TWO rows this week involving Labour leader Keir Starmer and the party’s biggest donor, Unite, raise issues central to the entire purpose of the labour movement.

The first involved Labour trailing plans to select non-party members as prospective MPs. Party sources claimed this would improve the “calibre” of MPs and take selections away from the left.

Given the extreme weakness of the left in the parliamentary party, this goes to show how paranoid the Labour right remains after Corbynism — the prospect of any socialists at all at Westminster is one which gives them sleepless nights. It also speaks to an ongoing delusion that “the public” are right-wing while Labour members are an off-putting milieu of do-gooders and cranks. 

The same delusion inspired the 2014 Collins review recommendations to make it easier for non-members to join and vote for the party leader. Contrary to MPs’ expectations, reducing the union and parliamentary weighting in leadership elections did not restore Blairite supremacy in the party — it resulted in a massive influx of new members and the election of the most left-wing leader in decades. 

If the prime motivation of the Collins review was hostility to trade union influence (which the right blamed for the election of Ed rather than David Miliband in 2010) the motivation now is hostility to party members. The desired outcome is a parliamentary party with an even weaker connection to the Labour Party as a mass organisation, even less accountable to anything but itself, and the reduction of Labour members to voiceless door-knockers. 

Unite’s retort cannot be faulted: “The briefing around the ‘calibre’ of the latest intake of Labour MPs is disrespectful snobbery towards people who give their all for Labour. If the party carries on alienating and offending members, it will be hard to find anyone inspired to stand for office as a Labour MP.” We might add that it is ironic a Labour leadership that goes to great lengths to purge members for supposed disloyalty if their actions can be interpreted as supportive of groups to Labour’s left (even long in the past) is simultaneously completely uninterested in whether its parliamentary candidates have any link to the party at all.

A couple of days later trailed lines from Unite’s outgoing leader Len McCluskey’s new book Always Red warned Labour could “go under” under Starmer’s leadership because of its political vacuousness and vicious persecution of its own members.

The contest to succeed McCluskey is entering its final week and none of the candidates seemed keen for a bust-up with the Labour leader at this stage. Rightwinger Gerard Coyne directly attacked McCluskey, describing [his comments] as “exactly the kind of unnecessary and unhelpful intervention you will not see me making if I am elected.” 

Coyne indicates that trade union leaders should not be sticking their oar into Labour politics. Like the brains behind the bid to pick non-party members as candidates, his attitude is hostile to the concept of a labour movement, in which Labour gives political expression to the power of organised labour. 

This comes under attack from both sides: Labour Party strategists point out that trade union members are a minority of the workforce and are not a sufficient electoral base for political office; trade union figures that their memberships are far from consistently Labour-supporting, an argument even weightier in Scotland, where it is unlikely Labour is even the most-supported party by union members.

For some, this is a reason unions should not be promoting Labour and Labour should not be overly concerned about reflecting the priorities of unions. But if you see socialist politics as rooted in the mobilisation of working-class political power, it is rather an indication of weakness which needs addressing, both through organising unorganised workers and through making the Labour Party more expressive of their interests.

This can be presented as an either-or choice. In her response to McCluskey’s remarks about Labour “going under,” Unite leadership candidate Sharon Graham argues: “The Labour Party’s internal wrangles are a secondary priority ... My priority above all else is to build the power of the union at the workplace.”

Graham’s supporters pitch her as “the workplace candidate” (though Steve Turner was the only candidate whose spokesman’s comment on McCluskey’s criticisms of Starmer indicated he was busy working on an actual dispute: “Steve is in Barnoldswick, Lancashire, today, trying to make Rolls Royce deliver on its commitment to the future of a historic factory and hundreds of jobs”).

Graham has picked up left support from some of those who see a lack of industrial militancy and class struggle as key to the defeat of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour. 

The criticisms of the Corbyn project are valid. Not because the Corbyn leadership didn’t understand the importance of organised labour — it did, and unlike its successor it was prompt and active in throwing itself behind workers in disputes. Nor even as a particular criticism of the Corbyn leadership itself: while on issues like the second referendum it did divorce itself from majority working-class opinion, so too did many trade unions. 

But as a recognition of a central weakness it is justified: Corbynism’s failure to transform mass enthusiasm for change into a class-conscious movement saw it dissipate into a policy wish list aimed at attracting voters, a Westminster-first approach analogous to that of its right-wing enemies. 

And the Brexit debacle was, if anything, even more debilitating for the unions, whose attention was absorbed in trying to ward off prospective attacks on members’ rights by defence of the status quo precisely when a political movement was being born that had the potential to radically reshape that status quo in workers’ favour. 

The result was that there was indeed no united labour movement challenge to the ruling class between 2015 and 2020. But the reason was not just a lack of workplace power on the part of unions.

The “back to the workplace” response in the sense it is presented by Graham’s supporters — counterposed to political activity — might seem superficially similar to the trade union strategy being promoted by Communications Workers Union leader Dave Ward, which relegates Westminster Labour to a second-order priority.

“I’m not too interested in waiting for the Labour Party to win people to that vision. I think the trade unions have the power to change things ourselves,” Ward argued in this newspaper last month.

Actually, however, the emphases are different. Ward is clear that the strategy he proposes aims at building on, not turning its back on, the achievements of the Corbyn years: “This isn’t about watering down any of our beliefs or the political positions that Labour developed under Jeremy Corbyn. It’s about the trade union movement working out how to build collective struggles towards those positions ...

“Only the trade unions can lead a social movement that links in with community organisers, groups changing things on the ground.

“Working with Labour, sure. But not so much by pushing for this or that policy at Westminster as providing support for Labour people who are doing things locally ...”

Some Graham supporters seem to risk throwing the baby out with the bathwater — arguing that the political strategy of Unite over the past decade has failed, because a Corbyn-led Labour is seen as its culmination and the effort to put him in Number 10 didn’t come off.

Unite with McCluskey at the helm has exercised a significant influence on Labour’s direction, something openly acknowledged, while lamented, by Coyne supporters such as Peter Mandelson. 

It was among unions whose backing for Ed Miliband saw off his Blairite older brother, prompting a shift left between 2010-15, however tentative. It was crucial in supporting Corbyn’s Labour throughout Corbyn’s leadership. But it has also been a militant industrial union throughout, one that never repudiates a dispute.

And if Corbynism was a failure in the very obvious sense that it did not deliver socialist government, it had huge successes — building a mass political party after decades of declining interest in politics, temporarily reversing Labour’s long-term electoral decline in a 2017 result that demonstrated the potential mass appeal of socialism in Britain.

A renewed left fightback involves learning from the successes as well as the failures. If “back to the workplace” is posed as the alternative to politics, it risks becoming a policy of “leaving politics to the politicians” — when the gulf between Labour’s Westminster representatives and the people they are supposed to represent has been exposed as one of our most serious problems.

This is why Steve Turner — who is absolutely the candidate of workplace militancy, an experienced negotiator and industrial organiser — is right, while asserting his differences from and independence of the outgoing leadership, to say we need to build on its achievements rather than turn our backs on them.

The problem is that politics is failing working people, not that working people are not interested in politics. 

There is just a week to go of the Unite contest and it should be used to launch a final push to secure a Turner victory.

We know that a Coyne victory would reinforce Labour’s lurch right and its purges and persecutions, while withdrawing Unite support for grassroots and community campaigns. As the candidate of the United Left in Unite, Turner is best placed to defeat Coyne and that is a reason to vote for him in itself.

But socialists should also recognise that portraying the organised left in Unite as a problem — Graham has argued that her lack of involvement with United Left is a positive indicator of her independence — is not a socialist or collectivist approach.

Turner is not just the “beat Coyne” candidate — he is the strategic choice for a strong, militant trade union movement. If you know any Unite members who haven’t voted, it’s time to press that case.