Len McCluskey
Leonard David McCluskey is a British trade unionist. He is General Secretary of Unite the Union, the largest affiliate and a major donor to the Labour Party. As a young adult, he spent some years working in the Liverpool Docks for the Mersey Docks and Harbour Company prior to becoming a full-time union official for the Transport and General Workers' Union in 1979.
McCluskey was elected as the general secretary of Unite in 2010, and was re-elected to his post in 2013 and 2017. He was a key backer and supporter of Jeremy Corbyn during his time as Leader of the Labour Party.
Early life
Leonard David McCluskey was born in Liverpool, Lancashire on 23 July 1950, the son of a painter-decorator, after whom he was named, and Peggy, who politically inspired her son. He failed the 11-plus, but passed the 13-plus, intended for late developers. A Catholic, he attended the Cardinal Godfrey School, a grammar school, in Anfield. Leaving school with three A-levels, he began his working life on the Canada Dock, part of the Port of Liverpool.Employed by the Mersey Docks and Harbour Board as a ship’s planner, he drew maps indicating the location of cargo in the hold so it could be retrieved at the unloading port. He worked for the company for 11 years.
Early trade union activism
McCluskey joined the Transport and General Workers' Union in 1968, and became a shop steward for the union the following year. He was involved in unionising the white collar staff in the Liverpool docks among whom previously there had been an absence of trade union organisation. After joining the Labour Party in 1970, he became an officer of the T&GWU in Merseyside in 1979 and was its campaign organiser throughout the 1980s.During the decade he became a close friend of Tony Mulhearn and Derek Hatton, then deputy leader of Liverpool City Council, and supported the Militant tendency. "I would never, ever deny that", he told the Liverpool Echo in 2009 "but I never became a member". He added: "In the end I decided that Militant was too sectarian from a political standpoint to be effective. But I believe that on the chief issues they were right".
McCluskey was elected as the National Secretary of the T&GWU General Workers group in 1990, and moved to London to work in the union's national headquarters.
In 2004, he became the T&GWU's national organiser for the service industries. In 2007, he was appointed as the Assistant General Secretary for Industrial Strategy of the Unite the Union, a merger of the T&GWU and Amicus.
He defines himself as being on the left of the union, and has been given the label of "Red Len" in the British press because of his involvement in Unite's dispute with British Airways. In a speech at the 2010 Durham Miners' Gala he said political developments in Cuba and Venezuela should be better known, and suggested the reason they were not was because of "the fear of the good example".
However, in March 2012 the industrial correspondent of the Press Association, Alan Jones, distinguished McCluskey during the BA dispute from the former National Union of Mineworkers leader Arthur Scargill: "I think he's more willing to cut a deal". Labour politician Jon Trickett told George Eaton in 2016: "He got to the top through force of personality, intellect and organising skill". He expressed regret in 2009, and again in 2011, that the Labour governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown did not reverse the legislative changes affecting trade unions of the immediately preceding Conservative governments. He argued in June 2016, that the changes made by those governments have "left the lowest paid and the most vulnerable workers in our society in dire straits".
Unite and McCluskey backed Ed Miliband to become the next Labour leader in 2010. The combined union votes of Unite, plus Unison and the GMB, were enough for Miliband to be elected leader over the preference for his brother, David Miliband, of party members and MPs in the electoral college which was in force at the time.
General Secretaryship of Unite
2010 and 2013 Unite election
In 2010, McCluskey ran for election as General Secretary of Unite to replace joint-General Secretaries Derek Simpson and Tony Woodley, who had both announced their retirement. On 21 November 2010, it was announced that McCluskey had been elected to the post, beating Jerry Hicks, Les Bayliss and Gail Cartmail. He gained 101,000 votes in a total 16 per cent turnout of around 1.5 million members.Derek Simpson retired in December 2010, and Tony Woodley followed shortly after that, leaving McCluskey to take office as the General Secretary on 1 January 2011. In December 2010, McCluskey wrote in The Guardian that "there is no case for cuts at all", the government's "austerity frenzy" being "whipped up for explicitly ideological reasons" to complete "Thatcherism's unfinished business by strangling the welfare state".
In 2013, McCluskey announced that he would be running for re-election as General Secretary. He was re-elected in April 2013 with 144,570 votes against Jerry Hicks with 79,819 votes on a turnout of 15.2 per cent. In September 2013, Hicks complained to the trade union watchdog, the certification officer, that the result should be declared void as 156,000 ballot papers had been sent to people no longer paying union subscriptions. However, the union was obliged by law to give them a vote.
Relations with Ed Miliband
In an April 2013 interview for the New Statesman, McCluskey urged Miliband to drop three "Blairite" shadow ministers from his frontbench team. A spokesman for Miliband said McCluskey did not speak for the party and the "attempt to divide the Labour Party is reprehensible" and was "disloyal to the party".In July 2013, there were allegations of vote rigging in the Falkirk constituency. A consultation over an all-women shortlist was abandoned over fears that not all members had been invited to participate. This was thought suspicious because Unite's preferred candidate was Karie Murphy. Meanwhile, Unite had paid for scores of people to join the Labour Party in line with the union's political strategy. Miliband called in the police to establish whether there had been criminal behaviour. The police investigation was dropped in July. Murphy dropped out as a potential candidate in September 2013, and the Labour Party investigation and report found that there had been no wrongdoing. Charges against Murphy and the CLP's chairman Stevie Deans were dismissed.
McCluskey threatened to disaffiliate Unite from Labour and launch a new workers' party in March 2014 if Labour lost the 2015 general election, which could cause Labour to cease to exist in its current form, according to Jim Pickard of the Financial Times. Following Labour's electoral defeat, he found fault with the party's policy proposals, which he thought were "not particularly radical" and believed the party had fallen "for the Tories' austerity trap".
2015 and 2016 Labour leadership elections
During the 2015 Labour leadership election, Unite and McCluskey supported Jeremy Corbyn's candidacy, later reasserted by McCluskey when some senior figures in the union wanted to support Andy Burnham. According to George Eaton of the New Statesman, McCluskey was thought privately to share this view. Office space was supplied to Corbyn's campaign and by March 2018, Unite had donated £11 million to the Labour Party since Corbyn became leader.McCluskey later termed the events of June and July 2016 concerning Corbyn's leadership of the Labour Party as a "crazy vote of no confidence, this mass resignation" and "this coup attempt" in an interview with Decca Aitkenhead of The Guardian.