The vote that could ruin Keir Starmer – and the Labour Party with him

Unite has driven Labour into an electoral wilderness during the last decade. The forthcoming internal union election could define the party’s future, writes Peter Mandelson

Len McCluskey, current general secretary of Unite the Union (Getty)

The great unmentionable in Labour’s chances of recovery is the long dark shadow cast over the party by Unite the Union, the party’s largest donor and power broker. It is time for those who care deeply about the party’s future to speak out.

In the coming weeks, an internal union election will be taking place to choose Len McCluskey’s successor as general secretary of Unite. Four candidates look set to be on the ballot paper. Three are different varieties of Leninist and Trotskyist. Steve Turner, who was officially endorsed by the hard left grouping the United Left, will battle it out with national organiser Sharon Graham and Unite’s current head of legal, McCluskey’s favoured candidate, Howard Beckett. They have so far failed to agree who is best to challenge the one serious candidate, Gerard Coyne, who is promising to clean up the union and root out the mismanagement and corruption that have become endemic in the union.

This is not just about Labour, though. With £300m in its general fund, Unite could be a huge force for good for working people, using its collective strength to promote fairer rewards, better job security and equality of respect for those it purports to represent in the workplace. This is particularly true of the private sector, where union membership has fallen to catastrophically low levels, despite intermittent signs of improvement in the last couple of years.

When Unite was formed in May 2007 as a result of the amalgamation of the engineers’, electricians’ and transport workers’ unions, it was hoped that this mega-union would reverse the long era of trade union decline since the 1980s and build fresh, modern strength for those in Britain’s increasingly fragmented and precarious labour market. But the reverse has happened. The clique which captured control of Unite under McCluskey prioritised hard left Labour factional politics over its members’ employment interests.

As Unite’s power base inside Labour has expanded, its workplace effectiveness has shrunk. Instead of using its political influence to promote policy and legislative changes that could improve the lives of working people, the Unite leadership has laid siege to the only available vehicle for delivering these changes: an electable Labour party.

More than any other single force or individual, Unite has driven Labour into an electoral wilderness during the last decade. It has deployed large sums of money and affiliated scores of union branches to constituency parties so as to pocket candidate selections and exert leverage over Labour MPs. As reported by BBC Newsnight, the West Midlands police are investigating the funnelling in 2018 of secret union slush funds to hard-left organisers who schemed and conspired to remove Labour MPs opposed by Unite leaders.

By channelling millions of pounds of members’ cash into an array of hard-left campaigns, think tanks, networks, digital platforms, publications and activities over the last decade, Unite has created and cultivated the activist base that contributed to the election and sustaining of Jeremy Corbyn as party leader.

Through Corbyn, McCluskey’s hard left cyphers and cronies were parachuted into positions at every level of Labour’s structures while taking over the party’s rule making and policy making through control of the national executive committee, including all disciplinary procedures. This proved vital in the protection of the army of antisemites that entered Labour’s ranks under Corbyn. Unite apparatchik Karie Murphy took over the running of Corbyn’s Commons office while another McCluskey lieutenant, Jennie Formby, became Labour’s general secretary. Communist fellow travellers, Andrew Murray and Seamus Milne, completed the top line up – all owed allegiance to Unite’s hard left and benefited from the political, legal and financial largesse the union provided. Together, they were central to Labour’s disastrous election strategy and performance in 2019 when Labour was wiped out in its heartlands.

No doubt McCluskey and his henchmen will argue that they are entitled to their political views and to promote “union policy”. But they swept aside the interests and views of Unite’s members in pursuit of their hard left agenda.

This peaked in the involvement of Unite’s leaders in a case brought by then Labour MP Anna Turley against an extremist blogger’s libelling of her – during six days of trial at the Royal Courts of Justice, instead of helping Turley, Unite shockingly backed the blogger which cost Unite members £2m in avoidable legal costs and damages. This sort of behaviour meant Unite’s leaders could barely deliver their own members’ votes in the general election – they split almost evenly between Labour and Conservative.

The future of Unite is certainly at stake in this election. But so is Labour’s. Through Unite’s affiliation and funding of Labour, the party has given a powerful political foothold to a hard left organisation that has nothing in common with Labour’s democratic aims and ideals. Indeed, Beckett in particular has been deeply involved in the antisemitism rife in Labour under Corbyn and has been praised by the editor of the hard left website, The Canary, for offering “moral and practical support” to those who were guilty of attacking former Jewish Labour MP Luciana Berger and other colleagues.

Beckett makes no secret of his determination to use Unite’s financial and political muscle to coerce Labour into toeing the union’s line if he is elected. Something will have to give.

When Beckett launched his campaign video this week it featured a number of handwritten messages held aloft to excite his base. They included: “Take on the political establishment,” “Now is not the time to step back,” “Palestine,” “Priti Patel,” “Racist,” “Peter Mandelson,” “Unite money.” And finally his sinister pledge to Unite’s membership: “Starmer.” “Finished.”

Should Beckett win, it will not only be Keir Starmer going up in flames, it will jeopardise the Labour movement’s entire national standing. Beckett is relying on the usual 10 per cent hard-core turnout to give him victory. Hopefully more than that will ride to the union’s and Labour’s rescue.