| Abstract: | The connection between trade unions and parties of the left is traditionally close across Europe. In Britain the link is more than close: it is intimate, defining, and constitutive of what the Labour Party is and has been since its inception. This link allowed the party to survive during bad times and helped it to govern during good times, but during the 1970s it became less helpful, as policies backed by the unions not only failed to work but were also repudiated by union members themselves in what came to be known as the "winter of discontent" in 1979. New Labour was therefore built on the understanding that its past connection to the unions, and hence to a particular sort of "class politics," needed to be rethought and renegotiated. It is the new defining feature of the Labour Party. |
