The leaders of the 'Big Four' unions, Amicus, GMB, TGWU, and Unison - the trade-union 'mountains' - have recently made noises to suggest that they are about to go into labour. But so far they have not given birth even to the proverbial mouse.
They have had private meetings to draw up an 'alternative' trade-union version of the Labour manifesto for next year's General Election - that is, proposals they want to put into New Labour's manifesto. So far not much. And not enough.
By the time of the General Election, the Blair 'Labour' government will be eight years old. Through all that time it has not been a 'Labour' or working-class government even to the wretchedly minimal extent that previous Labour governments sometimes were. It has been government of the bosses by a bosses' government on behalf of the bosses.
To find anything that can reasonably be construed as being for the working class, you are driven to cite the miserably low minimum wage.
Most indicative of what this government is, in class terms, has been Blair's 'principled' fulfilment of the promise he made in the Daily Mail on the eve of the 1997 election that he would keep what he called 'the most restrictive labour laws in the western world' on the statute books.
Most of what makes for effective trade-unionism - the right of workers to take solidarity action, for example - is as illegal in Britain now as it was seven years ago.
The Labour Party itself has been stifled. The old pre-Blair Labour Party, in which there could be meaningful rank and file activity and some level of democracy, no longer exists.
The old trade union leaders, elected in the Thatcher years of defeat and demoralisation, backed the Blairite "coup" in the Labour Party.
Today, the unions are the only real element of the old Labour Party within Blair's party. They have a great deal of potential power there. They could mount and orchestrate a revolt against the party's entrenched Blairite bosses.
The coincidence that the unions are now under new, and on the face of it better, leaders, and the post-Iraq-war damage to Blair's credibility and status, has created the best chance in a decade for loosening and breaking the Blairites' grip on the party.
Will the trade union leaders take that chance? In their tough talk that the Blairites can no longer take union support for granted, are they serious? Or is it just a bargaining position from which to persuade Blair - or, for that matter, Blair's political other self, Gordon Brown - to throw them a sop or two in the 2005 manifesto?
Sops won't make this 'Labour government' any less of an anti-working-class government. Sops will not create a living working-class political organisation around the trade unions, as the old Labour Party, for all its faults and limitations, was.
It is significant that Tony Woodley, the new left-wing general secretary of the TGWU, has refused to join the Labour Representation Committee, which advocates the recreation of working-class political representation.
The unions should demand that their leaders pursue a serious fight for basic working-class policies inside the Labour Party - all the way to splitting with Blair and Brown and forming a new working-class party.
