He’s never met David Cameron, but the leader of Britain’s largest union believes the PM is out to smash workers’ rights – and he’s ready to fight. He explains why he thinks Jeremy Corbyn is a winner, and how he could work with Zac Goldsmith

Thank goodness for Len McCluskey. In the age of postmodern politics, the leader of Unite knows who he is and exactly what he stands for. He represents his members – even when they are wrong. Overweight, shabby and not especially clever, he is at ease with himself. And he needs to be. For he has a giant battle on his hands.

His primary enemy is Sajid Javid, the new business secretary, a politician who feels compelled to work out his personal myth in public – and who is at the forefront of the new Tory war on unions.

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Javid has a picture of Margaret Thatcher on the wall of his office, like a tribal effigy, and he longs to refight the heroic battles of a previous epoch – first of all through his trade unions bill, which was presented to the House of Commons this week. In this respect, he is reminiscent of those harmless obsessives found wandering about old battlefields reliving the English civil war.

Although McCluskey would not wish to admit it, Thatcher and Tebbit did their job. The employment legislation of the 1980s changed the labour market for ever. Javid is engaged in the politics of nostalgia, with many of the old tropes. For that purpose, he and the Conservative party have seized upon a useful monster: an old-style union boss bringing industrial chaos back to Britain.

For this to work, of course, Javid would need a willing participant on the other side. Luckily for him, McCluskey’s answer is a resounding “yes”.

When we meet at the Unite headquarters, shortly after the Transport for London strike and shortly before Javid unveiled his proposals, McCluskey is bristling for the fight. “I’ve been representing working people for 40-odd years,” he says, “as a shop steward, as an official and as a general secretary, and I’ve never yet come across a worker who likes going on strike.

“People go on strike because they feel that there’s an injustice, that their employer is engaged in something that is wrong. So, my view is that you always have to look: what has gone wrong? How can we work it out? And, for me, 95% of the time we do it.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Len McCluskey stands next to Charlotte Church at a protest against spending cuts and austerity. Photograph: Justin Tallis/AFP/Getty Images

Yes, he agrees, whenever service workers go on strike, whether public or private sector, “innocent members of the public suffer”. But he insists that the blame for the tube strike that brought London to a halt lies squarely in others’ hands: “intransigent management” is at fault, as well as Boris Johnson for a “belligerent approach”. He believes, however, that he could do business with Johnson’s likely successor as Conservative candidate, Zac Goldsmith: “He strikes me as a very capable individual, and that’s what I’m looking for – people who are prepared to engage.”



In the meantime, there is little political cost to others who refuse to do so. Does he worry about the union’s image – and his own? “Well, yes,” he says. “Nobody likes to be disliked. But, the problem is, unions exist for their members.”

There’s an honesty about this. McCluskey is notoriously poor at public relations, but that may be no bad thing. In the post-Blair age, political spin puts off the public, and there is something to be said for telling things how they are.

McCluskey tells me that this week’s Tory trade union legislation “is a destructive device. It once again sends out a message that somehow trade unions are an evil within society and that they have got to be dealt with. Unfortunately, it’s a continuation of this ideological view of trade unions.”



He adds that he would be more than happy to work with David Cameron and George Osborne – if only he had the chance to do so. He adds that last week he sent a letter to the chancellor – unanswered so far – offering to cooperate to improve British productivity. Then he reveals that, in his five years in the post, he has never met the prime minister or, for that matter, the chancellor. This is astonishing: 65-year-old McCluskey is head of Britain’s largest union, with 1.5 million members.

I press him. He must have met at least some cabinet ministers? “Well, yes, the only person in the cabinet I’ve met was Francis Maude.”

I didn’t have the heart to explain to McCluskey that Maude was never a cabinet minister; he was just one of those dogsbody ministers with “a right to attend” cabinet.

This non-relationship with the government disturbs McCluskey. “Why does the prime minister consistently try to create the image that we are the enemy within? He does that because, ideologically, this government is driven to believe that the trade unions are the enemy, completely different from how the European countries treat their trade unions.

He continues: “Look at Germany; their chancellor. The idea that Angela Merkel has never met the leader of [influential metalworkers’ union] IG Metall is nonsense. Our prime minister? Not only has he never met me, but he wants to constantly demonise me.” (Cameron has frequently used McCluskey and his union as tools to trash Labour.)

There are those who would argue that McCluskey has brought it upon himself, offering the government another propaganda gift by changing the Unite constitution to permit the union and its members to break the law. In response, McCluskey says Tory trade union reforms have left him with no choice. “This government, ideologically, is pushing for more. It’s like a bully in the schoolyard: they push and push and push, and they’re never satisfied. If you continue to move back and back and back until such terms are accepted, those are the only terms that satisfy them, and they will humiliate you even if that happens. At some juncture in life, you have to stand up and say, ‘I’m not prepared to put up with this anymore.’”

By way of precedent, he cites legislation against gay people: “In 1967, homosexual men, if they were engaged in a relationship, were considered to be criminals. Who now would suggest that anyone who did that prior to 1967 should have been a criminal? When Mrs Thatcher made it a criminal offence to be a member of a trade union if you worked in GCHQ, who now would regard any of those workers who secretly kept their union membership as criminals? These were laws passed by elected governments, and Mrs Thatcher had gained a massive majority, and yet the law was wrong. It was based on prejudice.”

I ask him whether he sympathised with Tories who defied the foxhunting ban. “No, no,” he cries. “You’re posing false alternatives to me. You’re trying to suggest that what I am saying is that anyone can pick and choose which law they want to abide by.”

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I suggest this is exactly what he seems to be suggesting. “I am not. You’re trying to lump me. Please, don’t lump me [he means put words in his mouth]. This is about the largest voluntary organisation in our nation. Trade unions represent in excess of 10 million people. That’s trade unions and their families. We are the people who contribute hugely to the wealth of our nation, and we have a government intent on prosecuting, on nothing other than class prejudice, our organisation. We are not Colonel Blimp in Berkshire, who prefers to go chase some foxes.”

McCluskey’s argument is not as inconsistent as it appears. A long and tragic history, backed by deep political and economic analysis, underlies his defence of special treatment for trade unions. Unions established themselves at the start of the 20th century after a series of legal and political battles had won them crucial immunities for collective action against employers.

Many of these immunities were lost in the Thatcher years. McCluskey believes the Cameron government has set out to take away the privileged status the unions enjoyed in the 20th century. “I have consistently said to the prime minister, and I will say it again: I plead, don’t do this, stop demonising us, stop pushing us outside of the law. Because, if we step outside the law, the consequences of that will be your responsibility. Otherwise, what you are asking me to do is to bend the knee, simply turn trade unions into an advisory agency, rather than an organisation, that represents the views of working people.”

It’s important to listen carefully to what McCluskey is saying. The trade unions came into existence to confront the shameful and terrifying social injustices that scarred British society at the end of the 19th century. Workers were isolated and vulnerable against predatory employers, meaning that inequality of wealth and life chances was grotesque. Over the last 30 years, the global triumph of neoliberalism has restored some of the inequalities, vulnerability and dreadful working practices that were prevalent more than 100 years ago. McCluskey’s problem is that both Labour and the Tory party have given their assent to the new economic model.

Notoriously, McCluskey blamed New Labour for taking the Scottish working class for granted and enabling the triumph of the SNP in last May’s general election. Now he warns that Labour could also play midwife to Ukip. “If Labour doesn’t act, Ukip could become the SNP of the north,” he says.

While he praises immigrants, he adds that, besides immigrants, “the second group that benefits are the greedy bosses. The ones who want a pool of labour, a cheap pool of labour, that can be used to undercut wages and conditions, bring an element of divisiveness into our communities and put pressure on our public services”.

“They don’t get a damn about that,” he says. “It’s a quick profit: they make money and then they can disappear to their island retreats or wherever they come from. We have to be prepared to enter the debate and deal with the concerns of ordinary working people.”

This brings us onto the Labour party. McCluskey and I agree that the three mainstream candidates are engaged in a squalid, undignified and meaningless contest to determine which one most closely resembles David Cameron.

“When there were three candidates,” he asserts, “it was incredibly bland and boring; nobody would begin to see what the hell was the difference. Some of the candidates could be sitting on the Tory bench. And there was a genuine depression within the Labour party. Suddenly, Jeremy Corbyn pops into the race and the place electrifies. We have thousands of members joining to become supporters of the Labour party; the debate has become more exciting. The other three have had to straighten themselves up and begin to talk more radical and appear to be more in opposition.”

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The addition of those 30,000 Unite members as registered Labour party supporters is bound to change the dynamic of the race. But McCluskey insists this flood of support for the leftwing candidate had very little to do with him. “I have an executive of 63 people and they voted pretty overwhelmingly for Jeremy Corbyn.”

By the end of our conversation, I feel sure of one thing: McCluskey is one of the most interesting and important public figures in Britain. He stands right outside the political class that has captured the main parties. He sounds different, he looks different and he is different. McCluskey is about loyalty, candour and belief.

In the age of focus groups, he doesn’t care what the public thinks. In the age of inauthenticity, he’s as genuine as they come. He talks a new political language and asks a different set of questions. He represents a full-frontal challenge to the system.

He is not simply a dinosaur, as the Tories believe. Political opposition is about to change shape. Burnham, Kendall and Cooper have bought into the bankrupt Blairite model – namely that opposition parties should model themselves on the government of the day. McCluskey and his ally Jeremy Corbyn are straining to take British politics in an entirely new direction. Who knows, they might succeed. And it might not be such a bad thing if they do.