Skip to main content

Len McCluskey interview: Extraordinary times in politics

Leader of Britain’s biggest trade union LEN McCLUSKEY talks to Morning Star editor Ben Chacko about the transformation of Labour under Corbyn, party unity and the importance of trade unions reaching out to newly politicised young people

LEN McCLUSKEY is proud to be addressing the Not One Day More march and rally called by the People’s Assembly today against the Tory government.

The recently re-elected leader of Britain’s biggest trade union is a man who knows the politics of protest can change the world — and has short shrift for those who “dismiss it as pointless.

“I’m one of those people who believes in demonstrations, in direct action, in coming out onto the streets,” he tells me. “The People’s Assembly is a fantastic organisation. Unite has supported it from the outset.

“Rallies like this express the anger that people feel, but also the enthusiasm. And the enthusiasm people felt at Jeremy Corbyn’s election campaign needs to continue, so all demonstrations of this kind are a good thing.

“All of this builds and holds the attention of working people as to the falseness of this government.”

That politics, of the street and the workplace rather than the game played in Westminster and Millbank by career politicians and media pundits, saw a dramatic revival in Labour’s election campaign — where open-air rallies and mass mobilisation of hundreds of thousands of activists saw Labour pile millions of votes on top of its 2015 total and win its highest share of the vote for 47 years.

“I’ve never seen rallies like it,” McCluskey enthuses. “It’s extraordinary. We have to tap into that social movement. We need to make sure it’s something we’re very much part of in terms of bringing down the Tories.”

That, of course, is the point of today’s demo. But now Theresa May has cobbled together a deal with the Democratic Unionist Party, is it realistic to expect the government to fall?

“It’s going to be difficult to prise them away from power,” he admits.

“But you’ve got to be ready. That’s why Jeremy is right to say Labour is on a permanent election footing, a permanent campaign.

“He plans to visit, to target, 73 Tory marginals because you never know what can happen. They say a week’s a long time in politics but especially now we have such a volatile situation.

“This whole issue of the Good Friday Agreement — is that at risk?”

DUP sources have been scathing about May — with one remarking that her aides could not find Northern Ireland on a map. And many Westminster pundits will have had to Google the party and what it stands for in the three weeks since Labour demolished the Tories’ majority.

Not so McCluskey. “Unite is the largest union in Northern Ireland and many of our members will have voted DUP. But they didn’t vote to prop up a Tory government whose austerity has destroyed Northern Ireland.

“In 2014-16 alone we lost 6,000 manufacturing jobs there. Six thousand! Workplaces decimated, at Michelin, at Gallaher, in Ballymena and Bombardier,” he says angrily.

“Where was this government then with its £1 billion? They couldn’t care less.

“And now we see the reaction in Wales, in Scotland, in the regions of England — it’s not that people don’t want to see investment in Northern Ireland but they’re saying ‘what about us?’

“A billion pounds would go a long way in the north-east, in the northwest, in the Midlands. It could help regenerate our industries, which is desperately needed.

“So there’s no doubt in my mind that we can use the DUP deal as a way of exposing the hypocrisy of this government. The cuts they are making to local government grants in working-class communities, in many areas the deepest hurt is still to be felt. A resentment about what the Tories have just done is going to grow.”

Combined with Labour’s transformation into the biggest party in western Europe and its stunning electoral advances in the face of wall-to-wall Establishment hostility, that makes a government headed by a socialist prime minister a realistic prospect for the first time in decades.

“I will shout it from the rooftops: Unite has been completely vindicated in the support we gave to Jeremy and everyone who backed him has been vindicated.”

Not only did Unite endorse Corbyn’s campaign in 2015, it — together with most unions — rallied to his side during the 2016 “chicken coup” by backstabbing MPs and McCluskey himself frequently spoke out in defence of the often embattled leader, something that has reinforced his status as a bogeyman to the billionaire press and the Labour right.

Such was the desperation to unseat McCluskey and thus mortally wound Corbyn that the challenge for the Unite leadership mounted by Gerard Coyne and backed by significant sections of the Parliamentary Labour Party sank to lows rarely seen in union leadership contests — railing against the union’s officials and activities in the Murdoch press and conjuring up all the stereotypes of the right-wing media in a scurrilous and underhand campaign.

It failed, and so did MPs’ bids to unseat their leader — leading to a campaign of quite a different type, the election campaign which has propelled Corbyn to the brink of power.

But there’s a paradox here, I note: the most remarkable aspect of Labour’s campaign was the way it attracted young people, a generation written off as uninterested in politics.

Corbyn could never have won the leadership or held it without the organisation and resources provided by trade unions, but the generation which is voting for him in droves has the lowest density of trade union membership of any.

“Can trade unions organise these people? We know they need unions,” McCluskey says.

“We know millions of them are in precarious work and on zero-hours contracts, many work in difficult to organise sectors.

“How do we draw people to us? Unions always have to be relevant. We’ve operated under tight restrictions for so many years and it has become difficult to organise and to fight back.”

It shouldn’t stop unions from intervening decisively over Britain’s future, he points out — “in key sectors of the economy, in energy, in manufacturing, in chemicals, union density is as high as it’s ever been.

“But now the workforce includes the millions who work for agencies and so on, and density overall is poor.”

Unions need to engage young people, start at the beginning and explain why they should join a union — “that’s why Unite started our schools programme.

“We talk to 15 and 16-year-olds about what unions are. It should be on the curriculum, we’re the biggest voluntary organisations in the country, but it isn’t.”

The restrictions on the unions have grown even tighter with last year’s passage of the Trade Union Act. Has resistance to it been strong enough?

“It’s a tough one,” he concedes. “Nine out of 10 unions have in their rulebooks that they have to act within the law — we did.

“But I knew that would restrict our resistance to the Act, so we removed it. We will be pushed outside the law if that is what it takes to defend our members.

“We will do what we have to do irrespective of whether it is lawful. But we are a very large union. Many of my comrades in smaller unions aren’t in the same position.

“Some people say the TUC should do more, but they do need to be clear: what is it they are asking the TUC to do? Do they want a general strike against the Act?

“Unite said we would support that, but the TUC did consult on it and only a handful of unions were prepared to envisage it — and I don’t even really mean a full handful,” he laughs ruefully.

“The TUC can’t magic up a general strike.”

The best hope of removing the Act remains electing a Labour government. But will the party’s right let that happen if it could mean a socialist in No 10?

“I think Labour is more united than it has been for years,” he says. “This is the magic of Corbyn — he has been subjected to the most vicious attacks from the right, been knifed in the back by his own MPs, yet he has turned Labour into an anti-austerity party.

“Nobody in Labour is now in favour of austerity. I haven’t heard anyone criticise the manifesto. Suddenly for the first time in ages, Labour is united around a programme.

“Now, this year it’ll be 47 years since I’ve been in the Labour Party. I’m not stupid, the party has always consisted of a right and a left and there are clashes, of tactics, of ideology.

“There are forces in Labour who are not as comfortable as I am about where it sits at the moment. But New Labour is dead.

“Blairism is dead. I don’t say that triumphantly or to be snide.

“It’s dead because it has no ideas. This is why Blair himself keeps cropping up trying to revive it — there’s no new champion. The thesis has failed.

“New Labour never challenged the structures of wealth and power in the country. That’s why in 13 years in office inequality grew.

“So Labour is united, on the face of it, around a radical manifesto; no alternatives are being put forward.

“The vast majority of the PLP will accept that and work with Corbyn.

“I said when Jeremy was first elected: the whole party is on a learning curve. The PLP needs to understand that the party is changing. We’re the biggest party in Europe. Some people are fearful of that. Some, I get the impression, want to put up a sign saying Labour is full.

“But I look forward to a million members. And that means ensuring the party is democratic: members need to feel their voice counts, can make a difference.

“That’s an essential part of maintaining the momentum we need. And I use the word deliberately,” he smiles.

“We’ve heard strange things about Momentum, as if they are some sort of aliens landed from the moon. They’re not. They’re enthusiastic socialists engaging in a campaign for change.

“They have every right to organise. When some in the unions wanted to expel Progress, I was one who was against: I said, if they want to organise for a programme let them organise. Momentum have exactly the same right.”

Does that mean the outright hostility shown to Momentum and to thousands of grassroots members by Labour officialdom has to change?

“If Labour members feel the structures have let them down I would say there is a duty, on the part of the general secretary and everybody else, to look at how they can ensure members are empowered and the party is democratic and transparent in its decision-making.”

Does that mean mandatory re-selection, I wonder.

“I’ve never personally been in favour of that. There is already the ability to have the trigger ballot, and I felt it could be a diversion, an internal fight that would sap the energy of the left.

“But Unite as a union is in favour, and that’s because this issue went to our policy conference in the midst of the attempt by MPs to unseat Jeremy and annul the decision of the party members.

“The smears against his supporters and against new members, the behaviour of the MPs as they sought to ‘break Corbyn as a man’ — they brought it on themselves, it wasn’t surprising that policy conference voted overwhelmingly for mandatory re-selection.”

MPs have piped down since, but this week did see a rebellion by some MPs over the party’s approach to Brexit — not something which the labour movement is united on either.

“Herein lies the issue of our day,” McCluskey sighs. “No-one knows what the government’s policy is on anything related to Brexit.

“May was headed for that ‘hard Brexit’ aimed at demonising immigrants, the dog-whistle politics: well, that’s fallen on its backside.

“The divisions will eat away at the Tory Party. But they are united on one thing: weakening workers’ rights.

“Unions will have to fight for that. In Unite, we argued for remain and reform: we didn’t think the EU was brilliant.

“The social chapter has been gnawed away till there’s little left, and I remember as a young shop steward hearing the arguments that the EU was just a bosses’ club aimed to make life easier for corporations — that’s truer than it ever was.

“So what does the movement look for from an exit? Safeguards for jobs and communities and industries, which by the way means safeguards for migrants who work in those industries.

“But where it gets controversial is we do believe in control of the labour market. There’s this purist idea that capital and labour should move freely.

“But I’ve never known a pool of cheap labour to be a good thing for our class. It just leaves vulnerable people open to being exploited.

“Control of the ways bosses can misuse and abuse workers is essential to how Labour forges a message that means it speaks for the 52 per cent who voted Leave and the 48 per cent who didn’t.

“And pushing that class politics is the key, building that social movement. It’s the only thing that will challenge the Establishment.

“We’re seeing it across Europe, and Unite supports all that community activism: we support the People’s Assembly, we supported the Coalition of Resistance, we back 38 Degrees and UK Uncut.

“It’s making a difference. Something is changing when the monopoly media can run 14 pages about the Labour leader being a terrorist the day before the election and the left makes progress anyway.

“The media needs regulating, the control of information shouldn’t be in the hands of a few billionaires. Alternative media needs supporting and that’s why Unite supports the Morning Star, which is the most solid and reliable source of news — especially trade union news.

“But I’d support everything that chips away at Establishment control of the narrative — The Canary, the Skwawkbox, all of it.”

He talks as if he is at war with the Establishment.

“Unite has been in a permanent state of war with the Establishment since I became the general secretary,” he says, deadly serious.

“Corporate greed has to be challenged. It has to be beaten.

“Grenfell Tower stands as a symbol of Tory Britain: profit before people.

“I’m sad to say I doubt anyone will be criminally prosecuted for that. Never forget it. Never forget the agony, the screams of the people incinerated by corporate greed — by uncaring capitalism.

“Our movement is about changing that. We stand for something better. Community. Solidarity.

“The people who made Grenfell Tower possible are the ones we are fighting against. It is a war, and no-one’s going to fight it for us. We have to be confident that it is a war our class can win.”

OWNED BY OUR READERS

We're a reader-owned co-operative, which means you can become part of the paper too by buying shares in the People’s Press Printing Society.

 

 

Become a supporter

Fighting fund

You've Raised:£ 12,411
We need:£ 5,589
5 Days remaining
Donate today