IT’S COMPLICATED. All relationships are. But the partnership for life between the trade unions — the working-class organisations that created the Labour Party — and the party itself has entered a new stage in which some, on both left and right, are questioning whether that relationship in its present form can survive.

On the right of the party — in Parliament and in the party apparatus — there is a clear sense that the powerful presence of trade unions in decision-making, candidate selection and policy formation now represents a threat to its 21st century project to decouple Labour from a politically engaged working-class movement and  permanently occupy the centre ground.

Over a century, with occasional interruptions, Labour’s leaders enjoyed a comfortable relationship with right-wing union leaders who were content to allow the parliamentary party to determine policies.

This was not always an easy cohabitation but in practice trade union representatives on Labour’s  national executive committee acted more as a conduit to transmit the Labour leadership’s position to the trade unions that nominated them than to compel a more combative approach.  

It didn’t always quite work out. In 1969 the Harold Wilson Labour government’s employment minister Barbara Castle’s corporative drive to tangle trade unions in the law split the Labour cabinet and the idea was dropped only to be taken up by the Tory employment secretary Robert Carr and carried further by Margaret Thatcher.

A more recent example of the willingness of trade union leaders, and especially TUC functionaries, to suspend judgement when bamboozled by Labour politicians was the Private Finance Initiative. Gordon Brown’s idea had hosts of  trade unionist supporters when the New Labour government proposed it as a ingenious way around the public spending constraints imposed by the Maastricht Treaty.

This naturally followed in the aftermath of Labour and the TUC’s wholesale abandonment of their opposition to the European federal project which necessarily required the adoption of fanciful illusions about “social Europe” as the sugar coating on the EU’s neoliberal economic regime.

Today, no-one among that generation of trade union leaders is prepared to defend the policy while some of its more enthusiastic proponents at the time pretend to have opposed it.

Outsourcing labour protection and employment rights to an EU regulatory framework designed to level the playing field with German labour market conditions clearly brought some marginal benefit to offset the effects of anti-union legislation and the weakened employment rights that successive Tory governments had imposed.

But this small compensation eroded over time with capitalist crisis, successive EU treaties and the anti-working class judgements of the European Court of Justice.

The ideological effect of the “social Europe” delusion was to encourage the idea that strife and conflict in the workplace and across industries could be avoided by supranational regulation which turned out to be impossibly remote from democratic intervention.

As the Labour and trade union leadership became more and more invested in membership of the EU a gap opened up between this worldview and the changing balance of opinion in the working class.

This was not the only factor in eroding working-class confidence in existing political institutions — including the Labour Party — to make a difference in their lives but it was powerful enough to administer a profound shock to the political class with the referendum result.

Officially Labour celebrates its origins at the turn of the last century as: “A new party for a new century. Its formation was the result of many years of struggle by working-class people, trade unionists and socialists, united by the goal of working-class voices represented in British Parliament.”

“It was this aim,” Labour proclaims, “that united Keir Hardie and the colleagues who gathered for the famous inaugural meeting of the Labour Representation Committee at London’s Memorial Hall in February 1900.”

Today working-class voices are few and far between in Parliament and the original conception of a party to represent the labour interest as distinct from the interests of other classes finds little support outside of a beleaguered minority of MPs.

Where trade unions have been almost completely united has been over the need to repeal the whole body of anti-trade union laws. It is striking that the governments of Blair and Brown — despite substantial majorities — conspicuously failed to carry out their commitments to do this.

Labour’s foundation (as the Labour Representation Committee) by the trade unions and the main socialist organisations was driven by the great growth in the New Unionism of the unskilled and semi-skilled labouring classes. Its midwife was the TUC and its founding leadership comprised two people from the Independent Labour Party, two from the Marxist Social Democratic Federation, one Fabian and seven trade unionists.

Labour’s emergence as an independent party quickly eroded the Liberal Party’s base and brought about a parliamentary majority for a TUC-sponsored Trade Disputes Bill that reversed the Taff Vale judgement that made unions liable for employers’ losses in event of industrial action.

When the Court of Appeal and the Lords ruled that the political use of trade union funds was prohibited delegates to the 1910 TUC were enraged but it took five more years of campaigning to partially reverse the judgment.

The election of Jeremy Corbyn as party leader, and the few years in which Labour was able to reconstruct itself as a truly popular party and one capable of mobilising masses, did draw a powerful trend among trade unions into something of an alliance with these new forces.

Where today can we find any enthusiasm among trade unionists for an extended war of position in the structures of the Labour Party or even a sense that it would be a very productive activity?

It is not surprising that socialists tend to see developments inside trade unions exclusively through a left-right political prism. But it is not always very useful.

We can draw from Sharon Graham’s very well conceived  campaign to become general secretary of Unite a clear sense that for a decisive element in her union, industrial sectors and the workplace are the key sites for activity. Informed opinion suggests that she was able to draw support independently of where her electors stood politically or even if they lacked a developed ideological position at all.

Where campaigning focused on developments inside Labour — and where the candidates were identified with any of the tendencies in the party — it was a big turn-off even to the minority of union members who turned out to vote.

We have now arrived at a position where the original and quite modest conception of the trade unions and socialists — to secure parliamentary representation for the working class — has evolved into a programme for government over which there is deep disunity.

And we have a substantial body of evidence — some very recent — to suggest that such a government could not be elected on a programme which presented a significant threat to the the wealth and power of the rich without the fragile unity of Labour's contending tendencies rupturing.

Before the second world war party leader Ramsay McDonald teamed up with the Tories and Liberals to form a National Government; in the 1980s, alarmed at the growth of the left in the party, the Gang of Four broke away to form an alliance with the Liberals. In the last few years the PLP in its majority, and the right wing generally, sabotaged the party’s electoral prospects rather than see a Labour government elected on a radical programme.

Surfacing in the preparations for Labour’s conference this month are contrary views over what might be the best electoral system to achieve a Labour government

The long-established Campaign for Labour Party Democracy argues that first-past-the-post delivers majority Labour governments and that proportional representation would make this “nigh impossible to ever achieve,” with far-right parties gaining MPs and legitimacy.

On the other hand Momentum has devised an 11-point programme with strong echoes of the last two party manifestos and including a call for proportional representation.

We can see how the clearly irreconcilable divisions in Labour mean that neither of these strategies — on their own — solve the problem of how to win a parliamentary majority committed to socialist policies.

The capacity of the trade union movement to command the unity and discipline of Labour MPs — even if itself united — is greatly compromised by the depletion of the organised working class in the balance of forces with just 5.5 million of the 33 million-strong labour force in trade unions of which under four million are in unions affiliated to Labour.

Politics is never static. A crucial variable is extraparliamentary activity, including trade union organising and mobilising, which has led to new political forces developing outside of the formal Labour link.

The catalytic effect of mass movements like the Stop the War Coalition, the People’s Assembly and new tenants’ and environmental movements were powerful factors in Labour’s fleeting renaissance and without this kind of movement the parliamentary straitjacket on profound change remains.

As the Brexit vote showed there are large sections of the working class outside conventional politics and unrepresented within it. It is conceivable, with the fragmentation of formal politics, the growth of nationalist, sovereigntist, regionalist and green movements that it will be impossible to maintain confidence in the existing parliamentary system without a change to some form of proportional representation. The templates already exist in the Scottish and Welsh parliaments and the London Assembly.

A question for the left is whether parliamentary forms of struggle are sufficient to effect profound change. The problem for the socialist left, which will continue to exist in a multitude of forms both within and without the Labour Party, is how to gather the forces which can compel an irreversible shift in wealth and power from the rich to the people.

Nick Wright blogs at 21centurymanifesto.