Statement on the Unite Policy Conference – Affiliation to Labour

By voting to remain affiliated Unite and their leadership have written Keir Starmer a blank cheque

The decision by the Unite policy conference to back continuing affiliation to the Labour Party is a rotten decision for the members of Unite and a terrible one for the working class movement as a whole.  It must also be regarded as a clear signal to anyone who believed that the election of Sharon Graham as General Secretary would offer anything different that this is another case of a left wing leader capitulating to a rotten status quo.  In her defence of continued affiliation to the labour party Graham stated that “This is the moment of maximum leverage for the union where we can hold Labour to account. Now cannot be the time to walk away. We would be weakening our own arm.”

Such a statement could only be believed by someone who is profoundly ignorant of recent history with regard to relations between the labour party and the union movement and we do not think that General Secretary Graham is ignorant, she is just simply lying.  The same excuses for defending the status quo have been uttered by her predecessors. Both Len Mcluskey and Tony Woodley defended continuing the affiliation to the labour party on the grounds that they were going to drive a hard bargain with the labour party leaders. For 13 years during the Blair/Brown government the labour party leaders actively boasted about having the most restrictive anti union laws in western Europe. The anti union laws actually got worse and the numbers in trade unions continued to decline from 1997 to 2010 and have not recovered since then. Now we have a Labour Party led by Keir Starmer whose whole purpose is to firmly return the labour party to the Blair era to the extent that the party has secured over £7 million from corporations and various members of the ultra rich since 2022. Starmer is also actively courting the Murdoch media empire and engaging in all the same fawning over the ultra rich that Blair used to engage in. His message is very clear, he promises to change absolutely nothing, to do nothing that would impact upon the parasitic 1% that own and control this country. The labour party offers nothing for workers and as we get close to the election Starmer will perform ever greater genuflections before the rich and run even further from anything that could offend them. Rather than holding Labour to account this vote by Unite has done the opposite. It has signalled to Starmer that he can go even further in pushing ever more anti worker policies knowing full well that the union leaderships of this country will never actually do anything serious to oppose him.The day before this vote was taken General Secretary Graham was denouncing the Labour Party for its consistent refusal to back decent pay increases for public sector workers. She knows very well that the labour party acts as the enemy of her own members and the wider working class.  

Many Unite members will be rightly outraged that their union continues to waste their money on such a rotten, anti worker party. Some will want to tear up their membership cards in frustration but whilst this urge is understandable it is not the way forward. The unions in this country are badly led by a selection of establishment stooges, cowards and liars but these are still our unions built up by years of sacrifice by working class people. There are ways to fight back against and the first is to make sure that as many Unite members as possible opt out of the political fund. From there more campaigns must be built across every Labour affiliated union to get this parasitic, anti worker party out of our unions and to free ourselves of the burden of funding our enemies.