mess in Falkirk that has convinced me that the arrangement has run its course (though they don’t help). I believe that the report should be published – in full – and the whole truth told as soon as possible so that the record can be made clear. I’ve still not seen the report but believe there are an awful lot of spurious suppositions being written."

So not only does he explicitly take a swipe at Shadow Cabinet in-fighting, he drops Miliband right in it on the secret Falkirk report, too. Labour have refused Tory and Blairite demands to publish - but it is hard to see how they can reject Watson's calls in the same way.

Labour sources tell me that the Watson operation are furious that Unite messed up the Falkirk selection-fixing so badly. They don't object to the idea of skewing selections to get Leftists selected - far from it, they are angry that the union's incompetence got the whole racket rumbled.

That he is now taking the fall for Len McCluskey's stuff-up in Falkirk, having got away with influencing so many selections elsewhere, rankles with Tom Watson. It offends his evidently extensive admiration for his own talents, hence his decision to write such a damaging resignation letter. No number of tips on new bands can hide that.

The plot thickens over Labour's Falkirk scandal

By Mark Wallace
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While Ed Miliband fights off calls to publish the investigative report into Unite’s attempt to seize control of the Falkirk Constituency Labour Party (CLP), he has admitted that no less than 14 CLPs are in “special measures” due to attempts to unduly influence candidate selections.

“Special measures” mean that the central party has taken direct control of selections, vetting new members and so on in order to prevent the skewing of the selection process.

14 is a remarkable number of CLPs to be in such serious trouble. The scale of the problem suggests Labour has a serious cultural issue that means people think it’s acceptable to attempt such coups, and a procedural issue which means that evidently quite a few get close to succeeding.

Labour’s defence line is that Falkirk is the only seat where union malpractice is the problem. But that seems to make the issue worse, not better. If this was solely Unite trying to stage a takeover, that would be bad enough, but now we learn there are plenty other groups and individuals pursuing such campaigns.

In short, Labour is riven with factionalism which the leadership and the NEC are apparently incapable of nipping it in the bud.

Their helplessness is evident from the period of time many of the 14 CLPs have been in administrative limbo – several have been in special measures since 2005 and one has been centrally controlled for 18 years.

It is now clear that the problem goes far beyond Falkirk, and the factionalism goes far beyond Unite. While the Times reports that some Conservative Associations have been taken into special measures in the past, I'm not aware of any that have been so treated for reasons of a political takeover, and I've certainly never heard of any being centrally controlled for 18 years. It seems Labour is under attack from within, and cannot effectively defend itself.

However hard he tries to unravel himself, Ed Miliband is bound to Unite

By Peter Hoskin
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Did you hear the one about the Labour Party’s biggest donor suing the Labour Party? No, it’s not a joke, but a possibility raised by the Ephraim Hardcastle column in today’s Daily Mail. Apparently, the Unite union is angry that their preferred candidate for the Falkirk seat, Karie Murphy, hasn’t yet been anointed by Labour HQ – and they’re threatening to take their anger to the law courts.

The story of what’s going on in Falkirk is told by Rachel Sylvester (£) and Dan Hodges in separate columns today, and I’d urge you to read both. Suffice to say that it’s a stinking mess. Thanks to the unions agitating in favour of Ms Murphy – and by “agitating,” I mean “fixing the entire selection process” – Labour has had to put the local constituency party on what’s called “special measures”. This means that thousands of trade unionists will be disbarred from voting in the contest, when it eventually happens.

But two particular passages from Sylvester’s and Hodges’ columns are worth pulling out here. From the former:

“I’ve been sent the minutes of the union’s executive council meeting, dated December 3, 2012, which describe the drive in Falkirk as ‘exemplary’. The document boasts of six other candidate selections on which Unite has had a ‘direct impact’ – in Peterborough, Norwich South, Harlow, Hastings, Tamworth and Crewe and Nantwich. ‘This is not an exhaustive list of the better candidates,’ the minutes note; but without the union’s work ‘Progress [the Blairite think-tank] or other right-wing candidates would have been selected.’”

And from the latter:

“Miliband needs to bite the bullet and move [Tom] Watson from his role as Labour’s campaign co-ordinator … Karie Murphy is a senior aide in Tom Watson’s office, and was described in yesterday’s Guardian as his ‘favoured’ candidate for the seat. She is also, of course, the favoured candidate of Len McCluskey, the Unite general secretary. ... McCluskey and Watson are good friends, and former flatmates. This week, The Sunday Times reported that ‘remarkably, Labour’s campaign co-ordinator Tom Watson has defended the actions of Unite in Falkirk’.”

It’s typical of Ed Miliband’s problematic relationship with the unions that both provide the bulk of his party’s financial heft and elevated him to the leadership. Any story that might distance him from them – Unite suing Labour, Len McCluskey attacking party policy, whatever – has a flipside that serves to push them closer together. The result is an awkward equilibrium: the Labour leader is neither close enough to Unite for the Unite bosses’ liking, nor far enough away from them for, one suspects, the public’s tastes.

Of course, all this is electoral ambrosia for the Tories, and they’d be right to feast on it. But a quick word of warning for CCHQ, and one which I’ve sounded before: there’ll be plenty of union members – Tory voters among them – who are appalled at what’s happened in Falkirk. They shouldn’t be tarred with the sins of the Unite leadership, nor alienated as potential voters.

Europe, public spending, union power grabs...Labour have plenty of splits of their own

By Mark Wallace
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The media is intent on a "Tory splits" narrative. Given the obsessive focus on any hint of disagreement on the blue side of the House, it is surprising that there has been so little reporting of Labour's splits.

They do have them - three in the last four days, in fact. Here they are:

The EU

Yesterday, various figures from the left and right of the Labour Party launched Labour for a Referendum - only days after Ed Miliband publicly rejected the idea of giving the people a say on Britain's EU membership. The rebels aren't just eurosceptic "usual suspects" like Kate Hoey, they include Brussels fans like former Europe Minister Keith Vaz.