The Labour Party would like us to think that, ever since Tony Blair sanitised it nearly 20 years ago, it has been perfectly reasonable, sensible and fit for human consumption.
But Red Len McCluskey, leader of the Unite union and the party’s principal paymaster, seems determined to make us revise that view.
In an interview in this week’s New Statesman — which a fortnight ago ran a piece by Mr Blair warning Ed Miliband not to move Left and to stop opposing moderate Coalition policies — Mr McCluskey has let rip.
Mr McCluskey is a copybook hard Leftist. A native of Liverpool, he supported the Militant Tendency at the height of its extremist activities in the EightiesThe roar of the dinosaur, which we imagined extinct by the mid-1980s, echoes again.
Mr McCluskey has just been re-elected leader of his union, and will serve until 2018. This victory, it must be stressed, was based on the backing of just 10 per cent of his members. Although he won 64 per cent of the votes cast, only 15 per cent of the membership bothered to fill in a ballot.
MilitantHis re-election, he says in rather garbled syntax, ‘sends a message to the Government that I’m going to be here up to and beyond the next election, so any promises and any issues that we’re seeking from them [the Labour Party] will be implemented if they get into power’.
Unite — which absorbed the notoriously militant Transport & General Workers’ Union in 2007 — accounts for a massive 28 per cent of Labour’s funding. Its votes ensured Ed Miliband became leader in 2010 rather than his brother David, who had the most support among MPs and constituency party members.
It manifestly wants, and expects, considerable bang for its bucks.
With Mr Miliband already weak after some serious misjudgments he needs Mr McCluskey's intervention like the proverbial hole in the headRed — or, as I like to call him, Prehistoric — Len also hints that he and his union are prepared to ignore any reluctance by the Trades Union Congress to call a general strike (the first since 1926).
He is, he says, willing to talk to other unions about ‘anything else they might wish to do, over and above the collective decision of the TUC.’
Like union barons of old, he supports democratic decisions so long as he agrees with them.
Mr McCluskey is a copybook hard Leftist. A native of Liverpool, he supported the Militant Tendency at the height of its extremist activities in the Eighties. He also describes Thatcherism as ‘an evil creed’ and the funeral accorded the great prime minister (and attended by Ed Miliband) as ‘distasteful in the extreme’.
In his interview, he disparages Tony Blair who, unlike any other leader of his party, won three consecutive general elections, and warns Mr Miliband to ignore him. He also advises him to avoid supporting public spending cuts, or face losing the next election.
Protestors from the union in 2010. Unite - which absorbed the notoriously militant Transport & General Workers' Union in 2007 ¿ accounts for a massive 28 per cent of Labour¿s fundingMuch more threateningly, he also informs his leader — his placeman, in effect — that if he carries on consorting with Blairites, and having some in his shadow cabinet, ‘then the truth is that he’ll be defeated and he’ll be cast into the dustbin of history’.
He chillingly suggests the union might withdraw its support of Labour if it fails to act as ‘the authentic voice of ordinary working people’, effectively blackmailing Mr Miliband with the threat of removing almost a third of his party’s funding.
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His spokesmen were quick to dismiss the union boss as a marginal figure, but this is simply not the case.
It is not merely the vast financial contribution Unite makes to Labour, or the fact that the party’s present leader would not be in his job without the deeply undemocratic union block vote in leadership elections.
It is that trade unions sponsor around 40 per cent of the party’s 258 MPs, and half the Labour candidates already selected to fight the next election are union-sponsored.
Their sponsors can bring heavy pressure to bear on some of them to support the extremist, socialist policies so beloved of Prehistoric Len. Indeed, it was Mr McCluskey who last year called for strikes and ‘civil disobedience’ during the London Olympics.
These are policies redolent of the 1983 Labour manifesto drawn up under Michael Foot’s leadership and which Sir Gerald Kaufman, still a senior Labour MP, described as ‘the longest suicide note in history’.
Any such flavour to the next manifesto would leave Labour struggling for votes, and shut out support in the South of England which it needs to have any chance of forming a credible administration.
However, the price Labour pays for ignoring the unions is, as Mr McCluskey has suggested, predominantly a financial one. For after Mr Miliband’s election as party leader in 2010, donations from individuals to the party have plummeted.
The Electoral Commission found in 2011 that 91 per cent of the party’s funding came from unions.
The more to the Left Mr Miliband moves — and, presumably in order to placate his paymasters, he signalled earlier this week that his policies would be further Left than those of any leader since Neil Kinnock — the less likely he is to find anyone in the private sector to give his party money.
The truth is that the McCluskey intervention sums up how little has changed in Labour since its dark, wilderness years of the 1980s.
DisruptiveIt still speaks mainly for a small, militant but intensely disruptive faction within its own movement that is wildly unrepresentative of the mass of the British people.
Mr Miliband, meanwhile, has a wider problem. It is not just that he owes his place to the unions. In a parliamentary Labour party that is mostly comprised of people who did not vote for him — only 84 backed him in the first round of the 2010 contest and the rest would still probably prefer to vote for someone else in another leadership election — it is hard to discern who his real supporters in Parliament are.
McClusky disparages Tony Blair who, unlike any other leader of his party, won three consecutive general elections, and warns Mr Miliband to ignore him Ed Miliband who is currently on the campaign trail has the problem that it is hard to discern who his real supporters are in his own partyWe all know who the Blairites were, and indeed still are. They see their influence diminishing, which is why some of them, led by Mr Blair himself, have been so vocal in trying to persuade Mr Miliband to re-connect with the centre ground. The alternative is a party in which Mr McCluskey and his friends find their wishes granted — and which faces electoral oblivion.
We also knew who the Brownites were. Some are, indeed, in prominent positions in Mr Miliband’s shadow cabinet, waiting for the next vacancy to occur so they can pursue their ambitions — notably Ed Balls, the shadow chancellor, and his wife Yvette Cooper, the shadow home secretary.
Arrogant Mr McCluskey has just been re-elected leader of his union, and will serve until 2018But Mr Miliband’s supporters remain the people who propelled him to his present position in 2010 — the unions, and notably the biggest union of them all, Mr McCluskey’s Unite. The only real loyalty the Labour leader owes is to them.
He and his friends can, in their embarrassment at Mr McCluskey’s arrogant and undemocratic intervention, denounce the union baron and protest that he has no influence over what Mr Miliband would do. However, anyone with a memory that stretches back to the 1970s and early 1980s knows how the Labour movement works, and will suspect such a denial is worthless.
When Labour is in opposition — as it is now, and as it was under Michael Foot in the early 1980s — such internal squabbles are simply private grief. It is a different matter when Labour seems to have a chance of office: two years out from the next election, the latest opinion poll gives it a six-point lead over the Conservatives.
As he has warned us, Mr McCluskey will be there waiting for the promises he has extracted to be kept. And it will be the minority of his members who will stand to benefit from such blackmail, and not the hard-working, hard-pressed majority who make up middle Britain.
Because if anyone tries to tell you that a man who provides 28 per cent of Labour’s income, and for whom hardly anyone has the chance to vote, will not succeed in influencing policy, and that his fellow barons who provide the other 60 per cent will also hold back, you would be mad to believe them.