Breaking the link?

Byline: JIM HANCOCK

ALAUNCH pad for an unlikely General Election victory for Labour, or a knockdown dragged-out fight over jobs and the economy? The first meeting of the Trades Union Congress in Liverpool for 103 years gets underway this weekend and promises to be "interesting". The prospect of huge cuts in public spending, anger over the soft treatment of bankers, and rising unemployment are going to make it difficult for the Liverpool Congress to be the show of unity that Gordon Brown would like.

As well as those national issues there are a number of industrial matters on Merseyside that are likely to be raised inside and outside the BT Convention Centre including the future of the car plant at Ellesmere Port and the Copperas Hill postal depot.

The latter is of most concern to the Communication Workers' Union on Merseyside and their branch secretary Mark Walsh. I met him in his office opposite the depot and our conversation quickly turned to one of the key issues facing this congress, what is the value of the link between the Labour Party and the unions? It needs to be stated that we are not talking about all unions. Many are not affiliated to the party and some like the RMT and NUM have severed their connections. Could that happen to the Communication Workers? Their national concern is the, currently shelved, privatisation of the Post Office. Mr Walsh drew my attention to the union's stand. If privatisation goes through the CWU are out of the Labour Party.

Furthermore the union has proposed a motion for the Liverpool Congress which should cause great concern to the Government. It observes that New Labour is failing to attract trade unionists and is pursuing policies of cuts, privatisation and has refused to repeal anti-trade union laws. The CWU wants an urgent conference of Labour affiliated unions to "consider how to achieve effective political representation... " Unison is another union that's reached the end of its tether with Labour. They have suspended constituency funding to 35 Labour seats including Jane Kennedy in Liverpool Wavertree.

Kennedy's links to Unison and its predecessor NUPE go back over thirty years. Some will remember the young delegate with the fuzzy hairstyle telling a conference in the early eighties that Militant didn't speak for all public sector workers in Liverpool.

At her Kensington party headquarters, Kennedy acknowledged that the decision of Unison was worrying, but felt that in Wavertree itself relations with the union were good. However, having resigned from the Government in the summer, Jane Kennedy freely admitted that the Liverpool Congress was going to be difficult.

That won't be a new experience for the TUC. At the time of the 1906 Congress Liverpool was not a bastion of Labour and trade union support. Casual work and sectarian politics saw to that. It was also the year of the great Liberal Party landslide election victory. Within 17 years that party was in ruins and Labour was in government. Nothing is for ever.