Who now remembers Bill Jordan? Still a member of the House of Lords, Baron Jordan – when President of the Amalgamated Engineering Union (AEU) – saved the Labour Party from itself in the 1980s.
Of course there were others, John Golding, Diane Hayter, Roger Godsiff and too many others to mention. Rescue – unlike salvation – is a collective endeavour.
But the thing about Bill was that he didn’t simply get it – that the working classes need a government to represent them – he acted on it, shifting his union behind the forces of change and powering Neil Kinnock’s reforms of the Labour Party.
So, who still remembers Bill Jordan? Those who still understand the true purpose of the Labour Party: winning elections.
The foundation of the party was a decisive moment – a rejection both of alliances with and within the Liberal Party (something the miners favoured) and of the notion of extra-parliamentary action.
There was much furore about Hugh Gaitskell’s attempt to change Clause IV of Labour’s constitution – and Blair’s success in doing that very thing – but no-one has ever challenged Clause I (Name and objects):
This organisation shall be known as “The Labour Party” (hereinafter referred to as “the party”).
Its purpose is to organise and maintain in Parliament and in the country a political Labour Party.
The very purpose of the Labour Party was, according to its founders – the unions, the Fabians, the progressives, the feminists – winning elections.
No-one has challenged that purpose – until now, when Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters scorn the central aim, or object, of winning.
Take Jon Lansman, a key player in Momentum – the movement who told me: “Democracy gives power to people, ‘Winning’ is the small bit that matters to political elites who want to keep power themselves.”
Nothing could be a greater anathema to Keir Hardie, or to Bill Jordan. The question is who will defend Labour’s legacy as a left-of-centre party obsessed with gaining power rather than purifying internal ideology?
The right to join a union. Paid bank holidays by right, on top of four weeks paid holiday. The National Minimum Wage. Maternity, paternity and adoption rights.
All were guaranteed by legislation passed by Blair’s Labour government. The key words? “Legislation” and “government”. Without winning elections no government, and no legislation.
As in the eighties, the answer is the unions. There is a very simple reason why and it is easy to set out.
The industrial wing of the labour movement acted in the eighties because it saw that the parliamentary wing could be lost – and lost for good.
How much more is that the case today? The unions are much weaker and the Labour Party itself seems set on self-destruction. Nothing is forever, but that currently seems to apply more appropriately to the existence of the Labour Party itself, rather than its seizure by an unrepresentative ultraleft rump.
The lesson of history, though, is that the fundamentals of the Labour Party will reassert themselves.
Currently, the members – thanks to Ed Miliband’s extremely damaging changes to the rules – hold the whip hand.
It is important to remember that for the first 18 years of Labour’s existence they didn’t even exist – only in 1918 was individual membership established, previously it was collective.
From 1900 until 1918 there were unions and an increasing number of MPs.
The alliance of those two parts of the movement could yet save Labour from itself. Remember Bill Jordan!