In announcing that, in one month’s time, he will step down as Scottish Labour Leader, Jim Murphy has said: ‘The Labour party’s problem is not the link with trade unions or even the relationship with Unite members, far from it. It is the destructive behaviour of one high-profile trade unionist.’
This is an issue that the entire Labour movement needs now to confront directly.
The dinosaurs of the labour movement, the power-broking Union barons who flex their members’ subscriptions as the foundations of their own power base, are beyond the pale.
McCluskey is the old time fixer whose Union – Unite – held Scotland to ransom in October 2013 in a mindless display of ritual industrial muscle that almost closed the Grangemouth oil refinery for good, with incalculable consequences for Scotland’s fuel supplies and for its economy.
This is the same bullying anachronistic Trade Union baron whose adherents, one month later, in November 2013, were caught red-handed fixing the selection of the Labour candidate for the Falkirk constituency in the recent General election.
A key figure in both of these manoeuvres was the now legendary Stevie Deans – Unite’s boss in Scotland, the senior Unite union official at the Grangemouth oil refinery; and who became a sudden appointment as Chair of the Falkirk Labour Party – a few months before the crucial candidate selection to represent the constituency in 2015.
When the scam was revealed, the then national Labour Leader, Ed Miliband – in what was arguably the single most courageous [if not the most skilful] action of his leadership, given that he had won the position with the backing if the Unions, including Unite – reported the matter to the police and ordered the selection process to be scrapped and begun again.
Miliband also banned from the selection process McCluskey’s colleague, Karie Murphy – described in the media as his close friend and the candidate for whom the Falkirk seat was being fixed – with apparent involvement of some kind from Labour MP, Tom Watson whose office was managed by Murphy.
The ‘grudges and grievances of one man’ which Murphy today, naming McCluskey, declared must not be allowed to determine the shape and direction of the Labour party and its Leaders – date from this incident.
Since then McCluskey has hounded Ed Miliband while flaunting his own power in sponsoring no fewer than 25% of the Labour candidates selected to fight the General Election in question. This rightly raises questions about the propriety of having a substantial proportion of MPs of one party effectively owing their position to a Union baron as willing as is McCluskey to instruct.
McCluskey ‘took against’ Jim Murphy, lost no opportunity to undermine him and has tainted by association the very able Neil Findlay, who was a competitor of Murphy’s for the Scottish Labour Leadership and who was – is – the Unions’ man.
McCluskey has also, vindictively, been doing his best to finish off in Scotland the party he nominally supports, by endorsing the SNP in what is a clear and clever strategy by that party to undermine Labour’s prospects for recovery by making their own accords with the Unions.
McCluskey represents the Labour of the days when working people needed their own thug to oppose the thuggery on the employers’ side of the fence. No one stopped to question whether that was the constructive way forwards.
Bullies of any kind, on any side, are beyond the pale and remain a primitive taste we need, as a society, to leave behind.
A Labour Party fuelled and identified by these unevolved creatures is not supportable.
Jim Murphy may not, in his rootless Blairite pragmatism, have proved the man to relight the fire of the Labour party in Scotland – but that does not mean that reverting to the process of grubby deals done in back rooms by hulking fixers perverting fair systems is ever an option for an enlightened political organisation.
A panicking run by Scottish Labour into the arms of the Union barons is not going to produce any better result for a party that has partly been beached by the progress of time but has lacked the ability to think beyond the tribal.
