Len McCluskey's 'warning' to Labour

On April 1 UNITE”S leader Len McLuskey made a speech to the Westminster Press Gallery. He offered some witty sound bites to the reporters  - attacking the ‘car boot sale’ that Britain had turned into because of the Coalition Government (and previous governments). He bemoaned the mistake of the TU movement not adopting the Bullock report’s ideas on industrial democracy in the late 1970s. (Trade unionists on company boards and reps in local managements.)


Most papers picked up McLuskey’s call for a radical manifesto from Labour going into the next General Election. He argued that without it, voters might stay with ‘the devil they know’ rather than opt for Labour's austerity light option. The Morning Star reminded its leaders of McLuskey’s warning that, in the event of a Labour defeat, unions would have to look again at their affiliation to Labour and consider a new party to represent the working class.

Is this a new radical turn by Britain’s most powerful trade unionist?

McLuskey told the lunch meeting that work was underway in the Labour leader's office to give the coming manifesto more ‘coherence and fizz.’  He was clearly referring to Jon Cruddas’s policy proposals – due out this summer. He was identifying the union with Cruddas’s policy push. McLuskey related his campaign inside Labour to the Worcester woman and Mondeo man who are targeted by pollsters, but asked, who was interested in ‘Wakefield woman or man on a bus?’ McCluskey also accepted that Alex Salmond's SNP and Nigel Farage's Ukip were both doing well at winning working-class and even potential leftwing votes in the absence of something better.

McLuskey’s comments sum up the main political pressures and counter pressures that are alive today in the active mainstream labour movement. They are pressures for a more radical manifesto by Labour to separate it from the austerity mongers; and the identification of that type of manifesto with the Cruddas project. All this is and was standard left trade union politics for more than half a century. The only new element is the growing fear that sections of the traditional working class vote are already lost for good to the Labour Party.

This then is McLuskey’s political battleground. Defeat in his chosen political battleground would obviously lead to some re-groupments by the union but it is doubtful that it would lead to new parties. It would not be absurd to believe that any re-groupments emerging out of defeat would be more and not less defensive even than the trade union left's current position. Defeats rarely nurture bold new initiatives. McLuskey warns of the prospect of a new workers party. The warning is the only positive part of the message. He is using its threat as greater leverage for what he thinks he might get from Mr Miliband today.

Breaking out of the present thoroughly routine and unhopeful political framework of the mainstream left requires a new political fact. If hundreds of thousands come out on the streets against austerity, if industrial action continues to roll, if austerity is partly defeated in many towns and cities as in Lewisham and Derby, then the picture will shift. Does Nigel Farage support mass action against austerity? That is the concrete question that hundreds of thousands might begin to ask. A new social base for radical politics could emerge. That would change the traditional arguments in the labour movement, both inside and outside the Labour Party and much wider in society.