Union Ventriloquist

The Times hits on an essential weakness of Len McCluskey's claim to speak for Unite's 1.42 million members across the UK by describing the union leader as a ventriloquist - a performer who gives the impression that the their own words and thoughts are coming from someone else.

Spirit of the Lawless

As the Unite union contemplates protest outside the law, a democratic principle has been breached. Labour should condemn this reversion to 1980s militancy

Labour politicians ritually declare that the party’s links to organised trade unionism are a historic source of strength. Len McCluskey, general secretary of the Unite union, can rarely resist an opportunity to prove them wrong. Britain’s biggest union last week unambiguously endorsed the principle of protest outside the law against an elected government, at the urging of Mr McCluskey and his executive.

No credible left-of-centre party can countenance, let alone abide by, Unite’s contempt for democracy and the rule of law. No putative Labour leader can responsibly indulge Mr McCluskey’s assertion that his union is not bound by the rule of law. The party and its four leadership contenders have a democratic obligation to protest against this ugly and inflammatory stance.

Unite’s rejection of constitutional politics was smuggled through the arcane setting of a rules conference. A motion from the executive urged that the statement of the union’s aims be amended. The rule book had previously declared that “the objects of the union, shall, so far as may be lawful, be . . .”; the revision removed the phrase “so far as may be lawful”.

Mr McCluskey was in no doubt of the significance of this statement. It is an invitation to illegal picketing and other militant measures. In his speech to delegates, he declared: “Unite is not going to see itself rendered toothless and harmless by passively submitting to unjust laws.”

It is a matter of weeks since the Conservative party won an absolute majority in a general election for the first time in almost a quarter of a century. Mr McCluskey cannot credit the result. He holds instead to a fiction in which the paper membership of his union, by weight of their nominal numbers and his apparent ability to act as their ventriloquist, has greater legitimacy than an elected government. In fact, just 14 per cent of private sector employees belong to a union. The unions have merged to survive. It is because trade unionism is so weak that Unite appears strong within an enfeebled Labour party. And there is, in Mr McCluskey’s universe, no respect in which his union’s power can be legitimately abridged — not by the ballot box, parliament or the law.

This is an issue of principle for an opposition party but also one of electoral self-interest. Labour has already tested to destruction the notion that it should acquiesce in every sectional demand of the union movement. Unite’s contempt for constitutionalism risks consigning Labour to humiliating irrelevance and possibly terminal decline.

Labour has been here before. In the 1980s, the party suffered grievously from its failure to condemn the intimidation by the National Union of Mineworkers of its own members who were unwilling to join a political strike intended to force an elected government from office.

After its crushing defeat under Ed Miliband’s leadership, the party is no stronger than it was a generation ago. Treating militant trade unionism as misguided but essentially on the right side is no principled position for Labour now. The party’s sources of regional strength (notably in Scotland) have been rolled back. If it fails to adhere to the conventions of democratic politics, in which a moderate party of the centre-left stands as a plausible party of government, it could descend into an irrelevance from which there is no escape.

Labour’s leadership contenders have a short-term incentive not to protest lest they irk the unions. They should be braver. The candidature of Jeremy Corbyn, a far-left MP sponsored by Unite who has gained support among constituency parties, is an indication of how unserious is the party’s current stance and electorally suicidal is its trajectory. Mr McCluskey’s bluster at least has the merit of making clear the stakes for Labour. If it embraces his cause, the party will be over.