RED LEN HOLDS LA BOUR TO RANSOM

Union threat to stop its funding – and may even switch to SNP

MILITANT union boss Len McCluskey has threatened to withdraw funding from Labour if it chooses a leader who seeks to move the party to the right.

Labour relies heavily on money from the Unite union, but its hardline general secretary said its affiliation to the party could be reconsidered unless it showed it was the ‘voice of ordinary working people’.

He said resolutions from Scottish members will be debated at a special conference in July that would allow Unite to back candidates from other parties for the first time.

That paves the way for union support for SNP candidates in next year’s Holyrood election – a move the Scottish Daily Mail exclusively revealed was being discussed in January.

It comes as Nicola Sturgeon openly courts trade union leaders in the wake of Labour’s spectacular election collapse north of the Border, and follows an explosive row between outgoing Scottish leader Jim Murphy and Mr McCluskey.

Amid warnings that Unite ‘ heavies’ were putting pressure on MPs not to support UK leadership candidates not backed by the union, Mr McCluskey yesterday said it was ‘essential that the correct leader emerged’.

Andy Burnham, the frontrunner in the leadership contest and Unite’s favoured candidate, admitted he had spoken to Mr McCluskey in the past week. The shadow health secretary, who has the support of almost 100 MPs, denied he was the ‘union candidate’ – even though Mr McCluskey has said that Mr Burnham is the person who ‘impresses me most’.

In an attempt to show he was attracting supporters from the modernising wing of the party, Mr Burnham unveiled the support of Rachel Reeves, the shadow work and pensions secretary, and Lord Falconer, the ex-Lord Chancellor and Tony Blair’s former flatmate.

He also attempted to outflank David Cameron on Europe by calling for the EU referendum to be brought forward to address public concerns over immigration.

Labour relies on Unite for funding – during Ed Miliband’s leadership, the union provided £1.4million.

The Mail revealed on Saturday that two-thirds of Labour MPs – 147 out of 232 – are now members of, or are funded by, Unite. Any leadership candidate needs the support of 35 MPs, and Unite’s stranglehold makes i t harder f or Blairite candidates to gain enough support to get on the ballot paper.

One MP claimed at the weekend that ‘Unite heavies are leaning on MPs’ not to support the main Blairite candidate Liz Kendall.

Barry Sheerman said the election must not be ‘ hijacked’ by the unions, adding: ‘One new MP said, “What am I supposed to do when I am told that if I cross certain people it is the end of my career?”’

In a speech on Saturday, Scotland’s Labour leader Jim Murphy resigned with a broadside at Mr McCluskey – attacking his ‘destructive behaviour’ and describing him as the ‘kiss of death’ for the party.

An angry Mr McCluskey hit back yesterday, saying the Blairite Mr Murphy had ‘represented the ideology that has alienated voters’.

He warned that Unite’s affiliation to Labour could be reconsidered unless it showed it was the ‘voice of ordinary working people, that they are the voice of organised labour’.

He told BBC Radio 5 Live’s Pienaar’s Politics: ‘If they do that in a way that enthuses us, then I don’t believe that the mountain that is ahead of us is unclimbable.

‘If they don’t, if they kind of inject more disillusionment in the party then the pressure will grow from our members to rethink. It is certainly already growing in Scotland.

‘We have a rules conference in my union in July and there’s already a

‘Need to debate the free movement of labour’

number of r esolutions f r om Scotland seeking to release them from the rule that limits us just to the Labour Party.’

The Unite general secretary denied that Mr Burnham was his favoured candidate and appeared to suggest that free movement of l abour i n the EU had to be questioned.

Mr McCluskey said the left needed to ‘challenge’ Ukip, saying: ‘ That means in my opinion we need to seriously debate the free movement of labour.’

Frontrunner Mr Burnham denied yesterday that he was the ‘ union candidate’, saying: ‘I am the unifying candidate’.

He told the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show: ‘We have got to reach out to those voters who had doubts about us on immigration and economic competence.

‘If we are going to rebuild that trust we need to have an honest assessment of the record of the last Labour government on t he economy.’

He also admitted he had spoken to Mr McCluskey, saying: ‘Yes, I have spoken to Len. But I have also spoken to many people.

‘I’ve spoken to business leaders, I’ve spoken to party members, I am speaking to everybody to build a strong, united campaign.’

The other declared leadership candidates are Mary Creagh and shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper.

TONY Blair had a bad habit of defending Gordon Brown. Despite the huffs, plots and hissy fits, the PM would always insist to his fuming aides that the Chancellor was worth it – that the value of his strengths outweighed t he damage inflicted by his neuroses.

Even as Brown’s inexorable campaign to oust him became ever more transparent and shameless, Blair kept his cool. The desire to become prime minister was ‘not an ignoble ambition’, he said.

This approach – half empathetic, half patronising, as if he were a bemused but loving mum – must have driven Brown crazy. Crazier, even. It always felt like Blair understood his sulky successor rather better than Brown understood himself.

Blair also understood the psychology of power. The ambition to lead on the basis of a fixed moral compass, right or wrong, was what drove his Chancellor and what fuelled his passions and his rages.

It was responsible for his very real achievements as well as his obvious failures. And, after all, someone has to want to do it.

At the weekend, I watched the first debate between the contenders for Labour’s top job. Andy Burnham, Yvette Cooper, Mary Creagh, Tristram Hunt and Liz Kendall all want to lead, which is not ignoble.

It quickly became clear from the array of platitudes that it will be a long road back, and that most of the hard thinking is still to be done. Yet though times may be tough, the movement to which they belong has been one of the great motors of progress and justice in our country, and has supplied many of our greatest figures. And someone has to want to do it. The questions the winner must answer are: in 2015, what is it I’m leading, and who am I leading it for?

Destruction

When Blair took on the leadership in 1994, he did so with a clear idea of what was required. Long years in opposition had tested to destruction the idea that you could win from the Left in the late 20th century and into the 21st. He glued himself to t he centre - ground, developed a programme that had something for everyone – whether bottom, middle or top – smiled a lot and cleaned up. Three times.

Such was the scale of Blair’s success that Labour has never forgiven him for it. The cl ear evidence t hat a charismatic, pragmatic, One Nation frontman appealed to a mass coalition of voters was an affront to the purists and the ideologues.

They wanted their party back. They got rid of Tony as soon as was convenient, put ‘Real Labour’ Gordon into No 10, and promptly lost the next election.

Lesson not learned. The trade union paymasters for so long held at bay by Blair, both by inclination and by dint of his enormous majorities, installed Ed Miliband as leader, saw off his centrist brother and mounted yet another attempt to win from the left. It was radical, counter-intuitive and profoundly stupid.

Now Labour has lost that vote too, and once more finds itself in the electoral and intellectual doldrums, struggling for relevance and a public hearing. It’s like 1983 all over again.

After the failure of this vanity project, you might expect to see some humility from its architects. You would search in vain. At the weekend, Len McCluskey, the gobby Unite bruiser responsible for the Miliband experiment, toppled yet another centrist leader.

Be in no doubt that Unite did for Jim Murphy. Pat Rafferty, the union’s Scottish leader, had called on him to resign ‘without delay’. McCluskey, using Capone- esque language, advised that he should ‘leave the scene’. Neil Findlay, Unite’s preferred candidate for the Scottish leadership, resigned from the front bench. So did Alex Rowley, Findlay’s close supporter.

Despite narrowly surviving a vote of no confidence at the party’s national executive in Glasgow on Saturday, Murphy’s position was untenable. His allies, accusing their opponents of ‘Bennite nihilism’, vow that the month left to him in the job will comprise ‘four weeks of revenge against the over-reach of Unite’.

McCluskey’s is a war with northern and southern fronts. With Murphy gone, he is now tightening his python-like squeeze on the UK party as a whole. He has decided Andy Burnham will replace Miliband, as the candidate ‘who impresses me the most’.

This is code for ‘the most Left-wing and pliable option available’. Whoever takes over in London and in Edinburgh will be left in no doubt that they owe McCluskey big time, and that he intends to collect.

The origins of the British Labour movement, as a peaceful attempt to give a voice to the voiceless and to take a stand in number against the exploitation of the individual worker, are a beautiful thing.

But the relationship between its component parts has never been easy. Keir Hardie was viewed with suspicion by the unions due to his job as manager of the Labour Leader newspaper, which in their eyes made him a capitalist employer. They called him a ‘carpetbagger’ when he tried to win a seat in West Ham, forcing him to withdraw.

The great socialist reformer Sidney Webb described the general council of the TUC as ‘pigs’, while Denis Healey said the unions were ‘an obstacle both to the election of a Labour government and to its success once in power’.

If anything, though, the modern-day relationship between the two has reached new levels of toxicity. The titanic union barons of yore have been replaced with expenseaccount, korma-guzzling careerists who, despite vastly reduced membership numbers, behave as if they were Ernie Bevin, the mighty leader of the TGWU who went on to become Attlee’s foreign secretary.

They are crude bullies with big egos and rat-like cunning rather than any genuine wit or concern for the people they are supposed to represent. Industrial action and jo job losses are merely pieces in a cheap politic ical chess match.

So what does Labour do about this? Maybe nothing can be done. After all, Unite donates just under a third of the party’s income,n which amounted to £19million in t the last parliament. Perhaps the party is d doomed to i ts deathly embrace with M McCluskey’s vampire squid.

But the link between the two increasingly looks like an anachronism that should be laid to rest. As Blair wrote in his autobiography, A Journey: ‘All progressive movements have to beware their own success. The progress they make reinvents the society they work in, and they must in turn reinvent themselves to keep up, otherwise they become hollow echoes from a once loud, strong voice, reverberating still, to little effect. As their consequence diminishes, so their dwindling adherents become ever more shrill and strident, more solicitous of protecting their own shrinking space rather than understanding that the voice of the times has moved on and they must listen before speaking.’

Moderation

A popular and mainstream Labour Party should not rely on the whims of people such as McCluskey for its money. Blair’s moderation attracted support from business as well as the unions, which gave the party the financial freedom to think independently.

In today’s more vibrant zones of left-ofcentre political engagement there is an invigorating new approach to funding – the SNP is supported not just by the odd generous millionaire or lottery winner but also by ordinary individuals keen to commit to what they see as a positive, fresh and attractive cause.

This is the kind of bottom-up crowd-funding that led to Labour’s creation in the first place – a time when it could justifiably call itself the People’s Party. No one suggests it would be an easy path, but it surely offers the most obvious way out of the current political misfortune and unhealthy union dependency, and a lifeline to the future.

As Jim Murphy said in his resignation speech: ‘We cannot have our leaders selected or deselected by the grudges and grievances of one prominent man. The leader of the Scottish Labour Party does not serve at the grace of Len McCluskey and the next leader of the UK Labour Party should not be picked by Len McCluskey.’

The Unite boss is trying to turn the Labour leadership into a closed shop. In the context of the liberated world in which we live, that is an extraordinary and appalling thing. He must be stopped. Whoever succeeds in their not ignoble ambition to take over from Ed and Jim must decide what it is they’re leading, and who they’re leading it for. Red Len is the answer to nothing.