Last roar of the dinosaur

His plan to shut down Britain ++ His secret talks with Tories to help May’s Brexit plan ++ How he tried to hold Starmer to ransom ++ As freely confessed by ‘Red Len’ McCluskey, the biggest bankroller of any major UK party ever... whose supporters wait in the wings to seize back control of Labour

Few men have held greater sway over the Labour Party in the past decade than the combative trades union boss Len McCluskey. A 71-year-old Liverpudlian, he became General Secretary of Unite in 2011 and promptly began using the union’s financial muscle to gain extraordinary influence over the party’s then leader ed Miliband.

The union, which is Britain’s second largest, funnelled almost £20million to his administration and, at one point, was contributing 28 per cent of the party’s entire income from donations.

After Miliband had gone, McCluskey financed his old chum Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership campaign to the tune of more than £110,000, playing a crucial role in securing his unexpected victory. He then handed Labour a further £11m from Unite over the ensuing three years via regular donations, and a £3m lump sum before the 2019 election.

For most of that period, Corbyn’s and McCluskey’s links were more than simply financial: the Labour leader’s inner circle was also packed with ‘Red Len’s’ Left-leaning chums and associates.

A former girlfriend and Unite staffer named Jennie Formby — with whom the married McCluskey fathered a child in the 1990s — became Labour’s General Secretary.

His chief-of-staff Andrew Murray, once a card-carrying Communist, was released from Unite duties to become Corbyn’s top advisor.

And Karie Murphy, a flame-haired former nurse with whom McCluskey was secretly sleeping, was made Corbyn’s all-powerful chief-of-staff.

After their Trotskyite stewardship led to Labour’s utter annihilation at the 2019 election — the party’s worst result since 1935 — McCluskey chose to keep the cash flowing to Labour, seemingly in an attempt to influence the current leader Keir Starmer and prevent him from following a more centrist agenda.

eight donations, worth £1.1m, were handed over late last year, along with a coded warning that the Leader of the Opposition must ‘represent ordinary working people’ if he wanted support to continue.

It brought the grand total Unite handed to Labour under McCluskey’s reign to an extraordinary £46.7m, according to electoral Commission records which identify no fewer than 655 separate transactions since he took office.

He IS not just the Labour Party’s biggest paymaster of recent times, but the biggest single bankroller of any major party in the entire history of British politics.

All of which represents quite an achievement. Indeed, in a world where the wheels of politics are greased by cold, hard cash, one might go so far as to describe the self-styled champion of the working man — who is due to step down early next year — as the real power behind Labour’s throne.

Certainly, for much of his reign, he has been regarded as the Party’s unofficial Kingmaker.

Yet in the event the money doesn’t buy him what he wants, Labour’s paymaster McCluskey turns out to have a shocking plan B.

For throughout the decade that he’s been pulling strings in westminster, I can reveal that Unite’s leader has also been quietly formulating a chilling — and illegal —– plot for his Union to implement its hard-Left agenda, irrespective of who’s been voted into Downing Street. The secret plan is to effectively cripple Britain via a 1920s-style general strike — and the manner of its implementation is expected to be outlined in forensic detail in his forthcoming autobiography, Always Red.

In the book, due out next month, McCluskey admits that Unite under his stewardship has developed a ‘blueprint that would bring the country to a halt’ via wildcat industrial action.

He boasts that, in a few short days, it would cripple ‘seven of the nine critical infrastructure sections of the economy — things like energy, food and utilities’.

McCluskey’s scheme, which he admits would empower ‘anarchists, ultra-Leftists, the lot’ and inflict ‘unbearable’ costs on British industry, would not only subvert Parliamentary democracy but also seek to undermine the entire British justice system via civil disobedience.

Indeed, it’s only a slight exaggeration to say that a copy of his proposal (obtained by the Mail this week) reads at times like the screenplay of a Bolshevik propaganda movie.

The plan is considered so sensitive it was intended to be kept under wraps until McCluskey’s memoir is published.

In the book, the Unite leader criticises the way that, under reforms dating back to the Thatcher-era, today’s trades union barons are bound by strict laws governing strike action.

The rules ban them from, among other things, ordering a walkout without first balloting members to ensure that a majority of workers actually support industrial action.

UK law also bans so-called ‘secondary’ strike action, in which employees of one company walk out in support of colleagues who are employed by a completely different firm.

Such actions led to the so-called winter of Discontent in 1978, when industrial action by Ford workers snowballed into shutdowns across the public and private sectors, resulting in a million people being laid off, while rubbish piled high in the street, and overflowing morgues forced the authorities to store bodies in warehouses.

Under McCluskey’s stewardship, Unite has occasionally sailed close to the wind with regard to what he describes as these ‘restrictive’ laws.

He reveals in his memoir that the union has therefore developed detailed plans for a ‘scenario’ in which the laws are broken and ‘a court order[s] Unite to pay substantial damages’ to a company it has crippled via illegal strike action.

The response to such a judicial ruling, he writes, could be to simply ‘refuse to pay’ and ignore any court order. Instead, Unite would instruct a hard core of supporters to do everything in their power to disrupt the daily lives of Britons.

‘If we are pushed outside the law,’ he says, ‘the moral argument will be with us and the consequences of our actions and any ensuing chaos will be the responsibility of the government’.

THe first step would be for Unite to vacate all its offices, with many of its leaders going into hiding. ‘The authorities would move to sequestrate our funds and buildings. we would see that as an attempt to shut us down and therefore we would resist, using every means at our disposal,’ he writes.

‘I would move to TUC headquarters where we would form a war cabinet and work to a blueprint detailing what to hit.’

within a few hours, members of

Unite’s road haulage branch would leap into action by parking 200odd lorries at ‘key locations to block the motorway network and roads into London’. McCluskey also plans to create overnight picket lines outside major rail and tube stations ‘and trust the rail unions, who are great comrades, not to cross them’.

In other words, within 24 hours, Britain’s transport network would be crippled. Having ‘nothing left to lose’, he would then call on members who work in ‘critical infrastructure’ to close a range of other key industries.

‘Quickly, employers all over the country would be wailing about their losses. The disruption to the public would be considerable.’

Over ensuing days and weeks, Unite would create a ‘crisis leverage’ committee to oversee plans to stage a nationwide series of protests designed to cause maximum disruption to Britons’ daily lives.

Supporters would begin ‘hitting vital national targets as well as the company we were in dispute with . . . Anyone and everyone

would be welcome to join us — anarchists, ultra-Leftists, the lot.’

In the next stage, comrades from overseas would be invited to picket the offices of British multinationals, he adds, with the intention of causing them severe financial hardship.

For example, Unite would get ‘sister unions’ to ground British Airways planes in every corner of the globe by ‘refusing to service them’, meaning they ‘would land and stay landed’.

‘We would not go gently into the night,’ McCluskey promises.

‘We would make the cost of our destruction unbearable . . . If all of that sounds romantic, gallant and unrealistic, the blueprint I’ve described was developed because of a genuine belief it could be necessary.’

McCluskey would, in other words, be leading a revolution — using civil disobedience to undermine both an elected parliament and the rule of law.

What is perhaps most striking about Unite’s secret plan is the way it allows a relatively tiny proportion of the British population to subvert the will of the majority by bringing the country to a halt.

Indeed, in his memoir, McCluskey is expected to admit that his radical idea can succeed even if they don’t command the support of a majority of the union’s own members.

‘Of course,’ he writes ‘one-and-ahalf million Unite members would not come out on strike, but I know workers in key sectors and certain companies would defend their union.’

This is, of course, utterly undemocratic. But McCluskey has always owed his lofty status to an ability to gain power without necessarily commanding widespread support.

The son of a painter-decorater, who was educated at Liverpool’s selective Cardinal Godfrey school, he likes to describe himself as a former docker.

However, that’s only true up to a point: after leaving school, in the late 1960s, he did indeed get a job in the docks, but in a white-collar role as a ship’s planner, mapping where cargo would be placed in the hold.

Within a year, he’d nonetheless become a shop steward for the Transport and General Workers’ Union, and from the 1980s onwards was a full-time official, rising through the ranks until he found himself in with a shout of winning the Unite leadership in 2010, following the retirement of his colleague and ally Tony Woodley.

In that election, a mere 240,000 Unite members bothered to vote (a turnout of just 15 per cent), of which just over 100,000 backed McCluskey. In other words, he was supported by a mere seven per cent of its members.

In an interview after he was elected, he denied he was an extremist, declaring: ‘I’ve never called myself Red Len except when I’m supporting Liverpool Football Club.’

YeT, as we now know, he soon began formulating plans to illegally cripple the country’s economy.

Ironically, polls at the time showed that around a third of the Union’s members were actually Conservative voters.

But McCluskey’s victory gave him access to the union’s vast financial war-chest, which was endlessly used to pursue hard-Left causes and to provide unprecedented financial support to the Labour Party.

Thanks to the membership fees paid by its roughly 1.3 million

members at £14.95-a-month for a full-time employee, Unite today has a whopping £388 m in its General Fund, and £16.4m in the Political Fund that can be used for party donations, according to its

last financial accounts. McCluskey has retained his control over Unite by winning general secretary elections in 2015 (where he was backed by just under ten per cent of members) and 2017, when he controversially pipped centrist Gerard Coyne in a close ballot on a turnout of 12 per cent, meaning he was backed by roughly one in 18 members.

Mr Coyne is currently standing for re-election in this summer’s battle to succeed McCluskey, following his retirement, the results of which are due to be announced on Thursday.

His opponents are Steve Turner, who is backed by the Communist Party, and Sharon Graham, who has the support of the Socialist Workers Party.

While Mr Coyne has pledged to draw a line under Unite’s flirtation with the hard Left, and will presumably condemn McCluskey’s proposed revolution to the dustbin of history, his rivals are cut from a different cloth.

So it remains to be seen whether the departure of the union baron who has for years bankrolled Labour — while simultaneously plotting the illegal shutdown of Britain’s critical infrastructure — will lead to a restoration of sanity.