Is this what's supposed to be holding us back?

Some people seem to think Labour has a trade union problem. Problem my hole. I wish it was a problem. There are a lot of well paid lazy people out there who are hired to write shite. Step forward Cormac Lucey, smart-arse lawyer and former advisor to Michael McDowell who contributed his banal, ill-informed musings to the Irish Times a couple of weeks ago. He thinks that Labour should put the interests of consumers ahead of producers i.e. trade unionists. Simple binary oppositions. Either/or.

The world is more complex than this. People both produce and consume. There's a lot of other simplistic assumptions in the article:

The question of social background highlights a growing problem for the Labour Party. The Lansdowne/RTÉ exit poll conducted at the recent general election revealed that, for the first time, Labour has more middle-class voters than working-class voters.
In part this may reflect a shrinking working class as the effects of the aspirational society and broader access to third-level education make themselves felt. Labour has failed to connect with the aspirations of its working-class voters nearly as well as Fianna Fáil.

There is a confusion of class qua a person's position in relation to economic forces with a marketing use of status. Lucey is just guessing.

My guess is that Ireland's public service employees vote disproportionately for the Labour Party.

Yes matey, that's all it is. A guess. No evidence whatsoever. The crap vote Labour get should tell you that the party fails to get a majority of any social sector in the electorate. Then there's the admiration of Blair that many right wing commentators use to buttress many a flimsy argument.

Tony Blair recently wrote a piece for The Economist titled "What I've Learned", in which he wrote: "Public-sector unions can't be allowed to determine the shape of the public services."

Part of the Blair project was to establish the enemy as being inside the traditional ranks of the Labour movement so as "modernisers" could ascribe courage to themselves in the way they went about attacking old shibboleths. Lucey wants Rabbitte to do the same and the same fecker has done so on a couple of occasions for purely opportunistic reasons. But that would let the real class enemy and their political shills off the hook.

The Forward March to Oblivion

I've had enough. I'm deeply irritated by the fact that the Irish Labour Party is the worse performing social democratic party in Europe, securing a mere 10 per cent of the vote. This rump outfit with its ageing parliamentary party has run out of steam. It has stood still for the past three elections. And still there are people that think it's all down to electoral strategy. A few more votes here and there and we'd be in government...

Bollocks. It's more to do with identity than anything else. Labour is clueless about how to delelop a coherent narrative that can critique the celtic pup. The party is afraid to be critical of the economy lest it frighten the so-called middle classes - the aspirational types that are supposed to swing elections.

Of course the paid commentariat is equally clueless and some hig paid hacks are opining that it's Labour's perceived trade union identity and its taint of old fashioned class politics that puts off these aspirational new workers. Again, bollocks. Let's be clear about this. Labour's current connections with the union movement are largely residual and sentimental. Union leaders don't give a shite about theLabour Party because they have been given a seat at the top table by Fianna Fáil and they have known no other way of doing business since 1987. I'm really fucking sick of pundits calling for Labour to be courageous and to "modernise". This is sloppy thinking, using inappropriate comparisons to the Blair project within the British Labour Party.

I wouldn't mind if Irish Labour was too dependent on trade union members. After all there are over half a million trade union members but only about 200,00 Labour voters. I wouldn'y mind trying to think my wat around a problem in a context where there might be a parliamentary party at least twice its current size. More later.