This is no mere tiff

John Prescott is wrong. Speaking about his spat with his former union, the RMT, he told Sir David Frost yesterday: "This is just a flurry. It doesn't affect the relationships between the Labour Party and the trade unions." On the contrary, it should and it does. For a start, Mr Prescott's own actions show that something big is happening. The Deputy Prime Minister has been a member of the RMT and its predecessor, the National Union of Seamen, for 47 years. He entered politics as a union activist.

Unlike many Labour MPs who regard their union membership card as a mildly tedious necessity, Mr Prescott wears his union credentials as a badge of honour. To resign from the RMT within three years of his golden jubilee was plainly heart-wrenching.

That is not all. A number of unions have either sharply reduced their payments to the Labour Party or are debating whether to do so. What is happening, then, is no mere tiff. It is getting close to a serious bust-up. But is it terminal? The real issue is whether Labour and the unions will soon draw together again, or drift further apart.

This question is usually analysed from Labour's point of view. Before the 1997 election, Stephen Byers, then a rising star, told journalists over a fish dinner in Blackpool that the party would soon get the unions off its back.

The block vote would be abolished and Labour would be owned entirely by individual members. He was assumed to be speaking for Tony Blair. Yet the party has done nothing since then to cast off the block vote. There is a good reason for this. Labour nowadays gains much from its union links, and suffers little. In the Eighties, the party was widely thought (often wrongly) to buckle at the first whiff of grapeshot from union militants. Those days have gone. Mr Blair can be accused of many things, but cowering before noisy shop stewards is not one of them.

Yet the benefits of union support still matter. They remain a useful source of money, even if they pay a far smaller share of Labour's national income than they used to do. They also provide a great deal of practical local support at election time. There is one further benefit to Labour, or at least its leadership, to which nobody will readily admit. It concerns the current function of block votes at party conferences. They used to provide a moderating ballast. They were vital in the Eighties, first in preventing Tony Benn from replacing Denis Healey as deputy leader, and then in helping Neil Kinnock to defeat Trotskyist infiltrators.

That ballast is no longer needed. The extension of one-member-one-vote to local constituencies has been the death knell of the far-Left. Union block votes are no longer needed to keep the party sane. Instead they serve a different purpose: to enable the party leadership to downgrade Labour conferences.

This is because block votes make an obvious mockery of party conference as a democratic forum. The upshot is that Labour's leadership is able to ignore with impunity any conference decision it wants. It can dismiss the occasional defeat as a perverse decision by an unrepresentative gathering. Far from imposing greater discipline on Mr Blair and his colleagues, the union link actually gives ministers more freedom to do what they want.

The real case for breaking the link is not that it would help Labour, but that it would help the unions. They would have more money to campaign on particular issues. They would be free to make common cause when necessary with the Conservatives or Liberal Democrats.

There is one final potential benefit, the biggest of all. At the moment ministers feel they must bend over backwards to prove that union money does not "buy" favours. If the link were broken, such anti-union contortions would be unnecessary. Ministers would be able to consider union representations on their merits. By ending their donations and giving up their block votes, the unions would almost certainly end up with more influence, not less.