Rather like the football results on TV news bulletins, those of you who are fed up hearing about the Labour Party in this magazine should look away now.
BECTU's ballot of members produced a large majority in favour of staying affiliated to Labour, and the full results are published elsewhere in this magazine.
The union's Executive Committee, took its instructions from this year's conference, ran the ballot, and got a result which, among other things, probably saved Labour from a public relations disaster.
Although our vote didn't get the press coverage it deserved, you can bet that if it had gone the other way we'd still be hearing about the repercussions as you read this now. A "no" vote would have been the first instance of a trade union consciously opting out of the Labour Party in living memory.
So what next?
Well...strictly speaking the NEC could sit tight until next May's conference, report back to delegates, and leave it at that.
However, that would ignore the act of faith that must have been made by many members in the ballot who, despite their private reservations about Labour's current policies, accepted the argument that BECTU's relationship with the party is in their long-term interests.
It's now the job of the union's leadership to make sure that promise is delivered.
So far, Ian McCartney, Labour Party Chair, has been invited to meet the union to discuss how the relationship should work in future, and we'll have no shame in telling him that our members have earned the right to influence government decisions on their futures. Payback time, if you like.
Our immediate concerns are about jobs, jobs, jobs. Top of the list are: the privatisation of BBC Technology; the impact of a single ITV company on employment levels and regional production; public funding of the arts sector being channelled into building projects instead of staff; and the UK's opt-out from Europe's 48-hour maximum week, which every day allows employers to blackmail freelancers into signing away their rights.
We also need to tackle abuse of the new union recognition laws, introduced by Labour, which were were meant to open workplace doors for unions if a majority of the workers invited them in. Since the law came in, though, every effort by BECTU to win new recognition has been dogged by nitpicking legal opposition from employers - most recently the laughable claim by a small cinema chain that it already had a union, in which the company's Managing Director was General Secretary, and the Finance Director was President.
Our affiliation ballot result should give us helpful leverage when these issues are raised with Labour.
But, the occasional cosy chat with Labour mandarins isn't enough. We need to respond to two themes that emerged during the many months of discussion and debate within the union in the run-up to the ballot.
Our research into alternative representation revealed that there are plenty of politicians outside the Labour Party who are willing to side with the union when there's a fight going on. Even though we remain in Labour, we can't afford to be sectarian about sharing our information and ideas with people outside the party, and there has already been some preliminary discussion about the possibility of a cross-party liaison group of MPs and peers to take our issues on board.
Secondly, and perfectly honestly, some of us are guilty of moaning about Labour without doing anything about it, especially those of us who are party members. There are probably dozens, no hundreds of us, who can't remember the last time we went to local Labour meetings to argue about policy. To shake Labour up, the union needs engage with the party at all levels, from local wards up to the national policy forums which influence election manifestos, weaving our objectives into the democratic fabric.
All this will be driven by the clear message sent by the ballot result : more of you than ever before took part, most of you accepted the union's advice to vote yes, and all of you are now watching to see what happens.
We'll try not to let you down.
Tony Lennon
December 2003
