Labour Pains ... the First Abortion. posted by Richard Seymour

If further evidence were needed that New Labour is not merely a pragmatic, centrist administration with a nice line in sops to the middle class, we have it today in the culmination of Labour's bullying of the RMT. The RMT have taken their members, their money, and their support, and withdrawn from their century-long affiliation to the Labour Party . Consider - a demoralised, unpopular administration, a party hemorrhaging members, desperate for funds, with virtually no committed activists on the ground doing the donkey work, being forced to employ paid professionals - and they decide to force out one of their largest union backers just a couple of months before the European and GLA elections. The given reason is an idiocy. Yes, the RMT members voted to support the Scottish Socialist Party . But then the Labour Party is quite happy to enter coalitions with Liberal Democrats without consulting the unions. They are happy to bash, smash and trash the trade union movement so completely, so resolutely, that most of the leaders and many of the members haven't known what the hell to do about it for some time.

The time and trouble New Labour leaders have taken over gnashing at the hands that feed them dramatises the the worst possible dilemma, the worst possible conundrum for them - they absolutely despise the Labour Party and the unions, yet they cannot break their dependence on them. New Labour still seem determined to act as if they were invincible, as if they could depend on the working class and the Left to rally behind them no matter how many principles of the labour movement they discarded or disgraced. But the reaction to Hutton, to the war, to every New Labour clone who appears on Question Time, tells us they are not invincible. In fact, like most bullies and despots, they are weaker than we ever imagined they would be.