SHARON GRAHAM’S impressive win in the Unite leadership contest confirms the union’s left and militant direction.
The result is a heavy defeat for the right, whose candidate Gerard Coyne came last despite high-profile media backing and interventions from Labour rightwingers from Peter Mandelson down.
Unite members have voted for a candidate fighting on a platform of building workplace strength, empowering shop stewards and developing sector-based industrial plans, so reps across a sector can work to counter the race to the bottom on pay and conditions we see across the economy.
When combined with the support of the other socialist candidate Steve Turner, it is clear that the large majority of active Unite members are firmly on the left.
This will be far from welcome news to the coterie around Keir Starmer at the Labour Party, whose recent targeting of bakers’ union president Ian Hodson for exclusion from membership shows their ongoing hostility to industrial militancy.
A Coyne victory would have further empowered Starmer, boosting his majority on the party executive and being available to fish him out of the financial crisis caused by the exodus of Labour members under his leadership.
Graham, by contrast, stated clearly in the campaign there would be “no blank cheques” for Labour — with plans for a workers’ manifesto, with backing for Labour tied to commitments on specific demands.
Her view that engagement needs to be on Unite’s terms and linked to policies that will directly help trade union members is reflected in other pledges such as only supporting parliamentary candidates or MPs who have been shop stewards or reps, and to fight Labour councils as hard as Tory ones on cuts to jobs or services.
The plan to build a “progressive, working-class politics” rests both on increasing workplace power and working for a “broad progressive platform that will deliver painstaking, practical work to organise within communities.”
There is great potential here to work with other trade unions that have been calling for a co-ordinated, trade union-led movement to challenge a status quo that lets working people down, recognising that waiting on the Labour Party to deliver political change is not an option.
The Morning Star endorsed Turner, not Graham, for the Unite leadership, and we congratulate him on a campaign well fought as we congratulate her on her victory.
This was based on our view that Turner as candidate of the United Left within the union was best placed to secure its socialist direction, our assessment that the leadership of Len McCluskey has delivered lasting positives for the whole movement, and concern that this legacy might be rejected.
Unite has over the past decade played its part in moving Labour away from Blairism, over the course of the Ed Miliband and Jeremy Corbyn leaderships, but it has done much more than that, assisting with building and sustaining the extraparliamentary anti-austerity movement through the People’s Assembly, looking to develop union strength outside the workplace through projects like Unite Community, promoting institutions of our movement like the Institute of Employment Rights.
Graham’s victory is likely to mean a reduced focus on Westminster. But Labour is focused on persecuting and harassing its own members, while its inability to get a hearing among large sections of the working class even when under left leadership gives her goal of building power independently of party politics weight.
It has great potential to develop class consciousness in this country — a lack of which helped make the Corbyn surge of 2015-17 transient and vulnerable to liberal misdirection — and to create a more sustainable platform for a revived socialist politics.
Whoever we backed in the contest, socialists should welcome the election of a veteran organiser and leader who has an ambitious programme aimed at empowering working-class people, one which deserves support across and beyond Unite.
