The Unite Leadership’s Betrayal: In Solidarity with Imperialism, Not the Ukrainian Worker

The Unite Leadership Consistently Proves It’s Loyalty To The Ruling Class

We have said it before, and current events force us to say it again: the Unite leadership, from Len McCluskey to its current standard-bearer Sharon Graham, has built a record of failure and deception. They are fluent in the language of class struggle, of militancy, of workers’ power. But their actions consistently tell a different story—one of conciliation and, ultimately, betrayal.

This duplicity is now laid bare for all to see in the realm of international solidarity. The union’s recent decision to affiliate with the Ukraine Solidarity Campaign (USC) is not merely a mistake; it is a conscious political act of class treachery.

The USC presents a fairy tale for the credulous: the plucky Ukrainian nation, yearning only for freedom, standing against the brute Russian behemoth. It is a narrative manufactured in Whitehall and Washington, designed to obscure a far more sinister reality. What the USC will never acknowledge is that the current regime in Kiev was not born of democratic will, but of a violent, Western-orchestrated coup in 2014.

Let us state the facts that the Unite leadership and their new allies in the USC would have us forget.

The Maidan coup was the work of an ultra reactionary coalition that included, by their own admission, Ukrainian fascist forces. Figures like the late and unlamented fascist leader, Andriy Parubiy boasted of their role as the muscle that overthrew the elected government. The subsequent massacre of trade unionists, communists, and socialists at the Odessa House of Trade Unions was the regime’s bloody answer to peaceful opposition. This is not speculation; it is the open record of a fascist-led takeover.

And what has this regime, which Unite now declares solidarity with, delivered for the Ukrainian working class?

• The suppression of trade union freedom.
• The banning of anti-capitalist and leftist political parties.
• The fire-sale of the nation’s land and rare earth minerals to conglomerates in London, Amsterdam, and New York.

This is a virulently anti-worker junta, a client state of NATO, which has hurled hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian workers to their deaths in a proxy war it cannot win, a war engineered and sustained by British imperialism.

So we must ask the Unite leadership directly: With whom are you truly in solidarity?

It is certainly not with the workers of the Donbas, who took up arms in 2014 to resist this very fascist junta. It is certainly not with the Ukrainian proletariat, who are being bled white for the geopolitical interests of the Atlantic alliance.

The answer is plain. The Ukraine Solidarity Campaign is a project of social-chauvinists—like those from the pro-imperialist micro-sect, the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty—who drape their rabid nationalism in the tattered flag of socialism. They are, in Lenin’s precise term, socialists in words but chauvinists in deed. By aligning with them, the Unite leadership has chosen its side: it stands with the bosses, the government, and British imperialism.

This is a disgraceful abandonment of the working class. We remember the true solidarity of the past: the dockers who blocked arms for Pinochet’s Chile, the workers who boycotted apartheid South Africa, the Lancashire cotton workers who sacrificed their livelihoods to support the Union against the slave-owning Confederacy.

True solidarity means opposing our own ruling class. True solidarity means recognising that British imperialism, which imposed this fascist-linked regime on Ukraine and provoked a war against Russia, is the eternal enemy of workers everywhere.

Sharon Graham’s Unite has made its choice. It has chosen the side of the imperialists. It is a piece of class betrayal, and it must be exposed and condemned by every class-conscious worker in the movement. The fight for a genuine, anti-imperialist leadership begins with naming this disgrace for what it is.