Unite stopped a Tory majority government

From the Guardian......

In the many inquests into the Labour defeat, the one inside Unite will be specially worthwhile, more than £2m worthwile, roughly the amount the union spent to fund the Labour campaign.

Unite will be asking itself whether it got value for money and whether all its own unprecedented hard work, including for the the first time, the serious use of telephone canvassing of its members, had any impact.

This weekend the Unite political committee is looking at Unite's summary of the election, and whether the union's activism had any impact. The report admits "we would have liked to have said it was Unite wot won it, but we did not". But it does claim Unite did play a role in preventing a wipe-out, and may even have stopped the Tories winning an overall majority.

Unite identified 84 key seats on the basis of its membership concentrations, and the size of the majority being defended. This usually, though not exclusively, meant the Unite membership in the key seats exceeded the majority being defended, an opinion the Labour interim leader Harriet Harman incidentally endorsed at a private meeting with union leaders this week.
The results in these 84 seats were Conservative 56, Labour 25, Liberal Democrat 2, and Green 1.

The Unite campaign in the key seats, the report says "was based on the successful member-to-member approach pioneered by our sister union the United Steelworkers. In essence, it meant we contacted all our members in the seats we identified as key for Unite and the Labour Party to find out their voting history and intentions and key issues to build a dialogue with them ahead of the General Election.

"The means of communication were direct mails, emails and telephone calls through the virtual phone bank set up on the dedicated election website www.Unite4Labour.org

"The key seats were identified principally on the basis of comparing the parliamentary majorities being defended by Labour with the Unite membership in each seat."

The report claims " The final figure for strong Labour support amongst Unite members in those seats was 60 per cent. We know this figure to be accurate as it is based on the returns from our survey forms and the phone bank information. In the 25 Unite key seats held by Labour the average majority on May 6 was 2,870 compared to 2,974 in 2005. This represents a fall of just over 3 % which compares well with the national swing against Labour. Labour's victory in these seats effectively deprived the Tories of an overall majority.

"Of the 56 seats gained by the Tories the Liberal Democrat vote proved to be a significant barrier to Labour winning with that party's vote exceeding the Tory majority over Labour. It was only in three seats, where the Tory majority was less than the Liberal Democrat vote.
"Looking more closely at the top 10 key seats the average majority for Labour was 725 compared to an average of 2,903 in 2005. The average Unite membership in those seats was 2,441. Assuming 60 per cent of them voted Labour the 1,464 resulting average Labour vote per seat secured the majority for Labour by a factor of 2:1."

All this is self-evidently a pretty rough and not entirely ready analysis, but for those that say unions are now an organisational and political negative for Labour, these figures represent a challenge.

The scale of the unon's activity is also impressive. The union claims it sent over 1.9m letters from the union nationally and 2.5m emails. Over 51,800 phone calls were made through the Unite phone bank operation which is an average of over 1,100 calls per key seat.

"In the top 10 key seats over 219,000 direct mails were sent out and over 307,000 emails. In the most marginal seat of Hampstead and Kilburn, held by Labour with a majority of 42, over 18,000 direct mails were sent out, 19,000 emails and a contact rate of nearly 50 per cent was achieved on the phone bank to the nearly 1300 Unite members in the seat". Glenda Jackson, let Unite take a bow.

In Islington South 1,853 calls were made to Unite members and 1,585 in Poplar. Both seats saw increased Labour majorities.
In Birmingham Edgbaston, the seat synonymous with the Labour victory in 1997, and thereafter regarded as crucial to Labour's fortunes, Unite sent out 8 direct mails and 13 emails from October last year representing some 40,000 pieces of communication in total.

All this, in turn, may influence the way the union approaches future elections, including the Labour leadership contest.
In the past, union executives have tended to pronounce from on high that they support one candidate or another, before unions stuff a recommendation to this effect along with Labour's ballot paper, a recommendation that is then largely ignored.

But the Labour general secretary Ray Collins is even challenging the right of union leaderships to do this in the current leadership ballot. This is going down like a lead balloon with the unions, but if Unite high-ups do decide to back someone in the leadership election - and it then puts its phone bank resources behind that candidate - Unite could have some serious influence in the election.