As you know from my long paper of Welfare Reform, I think that studying the potential unintended consequences is really very important. I don’t underestimate the thought and planning that would need to go into an institutional shift like I propose, and i’m not tied to anything more than a general principle, but just because there are possible negatives doesn’t mean we shouldn’t work them through. What i’m seeking to do, and it won’t happen overnight, is to open a space within the LRC or elsewhere where the possible actions can be mashed around and flip and flowcharted in a better way than can be done on a blog.

On your specifics, if you don’t mind I’ll just remain grateful for the thoughts and come back in a further exploratory post.

Rory @6: As with Dan, i’m really grateful for you to spending time setting out some of the possible implications, ans likewise i’ll pick them up in a furtehr exploratory post. Your engagement was exactly the kind of thing I was looking for from a union perspective.

Quickly though:

If the tories do it thne so be it.

Yes there may be a risk of disaffiliation and no re-affiliation, and there might need to be an agreement at national union conference that this is NOT something to do. While you’re right that this may create a temporary union imbalance between power and responsbility etc., my sense is that this is what is need to break the irreversibility of the power direction within Labour.

Would it mean the end of national political affiliates? As with everything else, once the left/local has the power,all comes up for grabs.

Salman @7: I accept I’ve maybe been a too strong there, Salman, more as rhetorical flourish than any desire to criticise you. I should have been more general and not taken you as an example. I’m sure it won’t break your heart if I leave it as it is for now, but i’ll change it for the book form, while ensuring that you still get a mention for your critical engagement with what it means to be leftie and Labour. Deal?

The simple reason why it is unlikely to happen in the immediate future is the dislocation between TU branches and their local CLPs.

It would presumably also mean a complete rewriting of Labour’s structure to remove the national affiliates.

The other major question is how, if the union withdraws all national funding, it guarantees the same funding will be made locally while leaving those decisions up to individual branches.

If the unions can be persuaded to disaffiliate from the national party and instead support local parties (or, as I suspect would happen, some support local CLPs, others support the Socialist Party, some support the Greens etc.) then they won’t turn round and bail out the national party or set up transitionary arrangements.

It would, I guess, be possible to let the party nationally go bankrupt (though if that is the strategy then I suggest we all start by voting for the six people we like least to be our reps on the NEC as they will each get stuck with the bills), and then the newly empowered and vitalised CLPs could come together to form the Real Labour Party or whatever it would be called, with greater power for the grassroots members.

I suspect the reputational damage of letting the Labour Party as officially constituted go bankrupt would drive away supporters and activists in their droves would outweigh the benefits of turning power upside in the Party. But since the Party might go bankrupt even with union donations (or unions disaffiliating one by one), maybe this is something worth considering. It would certainly signal to disillusioned lefties that the Labour Party has changed!

But there are some pretty massive risks here, e.g. :

1. that the unions disaffiliate nationally without reaffiliating locally.
2. that the labour party centrally can’t pay its bills and collapses, causing an exodus of labour activists and supporters to the lib dems and the greens.
3. that in response to the threat of (2) the labour party centrally uses its powers to take any money that CLPs receive from local unions + ramping up donations from millionaires.
4. that as soon as the left starts this kind of campaign, the leadership says that lefties are trying to destroy the labour party and manages to turn the majority of members against the left and/or expel leftie activists.

I’m not currently convinced that there is a strategy to avoid or minimise these risks, nor that the potential gains outweigh the disadvantages. But open to persuasion

Fookin’ hell, as I believe people say.

Of course I understand how close to insolvency the LP is. i’m not stupid That’s more than half the point. It would be perfectly be possible to come to an arrangement on transitionary arrangements, but the threat has to be there and the PLP/NEC has to know it’s serious or the bluff will be called easily enough. I don’t want to send the LP into administration (or whatever legal term their is for its weird constitutional form) but if it came down to it the unions could actually, through the receivers, simply take over many of the regional liabilities and leave the NEC to the rest of it.

The Northern Ireland peace process was brokered on the basis that the government would actually walk away and that the deadlines were real. That’s what sudden institutional change is about.

The point about lefties and their other concerns, which i’m a bit too elliptic on, is that you’re sending out a message of a break with the old central control mechanisms, and that their voice will now be heard, along with all the Labour members who are – strangely – quite like them in that they thought invading Iraq was wrong and ID cards stupid.

The immediate problem is that if this were to happen then the Labour Party would, within a very few weeks, be insolvent and unable to pay its bills.

Also not sure how this is meant to impress young lefties annoyed about Iraq or civil liberties?

Thanks for this engagement. Whether what I propose is ‘radical’ because it’s a good design or because the situation’s desperate now for the Labour left is perhaps a moot point. Perhaps a bit of both.

But on your substantive point about the loss of a coherent, collective national viewpoint (and I think the Heathrow example’s a good one), I don’t think that an irresolvable one if the political will is there (and I argue that at grassroots level it may well be). I can’t see why local union branches, engaged in local decision-making with their CLPs and now with a great deal more influence, can’t also be bound by their own national conference decisions on the national level issues.

Perhaps I’m just missing something; as I said in the OP, I’m not claiming to be an expert on how such changes would get taken on board by the different unions (perhaps in different ways in each) but I’d love to engage with people like yourself to work through the nitty gritty, if I had a sense that what I’m proposing is at all on anyone’s wavelength. I acknowledge that it seems ambitious (and Tim F in previous comments has already suggested ‘half-way’ options which may in time be more viable, but I also feel that the Labour left, and the left, needs a big idea it can hang on to and which is at least in some way achievable.

Dave @2: Similar comments to above really. I know it seems ambitious, and that union leaderships are not likely to want to entertain the idea, but it seems to me that the possibilites for change are greater in unions, and the grassroots support more immediately tappable, than they are in the Labour party itself (for the institutional ‘irreversibility’ reasons I’ve ste out in the OP. In addition, the very idea of engaging local unions and CLP in this kind of time-limited endeavour with a clear objective is attractive for obvious longer term reasons.