A recent article on the left-Labour website Squawkbox detailed allegations made by a group of activists in Unite the Union regarding their treatment by the Labour Party and their trade union (‘”Our great union is to be Starmer’s poodle” – furious Unite members on “abandonment”’, 17 July 2024).
The activists had been expelled from Labour during the period from 2019 to 2022 as part of the 1980s-style purge that was inaugurated under the failed leadership of Jeremy Corbyn and was led by his then General Secretary Jennie Formby.
What began under Corbyn as an industrial-scale process to cast hundreds of members out of the Party in perpetuity on the basis of confected charges of antisemitism became, with the ascension of Sir Keir Starmer to leader, a re-tooled process to purge the party of Corbyn loyalists, anti-Zionists (many of them Jewish) and Trotskyite factions.
This second phase of the Labour purge created a groundswell of agitation amongst ex-members and soon-to-be ex-members, as well as amongst Labour grassroots activists not yet in the crosshairs of the Party’s bureaucracy.
During Covid lockdowns, the use of video conferencing tools became ubiquitous, and many disaffected ex-Labour members organised online meetings to discuss their shared plight and to garner support from similarly-minded people. According to Unite member Graham Durham, it was his attendance at one of these meetings that resulted in his own expulsion from the Party.
In 2021, Labour proscribed four organisations – Socialist Appeal (a Trotskyite faction now rebranded as the Revolutionary Communist Party), Labour in Exile, Labour Against the Witchhunt and Chris Williamson’s Resist.
The Party threw members associated with any of these groups out of the Party, usually on the flimsiest of evidence including social media output, while the proscription of these four groups and their associates was enacted retrospectively, meaning that Labour members were thrown out of the Party for actions taken before the ban was brought in, including attending online meetings of disaffected and/or expelled Labour members.
In the case of Mr Durham and his colleagues, all Unite members, the support of his union’s executive would have been most welcome. And indeed, according to his account of events, the Executive Committee did actually instruct the General Secretary, Sharon Graham, to make a statement opposing his treatment.
Graham did not carry out this instruction, however, thus contravening one of the most fundamental principles on which trade unions are supposed to be organised: that the General Secretary acts on the instruction of the executive, not the other way round.
What in fact happened was that the union carried out a review of the way its members had been treated by the Labour Party. According to Durham, this process included interviewing the expelled members and meeting with senior Labour officials. It was following this review that Unite determined that Labour had done nothing wrong by expelling members simply for offering their solidarity and support to other expelled members.
Mr Durham has also stated that the head of the union’s legal services, while admitting that the Labour Party’s actions were wrong, was not prepared to support any challenge against the Party’s decision.
Britain’s unions routinely abandon their own members
This is of course not the first time that the trade union movement has abandoned its members in times of need. In April 2023, Communication Workers’ Union (CWU) leaders capitulated in their year-long dispute with Royal Mail as they accepted an offer that had been roundly rejected by their own membership just four months previously.
In a livestream broadcast by the union on 15 May 2024, hosted by General Secretary Dave Ward (no doubt soon to be Baron Ward of somewhere or other) and Deputy General Secretary Martin Walsh, Walsh stated that the derisory offer – which had been made by Royal Mail management to workers and against which CWU members had gone on strike for seven months in 2022 – was accepted because the CWU negotiators believed that continued industrial unrest would plunge the organisation into administration.
In 2022, Kathleen Stock, a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Sussex, was hounded out of her job by gender identity ideologues when she aired what should be uncontroversial views that sex was immutable and that women’s safe spaces should be legally protected.
Despite facing absolutely no charges from her employer, an organised campaign of harassment and intimidation, orchestrated by students and balaclava-clad outside agitators (most of whom were men), drove Stock to resign from her position.
Stock’s fate was sealed by her own trade union, the contemptible University and Colleges Union (UCU), led by identity politics devotee Dr Jo Grady. At the height of the tumult, when Ms Stock was increasingly isolated, threatened and in need of assistance, her own UCU branch passed a scurrilous motion calling on the University of Sussex to investigate “institutionalised transphobia” at the university, effectively hanging their member out to dry and placing the branch and the UCU firmly on the side of the baying mob that had unleashed their campaign of vitriol against her.
It was grimly dark day for the UCU, as well as for the whole trade union movement, to give anti-worker bourgeois ideology precedence over one of its own members, herself a member of the LGB group.
The fact that trade unions sell out their members should surprise nobody. They have been failing their members for decades. However, what the cases of Mr Durham and his colleagues in Unite and Kathleen Stock and the UCU demonstrate is how quickly and easily unions will abandon members whose own political and ethical leanings do not conform completely with the narrow and rigid belief set of their trade union.
Regardless of our own views on Mr Durham’s membership of the Labour Party, or indeed Ms Stock’s beliefs on sex and gender, both parties were entitled to expect and demand the full support of their trade unions when they came under attack. Yet both Unite and the UCU balanced the legitimate needs of their own members against the continued unadulterated support of an imperialist political party in the case of Unite, or the continued adherence to bourgeois identity politics in the case of the UCU.
Like all the workers in struggle who have been sold out over the decades, Mr Durham and his colleagues are just the latest hapless victims of their trade union’s total servility towards the imperialist Labour Party – a relationship which has endured for decades and must be broken permanently if the interests of the working class are to be genuinely defended by Unite or any other British trade union.
The work to end this dysfunctional, destructive and anti-worker relationship must start at the very ground roots of the trade union movement, and it must start today.
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