THE leader of one of Britain’s biggest unions has urged union members to mount a concerted campaign to seize the Labour Party back from new Labour by flooding local party meetings and ensuring that more union-backed candidates win election nominations and constituency positions.

Derek Simpson, the former Communist joint general secretary of Amicus, said yesterday that union members should increase their activities within Labour “to reclaim our party”.

Amid a growing unrest in the union movement over the Government’s action in the firefighters’ dispute, Mr Simpson said: “I would urge members to go into branches, to step up their work within Labour and take this party back to what it used to be.”

He added: “We want to be engaging more, not less. If we are there in much greater numbers we can take back Labour” Mr Simpson’s call for a revolution within Labour is likely to be echoed by other union leaders as an increasingly organised opposition to new Labour develops. Mick Rix, the general secretary of Aslef, and Bob Crow, the general secretary of the Rail, Maritime and Transport union, have also joined the campaign to “reclaim the party”.

They, Mr Simpson, Andy Gilchrist, the general secretary of the Fire Brigades Union, and other senior union leaders are also part of a Left caucus within the union movement, working to advance common interests and trying to push a harder line within the TUC. Mr Simpson said that if the Government was serious about helping to resolve the fire dispute it would try to seek some agreement from other public service unions, through the TUC, that a high settlement would not be used as the benchmark for other claims.

“If I were a Conservative I’d be falling about laughing. The Government has picked a fight with a union with an enormous amount of respect from the public, with a lot of street credibility. This union won’t be broken. They are not afraid of fighting fires, they won’t mind standing on picket lines.

“People are saying that new Labour is falling out of favour but the new Labour bubble burst a while ago, it is just still expelling air. This Government lost its popularity with working people for not doing enough for them.”

The fire dispute is seen by many as a seminal point in Labour’s relations with the unions. Mr Simpson said: “Some may look back in the future at this point and say that was where new Labour’s decline started.”

The issues of public pay and employment rights are expected to be high on the unions’ agenda in coming months. John Monks, the TUC General Secretary, has said that many public sector workers believe that it is time they had a fair deal on pay.

Amicus staged a protest outside the CBI conference in Manchester yesterday to demand equal pay for women. Roger Lyons, its joint general secretary, said: “There was dissatisfaction in public services during the first Labour term because Labour kept to Conservative spending plans. Now money is being put in and people are also looking for a fair share in pay.”

• The Conservatives are exploring proposals to ban key public sector workers from going on strike. The work, which is being conducted at Conservative Central Office, will be finished in time for the next election and looks set to appear in the Tory manifesto.

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