Can Keir Starmer take on Len McCluskey and the unions?

It might seem from an outsider’s perspective that the Labour leader is in trouble now, writes Sean O’Grady - but all he really needs to do is keep up momentum

Len McCluskey’s frustrations with Sir Kier have reached a financial tipping point (Getty)

To borrow an old insult sometimes bandied around in the traditionally fractious Labour Party, Len McCluskey is not as nice as he looks. Or at least that might well be the conclusion drawn by the current leadership as Mr McCluskey proposes a 10 per cent cut in his union, Unite’s contributions to the Labour Party. 

As the country’s biggest union and as the party’s largest single donor, Unite’s move matters; and even three or four years from a general election it will make a difference to Labour’s ability to campaign on issues that concern Mr McCluskey’s members. In 2019, Unite gave some £3m to Labour’s doomed election campaign, and a total of £7m during the year in total.

Next year will see important elections in Scotland (crucially for Scottish Labour), in Wales, in London and across many municipalities.

Mr McCluskey’s beefs with the current leadership of the party are well known, if not predictable, and the Unite leader signalled in August that his organisation was reviewing where its members’ funds were best directed politically. Now the frustrations have spilled over into a clear warning to Sir Keir Starmer of another old proverb, associated with the union’s role in the Labour Party: “He who pays the piper calls the tune.”

To put things at their simplest, Mr McCluskey still misses Jeremy Corbyn, to whom he was exceptionally supportive. Difficult as it may be to credit at this distance, before last December’s general election Mr McCluskey argued that Mr Corbyn, then 70, could remain as leader even if he lost the election, and he certainly took his time in moving off the stage.

Against accusations of the antisemitism that had become painfully evident in parts of the party, Mr McCluskey maintained it was “mood music”, designed by his enemies to discredit Mr Corbyn’s leadership. More recently Mr McCluskey also made plain his disapproval about the party spending considerable sums in legal fees and damages to close down an internal dispute about a Panorama documentary into antisemitism: “So we shouldn’t have paid them anything”. His critics counter-claim that the union does much the same when it suits it.

And on the biggest issue aside from Covid, Brexit, Mr McCluskey was fiercely opposed to Labour taking its support for a second referendum, or people’s vote, into the last election campaign. The man most associated with that policy and the Europhile tendency, Sir Keir, is now party leader. Mr McCluskey’s favoured successor, Rebecca Long-Bailey, was decisively beaten in the one member one vote election, and after an ill-advised tweet about Palestine is no longer even in the shadow cabinet. Other heroes of the Corbynist revolution have been marginalised, and Angela Rayner has positioned herself as a loyal figure on the sift left. The rout is complete, and Mr McCluskey hasn’t enjoyed it.

Though he doesn’t quite admit it publicly, Mr McCluskey must be dismayed at how rapidly the left’s hold over the party and its institutions has been loosened. Momentum and the new wave of “Corbynista” members have shifted remarkably meekly towards what might be termed Sir Keir’s post-Blairism, a gentler brand of social democracy than Mr Blair’s. 

So far as can be discerned this soon, Sir Keir appears keener on intervention, more sceptical of markets and more impatient of inequalities than was the last person to win a general election for Labour (back in 2005). Sir Keir will probably prove less enthusiastic than Mr Corbyn about restoring the power and immunities lost by the unions over the past four decades, or indeed giving them back the 90 per cent of the votes at Labour conference they once commanded.

But where will Mr McCluskey’s money go instead? There doesn’t appear much appetite for funding far left parties instead, let alone disaffiliating from Labour. As Mr McCluskey remarks, in a slightly found-edged way: “The Labour Party is our party”. The union might choose to experiment with the various leftish communities and alternative media sites that have sprung up online, in a vague echo of Barack Obama’s successful election campaigns. The Black Lives Matter movement, Extinction Rebellion and campaigns for minority rights could also ably attract the support of the unions, and not just Unite. Mr McCluskey might also choose to financially support the 34 Labour MPs self-identifying in the Socialist Campaign Group. There’s also a Unite Group of sponsored MPs, which is rather less well organised as a caucus; it includes Lisa Nandy, shadow foreign secretary, and Lindsay Hoyle, the Speaker.

As for Sir Keir, a row with Labour’s paymaster general will do him little harm. Being seen to stand up to such a powerful internal interest group makes him look strong, and puts into sharp relief the Conservatives’ links with big business (particularly property developers, oligarchs and hedge funds). Besides, Sir Keir knows that he is the unions’ only hope of kicking the Conservatives out of power, and the more popular he and his reformed Labour Party grows in the country, the less leverage even Mr McCluskey will be able to exert over personalities and policy.