The Battle For Labour

The resurgent confidence of the militant tendency among the leadership of Labour's giant union financial backers is a clear sign that a vicious civil war has started in the Labour movement. Charles Moore's article for Saturday's Telegraph on this disturbing development, in which he provides bullet proof evidence that the far left, who long ago infiltrated and took control of the unions, are planning to seize power, is dynamite. He says, for instance:

Unite is led by Tony Woodley. From today, he is pitting his union against hundreds of thousands of holidaymakers in a strike designed to break the will of British Airways, which could go bust. And yesterday Unite's traditional allies in the rail union RMT promised an Easter strike of signal workers.

Mr Woodley is backed by the faction in his union called United Left, which declares that it wants "a socialist economic, social and political system", and wishes to "regain" the Labour Party. It has a motion down for the union's policy conference after the election that calls for the union to "give no support" to any Labour MPs who do not seek to abolish the "anti-trade union laws". This threat could be powerful: Labour campaigns in 148 constituencies are funded by Unite, and 167 Labour MPs and candidates are members of the union. Unite produces a quarter of Labour's money.

This is just a taste. The rest of the article is so powerful, I would hazard it could turn the election. That is if, as Moore says, Cameron starts to move with a bit more political athleticism in taking advantage of it. The stakes are so high, it's difficult to frame them. We are now faced with the real possibility, if Cameron gets it badly wrong (and he would have to get it very badly wrong, admittedly), not just of five more years of Gordon Brown (hideous though that thought is) but of a hard left Labour regime in Westminster.

Whatever the speculation about policy and the intricacies of poll variations, one thing is now clear: the real fight, the fight for the nation's soul, has now begun. And it's a fight we, and the Conservative Party, have to win. Or we all lose.

Fawkes On Whelan

Enjoyed the McBride fact or fiction thing. Not sure what that 'Eric Tickles' thing was all about, though.

But Whelan. Sheesh, what a real piece of work that scumbag is. In terms of being a total stranger to the truth, and being as corrupt as a gambling copper with a serious drinking habit, he's second only to Brown himself. Well, the Labour wheels have come flying right off this time. There's one thing people never, ever forgive and that's being taken for mugs.

Unite's funding of Labour with public money, and 100+ Labour MPs, again with public money, and its subsequent war on BA (which does not serve the interests of its members) makes Brown's - and Labour's - position untenable. Unless Brown gives the £11 million back - not to Unite, but to the taxpayer - people will rightly feel robbed. But he can't do that because first it would be an admission of guilt, and second, it would bankrupt an insolvent party.

Checkmate.

Brenda "SOGAT '82" Dean Shock

Brenda Dean (you know, her of SOGAT '82 fame), now Baroness Dean of somewhere or other, has claimed that she was 'shocked' to find out that Lord Ashcroft was a non-dom, (or maybe it was she was 'shocked' she hadn't been asked by her party to be 'shocked' sooner. Who knows? Who bloody cares?). She's a dyed-in-the-wool Big Union Labourist who's been recruited to try to keep the Ashcroft non-story bubbling along, so she would utter all this disingenuous claptrap wouldn't she.

The surprising thing, therefore, (possibly), is that The Times and, briefly, The Daily Telegraph, thought this to be front page news. The MSM's dodgy, increasingly naff judgment strikes again, then.

There was, however, one MSM source who was having none of it - namely Paul Waugh of the Standard. He joins the historical dots and sifts through Dean's place in the genealogy of the biggest union in Britain:

Baroness Dean gave evidence today on Lord Ashcroft failed to uphold his undertakings on becoming a peer.

The noble baroness was not asked why Lord A should be treated differently from Lord Paul.

But something that many Tories would have wanted her to mention is this:

Brenda Dean made her name as the gen sec of print union Sogat 82.

Sogat 82 later merged with another union to become part of Amicus....which is these days part of...you guessed it....Unite.

Given that tomorrow's DT has evidence that Unite were given £18 million of taxpayer's money, of which £11 million went straight back to the Labour party in what looks increasingly like a really special kind of money laundering, you'd think these tossers, with their ennobled thicko mouthpieces like Dean, would have learned when to shut the hell up.

But they haven't - and I, for one, am counting on that! I'm pretty certain David Cameron and the Conservatives are too. Play it straight, like Hague did today, and let these spinning, lying, corrupt wreckers condemn themselves out of their own mouths, just like Brown did at PMQs yesterday, and ex-Communist Charlie Whelan, who's taken over the Labour party through Unite, too in his laughable interview.

If nothing else, the next few weeks will occasionally make for compulsive viewing.

Vague Hague Kills Ashcroft Story Stone Dead

Peter Hoskin has covered very well Hague's interview on "Today" this morning about the Ashcroft non-story, which I listened to while driving to work (which is where I am now - so this won't be a long post!). Suffice to say that Hague, while slightly vague at times, did nail down this stupid story once and for all, and successfully lobbed the ball straight back into Brown's court. Lord Paul, anyone? Hoskin's conclusions are rather cleverer than mine, (no surprise there), but sort of amount to the same thing.

Any road, it seems this is now a non-runner for Labour, but that does not mean they won't continue to push it, no matter how stupid they will increasingly look for doing so now that Hague has, in my view, successfully killed the story off once and for all. However, if, for instance, this latest piece of Charlie Whelan delusion is anything to go on, then truly anything is possible (so thanks to Daniel Finkelstein for reporting it):

In yesterday's interview with Will Straw, Charlie Whelan appears
to have given up being a spin doctor and a political organiser and become,
instead, a pollster. He claims that it is not true that a third of Unite
members are planning to vote Conservative because his own survey showed it was
only about 8 per cent. It never occurs to him to wonder if their might be an
interviewer bias in answers to a survey conducted by his own
officials. He describes the contrary evidence as:
Some Tory paper did a bogus poll of Unite members
But the poll was actually a balanced and representative survey of 1,023 members of the union conducted by Populus last year.

This Whelan man is extremely sinister, not least because he is as big a self-deceiver and figure-fiddler as Brown himself. Moreover, in the name of a union membership the majority of whom clearly doesn't support him or his party, he is trying to shut down British Airways internationally by unleashing the forces of militant trade unionism abroad. Sort of sympathy strikes for the global era. But care not one jot do these people for democracy, or the massive job losses that would result from the collapse of a business as big as British Airways.

A Matthew Parris anecdote in his column in this morning's Times is quite disturbing on that score:

It was before he was even a Cabinet minister that, in a private
conversation, Mr Mandelson was asked who he thought would be in the running for
the leadership of the Labour Party if the present Government were turfed out of
office at the coming general election.

He paused thoughtfully, then, with no hint of a smile, and peering over his spectacles in apparent incredulity, observed: “You don’t think a little thing like losing a general election is going to stop Gordon Brown, do you?” Whether, by “stop”, Mr Mandelson meant stop
Mr Brown from carrying on as Labour leader, or stop him from carrying on as
Prime Minister, he did not say.

Getting rid of this particular crop of corrupt, anti-democratic, arrogant socialists might take a bit more than a general election victory for the Conservative Party!

Brown won't take electoral defeat - or "No!" - for an answer.

Misquotes and Trainwrecks

Having now had the chance to see Brown's worst performance yet at PMQs (and that's saying something), I absolutely agree with Iain Dale who said of it:

Cameron was on fire and pulverised Brown, who was almost reduced to a wimpering wreck. Jack Straw's face said it all. "Why didn't we get rid of him when we had the chance?" was what he was clearly thinking.

Well, if that was what Straw was thinking, a few more examples of Brown's - or Brown's team's - nightmare bungling will give him yet more food for thought, or cause for regret.

Here's one. Christopher Hope, in his Daily Telegraph blog, has just pointed out that he was the one who wrote about Cameron's attempts to open a dialogue with the unions, and that he was totally misrepresented - and pretty much misquoted - about it by Brown during those self same PMQs, while the old fraud, who had just finished admitting to lying to the House and the Chilcot enquiry over defence cuts, was trying - and spectacularly failing - to turn the tables on a rampant Cameron.

He told the Commons today: “The right hon. Gentleman [David Cameron] has come a long way from a few months ago, when The Daily Telegraph reported: ‘David Cameron has launched a secret mission to win over Britain’s trade unions…

“The trade unions have also been asked to help draw up opposition policy, The Daily Telegraph can disclose’.

“It also stated that ‘party officials have met with the unions more than sixty times since the spring.’ One day they are for the unions; the next day they are against the unions. The only consistency is in their total opportunism.”

Brown is wrong on a couple of points here. Cameron’s links with the unions did not emerge “a few months ago”. In fact my Telegraph story he was quoting from was published on the frontpage of the Telegraph in August 2008 – a full 18 months ago.

Since then, David Cameron confirmed the talks in an interview with the Telegraph and covered his plans to curb their links with the Labour Party just last month. Not much that is opportunistic here either – given Cameron had also hired his own “union envoy” Richard Balfe.

Anyone would guess there was an election around the corner.

Well, there is an election around the corner, and Brown's latest in long, long line of trainwreck performances might well prove decisive in determining its outcome. As Cameron struck home with devastating point after devastating point, and Brown's parries became more and more feeble, you could almost feel the votes hemorrhaging from Labour, and what remained of Brown's already ragged credibility draining inexorably away.

The most devastating blows Cameron struck, however, he saved until the last, of which the best was the damning charge that at least one thing is now absolutely crystal clear. Brown has been almost exclusively serving the interests of his paymasters, Unite, for years now, and not the interests of the nation. In addition, Cameron also managed to make it fairly clear that it was the interests of these giant, Labour-sponsoring union leaderships Brown had been serving, and absolutely not the interests of their members - or, indeed, the nation.

This is a key distinction that has to be rammed home from here on in. It will resonate, revealing, as it does, the trade union, anti-democratic power grab that's been going on behind the scenes relentlessly, if not furiously, since Brown usurped Blair. Cameron was right (again); this is a return to the handwringing, lame governments of the Seventies, who, as he memorably said, caved into the unions rather than talking to them.

Overall, this is a narrative that will ring true with hundreds of thousands of people who have been virtually disenfranchised and misrepresented for decades by left wing union leaders who now, it seems, have regained control of the Parliamentary Labour Party. And the reason why it will ring true is because it is true.

No one, bar the more rabid loony lefties of the Grauniad class, and Labour's new militant tendency itself, wants to go back to that sort of grim world, with a stagnant nation held to ransom by an unelected politbureau of bitter old union Trots. And people are quickly realising that Brown is so compromised, so reliant as he is on union money and largesse for his power, that he is not on their side. It's also becoming vividly clear how he survived all those coup attempts. The unions weren't willing to lose their puppet just yet - or, at least, until he's served his purpose.

Point is, there is so much new and powerful ammunition for the Tories here, it'll be hard for them to know which grenade to lob first.

And, of course, the ultimate, happy upshot of all this is that we have all taken one more agonising step closer to the downfall of the Brown regime, and towards a reforming Conservative government, attempted Unite coup d'etats and atavistic Big Union international syndicalism notwithstanding.