Unite cuts funding to Labour Party by £1m following warning to Sir Keir Starmer
Unite, Labour’s biggest single donor is to cut the amount of money it gives the party after the union’s general secretary, Len McCluskey, said he feared Keir Starmer was leading it away from the left.
On Tuesday Unite’s executive council voted to cut its affiliation to Labour by 10%, or 50,000 affiliates. It is understood the move could reduce the union’s funding to the party by just under £1m.
Unite will instead use the money to fund other organisations, although it stressed it would still remain Labour’s largest trade union affiliate.
In response, Labour’s Ben Bradshaw shows us exactly what the overwhelming middle-class ‘parliamentary Labour Party’ think about the working class and the unions that financially support the Party.
Bradshaw said the Unite leader has “done our movement so much damage” as the union plans to reduce its donation to Labour by 10% claiming “Few people have done more to keep the Tories in power for the last 10 years than Len McCluskey,”
Accusing Len McCluskey of damaging the Labour Party is not only biting the hand that feeds you but stinks of Blairite hypocrisy, it’s as if the right of the party thinks the people have some sort of cognitive block and don’t recall the continued undermining of the Labour Party.
The Blairites have spent the last 5 years doing everything they can to undermine Corbyn and stop Labour winning, including a coup that both Bradshaw and the new Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer participated in when they attempted to undemocratically remove Jeremy Corbyn from the leadership in 2016. It’s treacherous behaviour from the PLP that has created so much distrust in the Labour Party not to mention the fact which infuriated many supporters and members, the Labour Party’s own staffers doing everything they could to throw the 2017 general election. Len McCluskey should use the subs for the Labour movement at large and not the other Tory Party AKA Starmer’s New Labour. #LabourLeaks
A response to @Benbradshaw, ‘You talk about cancer? I feel very strongly about people whose entire life depends on the working class movement. Every office you held was because of the Unions backing you and then you slate them. Now that is a cancerous growth.’ #StarmerOut pic.twitter.com/Qw49Jvv5T6
— Labour Heartlands (@Labourheartland) October 7, 2020
If Tony Benn was here I’m sure he would say, ‘You talk about cancer? I feel very strongly about people whose entire life depends on the working class movement. Every office you held was because of the Unions backing you and then you slate them. Now that is a cancerous growth.’
Unite has been Labour’s biggest financial donor and the union’s general secretary, Len McCluskey, was one of the strongest allies of ex-Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.
However, Mr McCluskey has recently warned new Labour leader, Sir Keir Starmer, over the direction of the party.
He has also expressed anger at the party’s decision to reach a settlement with antisemitism whistleblowers.
McCluskey has been particularly critical of Starmer’s decision in July to make a formal apology to party whistleblowers who spoke to a BBC Panorama programme about antisemitism in the party, and to pay them damages.
The eight former staffers sued the party for defamation, saying senior Labour figures had issued statements attacking their reputations and suggesting they had ulterior political and personal motives to undermine the party.
When the programme was broadcast, a Labour spokesman called them “disaffected former officials” and said they had “worked actively to undermine” Corbyn and had “both personal and political axes to grind”.
McCluskey told Newsnight he and the party’s executive were angry about the decision, “because they thought it was an absolute mistake and wrong to pay out huge sums of money to individuals who were suing the Labour party based on the Panorama programme, when Labour’s own legal people were saying that they would lose that case if it went to court”.
“So we shouldn’t have paid them anything.”
People should understand this is not just a case of ‘sore loser’…
In the 2017 general election, The Labour Party and Jeremy Corbyn was just 2,227 votes away from a chance to be Prime Minister
If the Labour leader had won seven marginal Conservative seats and formed a so-called “progressive alliance” with all other smaller parties – barring the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) – it would have been enough to command a working majority.
Related articles:
The Labour Party is institutionally treacherous
#LabourLeaks: The Labour Party’s GLU created a ‘new Stasi system to spy on members’
Sir Keir Starmer repeating a lie to create the ‘illusion of truth’
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