The cash for honours crisis provides further illustration, if further illustration were needed, of New Labour’s dedication to favours not fairness. It underlines this government’s abiding orientation to big business and the rich. More fundamentally, the story, as it has unfolded, illuminates the main parties’ drive towards the Eldorado of state funding and New Labour’s sustained attempt to downgrade its financial and political relationship with the trade unions. The view that powerful, independent trade unions are a reactionary constraint on the efficiency of the market and intruders of dubious legitimacy in decision-making inside modern political parties is deeply embedded in New Labour’s neo-liberal psyche. For Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, their party’s historic entanglement with the unions constitutes an impediment to its role as the party of globalisation; an obstacle to independent and opportunist development of party policy by party leaders; an electoral liability; and if, despite the trade union albatross, Labour is still lucky enough to achieve electoral success, a hindrance to an efficient business-friendly government.

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