´óÏó´«Ã½

The very nice lady who sat next to me at a fringe event last night was quite clear that Usdaw had the best giveaways on their stand. Their raisins kept us both going and she'd heard they were promising more and better today. I hope she's made it to their stand to find out.

I'd have to say though that Unite has caused more of a stir amongst other delegates.The warm welcome given to Edwina Hart by them last Wednesday night did nothing to settle the feathers ruffled by her emergence as a serious contender to replace Rhodri Morgan when he finally announces he's going to step down.

Unite's top man in Wales, Andy Richards, recieved her with a hug and a kiss as she arrived to speak to a meeting of union activists. She got a warm round of applause before even beginning to address them and also before the camera left the room. The implication, from the top man at least, was clear - she's one of ours.

I gather a number of emails have been flying around since then, expressing concern about old fashioned union stitch ups and so on.

One "Labour source" told the Western Mail they'd found the spectacle "very disturbing". -Not sure we can we still use the singular really given we already have the Sharks and the Jets - you decide which one is which - and probably the Harts too. Not so says Jeff Cuthbert AM in a letter to the newspaper today: "I think this person has very little knowledge of the party's traditions and certainly no feeling for the union movement". In other words, union power is here to stay, like it or not.

Just why this warm welcome caused such a stir among the Carwyn Jones and Huw Lewis camps is made absolutely clear by some figures quoted by the ever-well-informed Lee Waters over on . He cites a fascinating breakdown of the relative size of each union whose votes will make up the "third" electoral college - the first and second being AM/MPs and party members.

And who's top of the list?

Unite - with 100,450 members eligible to vote, dwarfing the next largest, Unison Wales Labour Link, with 52,000 and the GMB with 51,000.

Discomfiting? You betcha. The other unions are considerably smaller. Usdaw have 22,000 members, CWU 14,000, right down to the Musicians' Union, who were much in evidence at last night's Welsh Night, with 2,000 and TSSA with 1,000. In total, affiliated organisations and societies have just under 300,000 members eligible to vote, so Unite could potentially deliver a third of that college. To put it into perspective and if our maths is right, if all its members voted the same way, it would deliver the equivalent of 20 AMs or MPs.

Of course, they won't do that. The unions will ballot their members, and cast their votes according to the proportion who voted for each candidate. The days of the block vote are long gone.

But if Mrs Hart can take the lion's share of the Unite vote and then make substantial inroads into the Unison and GMB too, then it could go a long way to offsetting any lead that Carwyn Jones is building up among MPs.

The more you look at it, the more intriguing it gets.

• Bookmark with:
• |
• |
• |
• |
• - What's this?