Alan Johnson, the Education Secretary, is now being spoken of variously as the likely next deputy leader of the Labour Party or as the Blairite challenger to Gordon Brown.
He does not have the typical New Labour biography. He was brought up by his older Andrew sister from the age of twelve after his father left the family and his mother died. He worked for a while in Tescos after leaving school without qualifications.
On joining the Post Office he became an activist in the Union of Communication Workers (UCW). After a merger this was imaginatively re-christened the Communication Workers' Union.
While active in the UCW he had a reputation as a militant and led an occupation of Whitechapel sorting office just as John Prescott earned his reputation as a leader of a seafarers' strike. Johnson: more articulate and less ludicrous than the deputy prime minister
He became a full time official of the union and was elected General Secretary as the candidate of the right and the soft left. At UCW educational schools at the time these were the people who were telling branch officials that
strikes were wrong and
dangerous. They frequently
pointed the example of Arthur Scargill and the miners as an illustration. Johnson and his supporters were greatly influenced by this defeat and it explains a lot about his later political evolution. He found himself coming into conflict with his executive members who had a more class struggle orientation. He was a Blairite from the very beginning. He was the sole union leader to support Blair's idea of dropping Clause 4 of Labour's constitution, which called for "the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange".
Blair headhunted him and forced him into a safe seat in Hull West in 1997.
Blair made him Minister for Higher Education and the former working class kid was responsible for winning a parliamentary majority for the introduction of tuition fees.
As secretary for work and pensions he agreed that existing public-sector workers would still be allowed to retire at 60 in exchange for new recruits working until they reached 65. This was a compromise deal with the union bureaucrats to avoid public sector strikes before last year's elections.
The thread that runs through Johnson's political career is his enthusiasm to be in the vanguard of Blair's anti-working class "reforms" from tuition fees to PFI.
His reward has been his appointment to high office for providing the trade unionist "cover" for the neo-liberal elements of government policy. That's exactly what Prescott has done since 1997.
Johnson is more articulate and less ludicrous than the deputy prime minister but he is just as committed to the Blairite project.
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