Breaking its links with the unions will do nothing to refound the Labour Party.

What is it with Ed Milliband? This isn’t a rhetorical question I’d really like someone to tell me why he is quite so useless.

Things have been going well for the Labour leader of late, the phone hacking scandal has shaken the coalition to its core and silenced his critics within the party. A recent operation on his adenoids has, so we’re told, changed his voice into one that sounds a little less like that of an earnest sixth former and a lot more like that of a potential prime minister.

Then with the neat facility for snatching disaster from the jaws of victory we have come to expect during his year in charge he has set in motion plans to blow every advantage he has accrued once the conference season gets under way.

Ed Milliband, dubbed Red Ed by the papers for his links with the trades unions now plans to push through proposals to limit the influence exerted over the party by the unions at the party conference in Liverpool next month. This would see the union vote reduced to below 50% and their role in choosing the party leader curtailed, even though it was the union vote that helped Ed Milliband beat his brother David to the top job.

Speaking to the Guardian last week an unnamed source close to the Labour leader said : ‘We cannot go on with a system in which unions have 50% of the vote at conference and just three general secretaries control four fifths of that vote.’

The same source went on to say that ‘Ed wants to do this through consensus’ but that he is ‘not going to give the unions a veto on change.’

I’m not sure whether his desire to bring about this divorce by consensual means if possible means that Ed Milliband is sweetly naive or dangerously arrogant; either way the consequences could be disastrous. The first consequence is that the unions will withhold the details of their three million contributors, making it impossible for the party to contact a large body of likely supporters directly. Then there is the small matter of the extent to which contributions made by trades unionists either through direct membership of the party or paying the political levy on their union membership are keeping Labour from the poor house; if they disappear in large numbers the party is bust.

Whatever happens this will almost certainly plunge the Labour Party into a bitter internal wrangle that could last until the 2012 party conference and beyond distracting it from the proper work of an opposition, biffing the government over the head at every opportunity.

Speaking to the Guardian the unnamed party source said ‘Currently the unions are playing hardball but they need to wake up’, somebody certainly needs to wake up but I don’t think it’s the union leaders. It’s Ed who we used to think was red and he’d better do it quickly.

At the moment Ed Milliband for all his undoubted intellect and seemingly genuine desire to do the right thing just doesn’t seem to get it. Under the guise of the recent ‘Refounding Labour’ consultation from whence these proposals originate a miserable clique of New Labour throwbacks are seeking a mandate to continue trampling over the party’s traditions and values.

Their vision is for Labour to become a party that doesn’t have members with a say in the policies on which it campaigns, just a network of neutered ‘supporters’ who get an occasional email from party HQ telling them how marvellous the leadership is and that they should stop worrying their fluffy little heads over what the party stands for. The arrogance with which this vision is pushed forward is shocking, I know of at least one constituency Labour Party where the members weren’t even allowed to discuss ‘Refounding Labour’ the recommendations made by the paid party officials were simply rubber stamped and sent off.

At the best of times this would be a stupid way to behave leading to the sort of decline in active party membership seen during the Blair years; these aren’t anywhere near to being the best of times, Labour is financially and ideologically bankrupt so by endorsing the conclusions of this skewed consultation Ed Milliband risks leading his party down the road to utter disaster.

The old heavy industries might be all but dead and the public sector might be about to take a drastic hit due to the budget cuts, but the game is far from over for the trades unions in fact they could well be on the verge of a renaissance, making maintaining strong links with them something that should be a top priority for the leadership of the Labour Party.

The union’s experience of organising local campaigns in workplaces can easily be translated into organising similar activity in communities, a point that has not been lost on some of the union leaders of whom the people advising Ed Milliband are so dismissive. This would allow the left to hijack the Tory vanity project that is the ‘Big Society’ and use it to build a strong grassroots political movement aimed at creating a fairer society.

If Ed Milliband can’t see this and prefers instead to appease a remote managerial rump of New Labour fanatics who hold the membership in contempt then you have to question his political judgement. In the short term taking this route might preserve his position as leader until 2015, but it won’t win Labour the election held then or give the party a long term future.

‘What a disgrace!’- Feeble Ed ducks the fight that could save Labour from irrelevance

This week pubic sector workers across the UK went on strike and, despite the best efforts of the Daily Mail to persuade us otherwise, the world didn’t come to an end. There were no scuffles on the picket lines and a march through London organised by the TUC resulted in just thirty arrests, rather less, I imagine, than on an average Saturday during the football season.

What happened instead was that, as Brendan Barber of the TUC put it at a rally in Exeter, people came together to protest quietly and peacefully about ‘The living standards of low and medium paid public sector workers being hammered in the name of reducing the deficit. Meanwhile those who caused the crisis go scot free.’

An event further from an orgy of militant anarchism it would be hard to imagine, participants in the London march even picked up their own litter. As the late great Gil Scot Heron might have put it the revolution won’t tidy up after itself.

Let’s knock two myths propagated by the right wing media and the coalition on the head before we go any further. The public sector workers who took to the streets on Thursday weren’t doing so to defend ‘gold plated pensions’; because for the most part they don’t have the sort of gold plated salaries that would produce such pensions. As for the wider public not supporting their cause, I’d say there is more concern and anger over the way private sector employers failed to invest in their pension funds when times were good and then pulled the rug from under the feet of their staff when they turned bad.

There is much in this strike to support, not least since it turns on the issue of fairness which is at the root of how the British see the world, and yet Labour leader Ed Milliband has chosen to stay on the sidelines.

In a speech to the conference of the Local Government Association (LGA) given on the day of the strikes Milliband said that he ‘understood the anger of workers who feel they are being singled out by a reckless and provocative government’, but the he believed that taking strike action was a ‘mistake’ and that it would not help public sector workers to ‘win the argument’ over pensions.

The responses from the unions were swift and angry; Christine Blower of the National Union of Teachers said with the sort of irony that could chill the most riotous of classrooms that it would have been ‘nice if Ed Milliband had felt he could have supported what we’re doing.’ Mary Boustead of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL) said that the Labour leader’s response was a ‘disgrace’ and that he ‘should be ashamed of himself’; before adding ‘I’m glad we’re (meaning the ATL) not affiliated to Labour.’

Later in his Birmingham speech Ed Milliband condemned the government for declaring their final position while negotiations were still ongoing and described their attitude towards public sector workers as ‘high handed and arrogant.’

Too little, too late; as a sad sounding John McDonnell MP put it the public sector unions had ‘expected more’ from the Labour leader; once again Ed Milliband had failed to deliver. It probably didn’t help that he made the point that he didn’t support the strikes five times in a weirdly robotic TV interview that brought back unwelcome memories of Gordon Brown’s odder moments in front of the cameras.

Trades unions, by their very nature, are able to organise large scale campaigns that capture the attention of the media and the public alike, on this occasion they are linked to a much wider movement than seems at first apparent. Thursday’s strikes were about more than how much public sector workers get paid in retirement, they were about the sort of society we want to live in. Do we want a society where people work together for the common good or one where the market drives us into endless and divisive competition?

All across the country individuals and communities are taking action to defend services they see being threatened with destruction by a government that is making cuts in line with the dictates of a flawed ideology rather than sensible economics. These may attract less attention than Mark Serwotka leading 100.00 civil servants out on strike, but they still share a common cause.

What is needed is an organisation capable of drawing these disparate strands together into a single coherent campaign. That could and should be the job of the Labour Party.

So why isn’t it? In part it is because the Labour Party as reinvented by Tony Blair and his followers feels awkward around the unions, they’re happy to take their money but don’t want their political input. The largest share of the blame though rests with Milliband himself, as has been the way with weak leaders since the dawn of political time he lets the headlines of tomorrow’s newspapers dictate his policies.

Real leaders do exactly what the name suggests; they lead the way. Sometimes that means walking head first into a storm of criticism and fighting battles that are hard and often thankless, what it doesn’t mean is sitting on the fence while your aides find a way of triangulating things to get the Mail to say something nice about you.

In an interview given to the New Statesman PCS leader Mark Serwotka said of this dispute and, I suspect the struggles of the unions in general ‘if you fight in life, you’re not guaranteed to win. But if you never fight, you lose every time.’ That sounds like advice Ed Milliband should take to heart, he should either gird his loins for a fight to defend the things so many people believe to be under threat from a government composed of individuals who are too rich to care; or step aside and let someone else take on the job.

Looking for an alternative? So is the Labour Party.

There are times these days when it feels like you’re living in two different countries at the same time. In one people are marching in protest against cuts to government spending that will destroy jobs and devastate communities, in the other people are willing to sleep on the pavement all night to be the first in line to buy the next generation iPad. Truly these are strange times indeed.

The march took place in London yesterday and was organised by the Trades Union Council (TUC), in the words of Dave Prentis of UNISON it was going to be ‘an absolutely incredible demonstration of ordinary working people saying this coalition has got to stop cutting jobs and public services.’

These sentiments were echoed a day earlier by Labour leader Ed Milliband who said the ‘voices of the mainstream majority’ would be making themselves heard through what was billed as a ‘march for the alternative.’

Things didn’t quite turn out as planned, the TUC march was an exemplary display of dignified, reasoned protest; unfortunately it was hijacked along with much of the media coverage by witless anarchists for whom breaking the windows of a branch of Starbucks counts as a legitimate political comment. There was also the small fact that between the sound of breaking glass and that of righteous indignation nobody seemed clear about just what the alternative they were marching for might look like.

For Len Mc Cluskey of UNITE it means ‘economic growth through tax fairness, so for example, if the government were brave enough it could tackle the tax avoidance that robs the British tax payer of £25 billion a year.’

A fair point to make and an even better place to start sorting out our economic woes than closing libraries and old folks homes, the line about our ‘all being in this together’ might have worn so thin you could read the small print on a mobile phone contract through it, but the truth remains that if the government got the likes of Vodaphone to pay the tax they owe the cuts wouldn’t need to be so deep or so divisive.

The trouble with tax though is that neither this government nor its Labour predecessor has been honest about it, for New Labour it was something to be raised by stealth and for the Tories it is just plain wicked. Neither side had the guts to admit that even though tycoons, trades people and the rest of us might have to pay a little more up front a fair tax system is the best, probably the only in fact, way of creating a fair society.

Quite how you sell that concept in a culture where the tedious Madonna tribute act that is Lady Gaga has nine million followers on Twitter and sensible people are willing to queue all night to buy an iPad that is a little better than the one they’ve already got is another matter. As one of the people waiting in Oxford Street told the BBC’s Newsbeat programme ‘without marketing nothing is going to sell.’ Quite so, the iPad has brilliant marketing behind it; sadly the idea of paying a little more to live in a society that is fairer and safer for all doesn’t.

What it has behind it is a trade’s union movement that is still largely taken for granted by the Labour Party. Labour leader Ed Milliband makes all the right noises, on Friday he talked about the government practicing the sort of ‘politics of division’ that were a feature of the Thatcher years and the need to defend ‘common bonds’ such as those established through the NHS and Sure Start.

The party’s next manifesto would, he pledged, be ‘as good as the ideas that come from the public.’ Before your all rush to the barricades it might be worth noting that these brave words were spoken at a truly cringe worthy ‘policy forum’ at which ‘handpicked’ members of the public mouthed pre-scripted questions to which Milliband gave long winded non-answers.

The whole tacky performance complete with celebrity supporters on hand to help proceedings along and its general air of patronising blandness suggested that the shallow spin of the Blair years is alive and well with a dash of Milliband’s own awkward earnestness thrown in to leaven the lump. Baron Frankenstein might have been proud of the resulting monster, but anyone who cares about there being a voice in British politics for ordinary working people would have despaired as they recognised it as yet another attempt by the party to find a way of not talking about something they have been conditioned to think of as wicked and dangerous.

What they are trying so hard not to talk about is socialism. Not as an impenetrable theory, but as a living, breathing alternative to an economic model that sees that market as being our only hope. A means of creating a new political settlement that responds to the ideas of fairness that are intrinsic to the British character.

They might be dangerously wrong on the economic front but David Cameron’s Tories have got one thing right; they have realised that in times like this the centre no longer holds. When the going gets tough a party or a government has to stand by its core principles to survive, which is why George Osborne’s budget this week took them back to their roots as the party of capital.

The old Blairite methods of keeping the city sweet and triangulating like fury to win over floating voters no longer work. To survive let alone prosper Labour has to start talking about the alternative to leaving everything to the whims of the market, not in two years time once it has finished rooting around in its navel for fluff; but now and with more fire and urgency than it showed at Friday’s sorry policy event.

If he can’t do so Ed Milliband’s tenure as leader will be a short and unhappy one, the Blairites will take back control, the spin machine will be cranked up to full power again and the party that used to speak for the people will be condemned to perpetual opposition.