CORBYN’S CHOSEN ONE
REVEALED: How the same union barons and Marxist heavies who anointed Corbyn have put Rebecca Long-Bailey within a whisker of the Labour crown – by brutally crushing all rivals in her path
Back in June 2013, the political department of Unite, Britain’s most powerful union, produced a confidential report for its executive. Then, as now, Unite was led by the Liverpoolborn Marxist bruiser Len Mccluskey and was keen to exert maximum influence on the direction of the Labour Party.
That meant pulling as many strings behind the scenes as possible. But, as the report cautioned, it should not be seen to be doing so.
It decided that the best way to seize Labour’s helm was to secure Unite’s chosen placemen — and women — on the party’s list of prospective parliamentary candidates.
‘as some will have noticed, the work of the Political department and the Union regionally in (Labour) candidate selections is a little bit like a swan,’ the document confided. ‘all that can be seen is indication of support here or there, while below the water activity is furious!’
The report — a copy of which has been obtained by the Mail — showed 41 would-be Labour MPs had been identified by Unite as ideologically worthy of its active support.
Today, seven years later, two names from that list stand out.
One is karie Murphy, then the prospective Labour candidate for Falkirk — more of whom later — who became Jeremy corbyn’s chief of staff and head of his disastrous 2019 general election campaign. The other is Rebecca Long-Bailey. How far she has come and how quickly! according to the latest polling of party members this week, Ms Long-Bailey, the shadow business secretary, is now front runner to succeed corbyn as leader on 42 per cent, ahead of fellow candidate (and the bookies’ favourite) keir Starmer on 37 per cent.
crucially, she has also secured the backing of Momentum, the hard-Left grass roots pressure group. In a ‘democratic’ Momentum poll — in which she was the only recommended candidate — she secured 70 per cent of members’ votes. So far, 33 Labour MPs, including leading Left- wingers John McDonnell, Diane abbott and Richard Burgon have endorsed her.
HER leadership bid, formally launched yesterday in Manchester, was not unexpected. She has been seen as a leading contender since last autumn, when corbyn and his Marxist shadow chancellor McDonnell indicated that ‘ Our Becky’ — as the latter calls her — was their anointed successor.
Of course, that was before last month’s Tory landslide and Labour’s worst general election performance since 1935.
Such a rejection would usually lead to wholesale changes in a political party’s leadership and direction.
But the corbynistas believe they can still hang on to power at the top of the party. Not with their 70-year- old namesake in charge, but his 40-year-old adoring acolyte who last week caused mirth and incredulity by giving corbyn ‘ten out of ten’ marks for his disastrous leadership.
But aside from her unwavering loyalty, just who is Rebecca LongBailey? She has risen without trace, been an MP for less than five years and was only thrust into the shadow cabinet in 2016 after dozens of colleagues resigned following a failed ‘coup’ against corbyn.
The official line is that Long-Bailey is a breath of fresh air. This, however, is the unofficial, untold story of the cheshire lawyer with scant political experience, who has been groomed by the hard Left to carry the torch of corbynism into the new decade.
She is indeed the ‘continuity candidate’, as former deputy leader Tom Watson has acidly observed.
and as this Mail investigation into her rise reveals, this political ingenue serves as a blank piece of paper upon which the hard-Left kingmakers and union bosses hope to write another chapter of Marxist control of the Labour Party.
REBECCA Long-Bailey’s understated appearance, small stature and ready smile might well suggest the dawn, at last, of a kinder, fairer politics. But, as the Mail can reveal, at her back stands a former Unite official and alleged ‘Stalinist’, alex Halligan.
But first to those much-vaunted Labour roots.
Long-Bailey was born in Withington Hospital, Manchester, on September 22, 1979, only child of workingclass Irish catholic parents. (Indeed, her catholic convictions this week brought her into conflict with some Left-wingers over her stance on abortion, namely her condemnation of terminations on the grounds of disability after the standard limit of 24 weeks.)
She has been teased for saying, with some poetic licence, that she was ‘born to the roar of the Stretford end’ of Manchester United’s
Old Trafford football ground. Pedantic critics point out that United were playing away to Wolves that day (losing 3-1), but it is true she was brought up until age nine in a family home 400 yards from the stadium. Her mother Una is from Galway, her father Jimmy Long from Belfast. On his Facebook page he has ‘liked’ the hard-line Republican newspaper an Phoblacht, which used to be accused of being the ‘mouthpiece of the IRa’.
He declined to comment when approached by the Mail, but a close source said: ‘Rebecca’s father is Irish and supported the peace process. He does not support the IRa.’ Now retired, Mr Long worked on the Salford Docks and then for Shell at the vast carrington petrochemical plant a few miles to the west.
In 2014, while campaigning to be the Labour parliamentary candidate for Salford, she told the Manchester evening News: ‘My Dad, Jimmy, worked on the Salford Docks and I grew up watching him worrying when round after round of redundancies were inflicted on the docks.
‘He was forced to witness his friends empty lockers into bin liners after decades of service, never sure when the axe was going to fall on him.’
Yet locals cast doubt on her recollections, pointing to the fact that Salford Docks closed in 1982 when she was aged just two, and therefore couldn’t possibly have any memory of the incident. even so, it is undoubtedly true that her father and fellow workers witnessed years of mass redundancies and shrinking union power throughout her early childhood.
Just not in Salford — where she was keen to emphasise her local connection when bidding to become its MP.
Industrial relations were indeed fractious at carrington in the neighbouring constituency of Stretford & Urmston. The plant had its own branch of the communist Party and a reputation for militancy.
In November 1983, the Socialist Organiser reported how unions defied Government injunctions to organise a wave of all- out strikes, overtime bans and secondary picketing.
That confrontation was over pay,
but Dave spence, a former union worker, recalls industrial action being triggered by much more trivial complaints.
‘at shell Carrington we had strikes over cold water in the cabins, then [the water] was too hot so they walked again. The canteen eggs at first were too runny, then too hard and yet another strike, hardly the stuff of revolution,’ he wrote in a memoir.
But in 1988, the Long family left Manchester behind. Jimmy, a ‘lucky survivor’ of the layoffs at Carrington secured a new position at shell’s stanlow plant near ellesmere Port, 35 miles away.
They settled in the market town of Frodsham in a neat semi now worth around £ 225,000 where Long-Bailey’s parents still live.
and so it was that the majority of Long-Bailey’s formative years were spent in leafy, suburban Cheshire. she is indeed the ‘continuity candidate’, as former deputy leader Tom Watson has acidly observed.
she attended a Catholic secondary school in Chester — an hour’s bus journey away — and aged 16 worked part- time in a pawn brokers where she has said that she saw the ‘real desperation’ of the poor. she also worked in a sofa factory, a Royal Mail sorting office and a bar, fending off bottom-pinching drunks and the ‘inappropriate’ attentions of colleagues.
after Manchester Metropolitan University, where she studied politics and sociology, she joined a law firm as an administrative assistant and pursued her own legal studies in her spare time. In 2006, she married stephen Bailey, son of an industrial chemist from Cleethorpes. (stephen, 46, who studied chemistry at sheffield Hallam university and worked overseas, is the audi a5- driving global sales director for an additives firm). The following year she began work as a solicitor at the Manchester law firm Hill Dickinson, specialising in NHs contracts and commercial property. In 2009, the couple bought their first house — a large detached property with views over countryside — in Frodsham, over 20 years after she had first moved to the town with her parents.
and there they would probably have remained in middle- class obscurity if Ms Long-Bailey had not discovered — rather belatedly — political activism.
she became involved with the party, she has said, after accompanying her mother to local Labour events. she only joined in 2010, but was soon asked if she would put herself forward to be a parliamentary candidate in the local Weaver vale constituency, a marginal seat. she agreed, although she had only just given birth to her son Ronan.
It was while on the all-women candidate list that her name appeared in that confidential Unite report. a Unite spokesman told the Mail: ‘Becky was on our future candidates programme back in 2013. We did support her in Weaver vale. she came through our training as someone we would say had the potential to be a fantastic MP.’
she came third in the contest, the successful Labour candidate subsequently losing in the election to the Tories.
But she was not disheartened. she approached close family friend Bill Moores, a veteran union activist who then recommended her as a potential candidate to salford’s ‘Unite mafia’.
Moores was a former salford mayor, Transport and General Workers’ Union shop steward and a contemporary of her father in the bitter industrial disputes of the eighties. He became a referee for her candidacy to replace salford and eccles MP Hazel Blears who was stepping down.
Prominent among salford’s current ‘Unite mafia’ was a young dynamo named alex Halligan, who had already risen to b ecome secretary of the city’s TUC. The burly Halligan was born in Yorkshire, brought up in Birkenhead and now lives in Greater Manchester.
On his Facebook page (now unavailable), he posted a photograph of himself giving a clenched fist salute in front of a poster of Hugo Chavez, the authoritarian Left- wing leader of venezuela much admired by Corbyn.
He has also been photographed apparently wearing a ‘stalinist’ lapel badge celebrating the brutal ice-pick murder of the dissident Trotsky, although his supporters insist the badge was simply being held against his chest.
Whatever the case, the stage was set in salford and eccles for a contest so bloody as to be almost shakespearean.
‘Halligan is completely ruthless and as hard-Left as you can get,’ former moderate salford Labour councillor Howard Balkind told the Mail this week.
‘I was told that he was ringing round other councillors saying I was useless and they shouldn’t support me. He then personally turned up at the meeting to make sure the ward councillors voted the right way [to deselect him in favour of Long- Bailey’s local political adviser]. That is a typical Union tactic — to pack a meeting in their favour.
AMONG the seven-strong all female selection shortlist Long- Bailey faced in 2014 were those who had lived in the constituency — she hadn’t since she was nine — and possessed impeccable Labour credentials. strongest among them was sue Pugh, local councillor and the party whip at salford council, and sarah Brookes, ‘ a proper salford girl’ and secretary of a local party branch.
Pugh, then chair of the party’s North West regional board, and her supporters are bitter about how Long-Bailey’s team allegedly conducted the campaign.
‘sue is properly local and did most of the campaigning herself with friends,’ a close friend of Pugh’s told the Mail. ‘Long-Bailey had the full Unite machinery behind her. There was even a call centre put at her disposal to lobby local party members.’
‘They had people knocking on members’ doors and being very disparaging about sue,’ adds the friend.
she’s originally from ellesmere Port and Long-Bailey’s supporters were asking people: ‘Do you really want a scouser as your MP?’ (salford is a hotbed of support for Manchester United, arch rivals of Liverpool FC.)
The allegation was independently confirmed by Mr Balkind, who was appalled by the tactic. a spokesperson for Long-Bailey said: ‘This claim is false’.
It was a strange question to be asked by Labour Party activists about one of their own comrades.
It is not clear if this was sanctioned by Halligan, but it would be strange for such a sentiment to be encouraged by a union official from Merseyside whose then boss McCluskey happened to be the most influential Liverpudlian in the political landscape.
What’s more, Long-Bailey had
grown up and at that point still lived in Frodsham, which is closer to Liverpool than Salford, though both towns are in Cheshire rather than Merseyside.
No matter. If stirring up local prejudices helped their then unknown protégée win selection, so be it.
Pugh’s friend said of Halligan: ‘ He’s a total chameleon. Apparently, he can put on a Scouse accent himself when it suits the situation.’ (A Long-Bailey spokesman denied the ‘smear’ allegation.)
Of Long-Bailey’s own image of a local working-class hero, the friend said: ‘She bent the truth. She emphasised her working-class credentials while living in a very nice house in Frodsham.
‘She’s a nice enough girl but seemed to lack political conviction. Nobody knew what her politics were. Nobody who knew her was aware that she had any Left-wing politics at all. But she was being backed by powerful friends in Unite and she was fine when she had a script in front of her.’
Salford council, led by Left-wing mayor Ian Stewart, also threw impartiality to the wind and backed her, though the local authority press officer had to quit in a row over bias.
By mid-summer Long-Bailey had secured the support of seven local party branches, with Pugh and Brookes getting four each. But when the three-woman final shortlist was drawn up, Brookes was not on it. Another candidate who had attracted only one vote was selected instead. Brookes took legal advice but was told there was no appeal.
Her supporters cried ‘fix’ and the local press reported alleged ‘skulduggery’, but to no avail. In August, Long-Bailey won the day.
‘It was hijacked by Unite,’ says Howard Balkind. ‘McCluskey and Halligan walked in and then walked all over us.’
In the general election of 2015, Long
They asked people: ‘Do you really want a Scouser as your MP?’
Bailey won the constituency. Of that campaign she remarked primly: ‘I’ve never had anybody being nasty on the doorstep, even if they don’t support Labour.’
Long-Bailey has since made good on her promise to move to the constituency with her husband and son, albeit into a newly refurbished £ 600,000 semi- detached house in the upmarket district of Monton — known as ‘ Monton Carlo’ by less fortunate locals.
For his part in her success, Halligan was brought south to help Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour leadership bid. He was credited by some sources as being a major factor in Corbyn’s subsequent rise to be leader. He is now on Long-Bailey’s staff and remains just as combative.
According to The New Statesman, Halligan recently told John McDonnell he was a ‘f****** idiot’ when the shadow chancellor tried to take charge of LongBailey’s leadership campaign.
Caught between these two alphaMarxists, Ms Long- Bailey’s mouth reportedly ‘opened and shut silently during the clash’.
And now she stands on the cusp of succeeding her political idol — Corbyn, whose own unexpected win can be traced back to the events of 2013 and the aforementioned Karie Murphy’s selection as the prospective candidate for Falkirk.
Allegations of Unite- orchestrated vote-rigging on a massive scale to secure Murphy’s candidacy saw the then Labour leader Ed Miliband move to overhaul party rules on voting. The changes were supposed to diminish the power of the unions, yet the new rules only served to allow Labour to be taken over by Corbynistas within Momentum.
They, rather than the Parliamentary Labour Party, now hold the balance of power in the leadership election.
Howard Balkind, who was ousted by Long-Bailey supporters in Salford and subsequently resigned from the party, is pessimistic about his party’s future.
‘I’m aged 68 and if they elect Rebecca Long-Bailey, I personally believe I will never, ever see Labour return to power,’ he said last night. ‘It would be an absolute disaster. They’ve got to realise they’ve got to come back to the centre.’
Until then, Ms Long-Bailey could simply become the continuity candidate for another decade in the wilderness.