Labour’s paymaster flexes his muscles

WHATEVER our politics, whatever our feelings about sport, the overwhelming majority of Britons hope fervently that the London Olympics this summer will be a resounding success – our chance to show this country at its best. Not so Red Len Mccluskey, the timewarp boss of Britain’s biggest trade union. To him, it is ‘unthinkable’ that the world should come to London and have a wonderful time, ‘as though everything is nice and rosy in the garden’. Instead, he sees the Olympics as a heaven-sent chance to cause maximum embarrassment to the Coalition, urging workers to consider strikes and civil disobedience in protest against cuts.

Could anything be better calculated to damage our hopes of recovery than making our trading partners think the industrial strife of the 1970s is back? One thing is clear. There can be no attempts to appease the cynical Mr Mccluskey with concessions on the cuts that remain so vital to our growth.

Even if Britain could afford to borrow more (which it can’t), he would only come back for more – as Boris Johnson found, when he cravenly surrendered to Tube drivers’ demands for huge bribes to stop them disrupting the Games.

But then it’s hard to believe the Unite boss seriously expects to gain anything by encouraging strikes, apart from the malevolent pleasure of flexing his muscles and spoiling other people’s enjoyment.

It would be a mistake, however, to write him off as an irrelevant throw-back to a bygone age of militancy. For the disturbing truth is that his union remains by far Labour’s biggest donor. And it is to him, more than anyone else, that Ed Miliband owes his job.

So isn’t it worryingly significant that, until he was pressed, the Opposition leader confined his condemnation of his paymaster to a tweet on Twitter? Doesn’t David Cameron have a point, after Mr Mccluskey’s grossly unpatriotic threat to the Games, when he suggests Labour should look elsewhere for its funds?