Always Red. By Len McCluskey. OR Books. 2021.
McCluskey has always come across as the ultimate trade union bruiser and then, in later years, a close ally of Jeremy Corbyn. Originally a ‘planman’ on the Liverpool docks (drawing up plans of where cargoes from various ports would be held on ships), he rose through the ranks of the Transport and General Workers’ Union before playing a key role in the creation of Britain’s most powerful union, Unite – formed in 2007 from a merger of the T & G and Amicus. From 2010 until recently, he became its General Secretary.
The ‘red’ in the title refers not only to McCluskey’s politics – he was an early supporter of Militant, though says he was never a member – but also to his love of Liverpool FC, with which he appears to have travelled all over Europe. He also appears to have seen red many times in the more metaphorical sense during his union career and the book is full of score-settling. Former Labour Deputy Leader Tom Watson – who was McCluskey’s old flat mate – comes out of it particularly badly. And there is clearly no love lost with Keir Starmer either, who he accuses of duplicity.
One of the recurring issues in the book though is McCluskey’s belief that the working class are ready to rally behind a radical left-wing programme of nationalisation and state planning if it wasn’t for the right-wing of the Labour Party selling them out. This, of course, is the old Militant line, parroted today by their successors SPEW (he also still uses some of their terminology, banging on not just about the Labour Right but the ‘ultra-left’ too).
This perspective leads him to often make a highly selective and one-sided analysis of events, the best example being the Labour performance under his friend Corbyn in the 2017 and 2019 General Elections. 2017 is portrayed as a great victory in all but name as Labour increased its vote with a radical programme of reforms by more than in any other election since 1945. However, 2019 is portrayed as the Brexit election and that Labour’s downfall was simply a reflection of this and its pro-Remain stance.
But this won’t do. Not just because Brexit wasn’t the only factor that led to their disastrous showing in 2019 – the public perception of Jeremy Corbyn and Labour’s unrealistic long ‘shopping list’ of leftist demands were almost as significant. But it’s also because their relative success in 2017 (even though they didn’t actually win of course) wasn’t principally due to the fact they presented the British working class with the radical stuff they had long been waiting for. After all, they’d actually done the same in 1983 and had come a big cropper then, as they later did in 2019 with an even bigger radical promise.
The main reason for Labour’s relatively good showing in 2017 was because that election was also dominated by Brexit but that time they more successfully pitched themselves as a party that could be supported by Remainers and even some ‘soft’ Brexiters worried by a no-deal outcome. It was why Labour managed to win strongly pro-Remain Kensington and Canterbury for the first time ever, yet against the national swing, could also contrive to lose the likes of hard-Brexit Mansfield and Stoke-on-Trent South for the first time in living memory. The correlation between increases in the Tory vote in strong Brexit areas and the increase in the Labour vote in strong Remain areas was statistically significant and the biggest factor at play, but McCluskey just ignores this. By 2019 the ground had shifted and Labour was by then simply left with an unpopular leader, an incoherent campaign and an unconvincing set of leftist reforms.
But it was ever the way with the left – always wanting to convince themselves the precise cocktail of radical reforms of capitalism purveyed by one or other of their factions would one day triumph, when most of the evidence is to the contrary (and not just in the UK either).
The best chapter is actually the last one, on ‘fighting back’ trade unionism as he calls it. Here McCluskey outlines how Unite has developed the tactic of ‘leverage’ and discusses how it works. A good example was when ‘passenger transport company Go Ahead sacked a steward working on the buses in Manchester, we discovered its growth plan was to move into the Norwegian rail market by winning a contract worth £3.8 billion. We dispatched a team to speak to Norwegian politicians and the press, armed with a dossier detailing how this company dealt with rail contracts in the UK. The company was forced to weigh the benefit of getting rid of the steward against the threat to a multi-billion pound contract. Soon enough, the steward was back at work’ (p.292).
There are a variety of examples of Unite using leverage in successful ways to defend its members and their pay and conditions. This is what good unions are for (despite their imperfections) and this chapter is arguably worth more than the rest of the book put together. Indeed, McCluskey can take some genuine pride in the role he has played in developing this – and certainly far more than in what appears to be his enduring adherence to the Trotskyist tactics and programmes of the 70s and 80s.
DAP
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