Len mccluskey

Nigel Farage emerged from his summer break today to kickstart his party’s No campaign. The Ukip leader hit out at Eurosceptic Conservatives who he believes are lazy and ‘there is no No campaign’ at present. But he won’t be putting himself forward as a candidate to lead the official No campaign —  instead focusing on his grassroots efforts with a tour of the country in September. I caught up with Farage, who appeared refreshed after ‘trying to keep away from people like you’. He denied that by attacking Tories, he is beginning Ukip’s No campaign on a negative footing: ‘You will have seen in national newspaper columns this week a

Could Jeremy Corbyn actually win the Labour leadership race? A new poll from The Times/YouGov suggests that he will. The new poll of eligible voters in the leadership contest — party members, registered supporters and affiliated trade unionists — has Corbyn on track to win in the final round of voting with 53 per cent of the vote, with the current bookies’ favourite Andy Burnham trailing six points behind on 47 per cent. The left-wing leadership candidate’s lead on first preferences is even more jaw-dropping. YouGov has Corbyn on 43 per cent, compared to Burnham on 26, Yvette Cooper on 20 and Liz Kendall on 11. Based on this, Kendall would be knocked out in

As graduates of the country’s best university, most former Cambridge students neither seek nor expect much in the way of public sympathy. Last weekend, however, the frontrunner in the Labour leadership contest, Andy Burnham, attempted to elicit a little. Describing his journey from a Merseyside comprehensive to Cambridge as the thing which ‘brought me into politics’, he told of his bewilderment when, as a prospective English student, he was asked at his interview, ‘Do you see a parallel between The Canterbury Tales and modern package holidays?’ He was, he said, ‘still pondering what the question meant when I arrived at Warrington station six hours later and when the rejection letter

A doff of my flat cap to Jim O’Neill, the former Goldman Sachs economist who has been made a peer, a Treasury minister and George Osborne’s ‘Northern Powerhouse’ supremo. The metro-politan media is busy trying to find reasons why this project for improved links between northern cities plus elements of devolution is a bad idea, or has ulterior motives behind it. The Guardian, for example, reports that ‘critics of’ Manchester’s Labour leader Sir Richard Leese think he has been ‘lured’ into championing Osborne’s plan ‘by the prospect of a bigger empire’; and that while Leese and his chief executive Sir Howard Bernstein have pulled off ‘breathtaking property deals’ (there’s a

Can Labour’s links with trade unions survive the leadership contest? This morning, Harriet Harman will outline in a speech at Labour HQ how the new party leader will be elected — and she will say the unions won’t be deciding who it is: ‘We will have strict rules to ensure there is a level playing field for each one of the candidates. Last time the unions communicated directly with many of their members, sending them ballot papers with accompanying material only mentioning one candidate. There will be none of that this time. The Electoral Reform Society will send out individual ballot papers to each member of the electorate.’ ‘The winner

“I’m the change candidate,” said Andy Burnham, settling down to the consolidation phase of his leadership bid. Chuka Umunna is out, so he is now the bookies’ favourite. He faces a conundrum: the brains of Labour want to tack to the centre, the money (ie, the unions) want to keep it to the left. So how can he keep both happy? Andrew Marr this morning asked Burnham if he was happy to be the union candidate. “I’m the unifying candidate,” he said. He admitted that he has spoken to Unite’s Len McClusky – the union Godfather – but only as part of his attempt to “build support from all parts of

Defeat in May would be dire for either Cameron or Miliband. It would end their political career in ignominious failure. But winning would not be much better: they would be the weakest PM in living memory. Here’s why it won’t be easy for either of them: Miliband would be a prisoner of his own MPs: The best that both Labour and the Tories can hope for is the narrowest of outright victories. The 21 seat majority that John Major ground out in 1992 is, probably, beyond either of them. Miliband would then find himself having to steer swingeing cuts past a party that is simply not prepared for them. It

There are many reasons why Labour conference felt flat this year, and many of them are out of the party’s control. It cannot help that its MPs and a number of its delegates are tired after an energetic Scottish campaign. It cannot help that the Scottish campaign saw a level of engagement in politics that cannot be replicated, save by another vote with a clear question and clear implications, and that would always have contrasted badly with the Labour conference. It cannot help that the referendum took place just days before the conference began, and that therefore it was impossible to get the same sort of coverage you’d expect in

One thing that made Ed Balls’ speech to conference look a little less impressive was the barnstormer of an address from Len McCluskey to the hall shortly before. Delegates loved it, and not just because the Unite leader was saying the sorts of things that they wanted to hear. He was also passionate and interesting. He deservedly received the first proper standing ovation of the week. So what did McCluskey think of the speech that followed from Ed Balls? I caught up with the union boss afterwards, and he managed some faint praise: ‘Well, I think it was a long speech, and it was a very embracing speech, and I

Trade unions have an important role in any decent society, but their stranglehold on the Labour Party is something we must fight against. I will never forget walking the streets of Poland back in 1981, when martial law was in force, and there were armed soldiers on almost every street corner. There it was a trade union, Solidarity, which brought authoritarian Communism to its knees. In the UK Margaret Thatcher recognised the importance of trade unions in society. Indeed one of her first roles in politics was as chairman of Dartford Conservative Trade Unionists. But the battle in British politics today is nothing to do with the work done by

Len McCluskey spoke to the press gallery lunch on April Fools’ Day. It would have been more fitting had the Unite leader not been such an impressive, witty, and thorough speaker. And much of what he said wasn’t very jokey at all: Ed Miliband, I suspect, will not be chuckling away as McCluskey’s remarks are relayed to him. The Unite leader told the Press Gallery that there could be a situation where his union votes to change its rules so that it can donate to political parties other than Labour. Labour, he told the listening hacks, is ‘at a crossroads’ and he fears for its future if the party loses

Len McCluskey is doing Conservative HQ’s work for them. The emboldened Unite leader is welcoming the return of socialism under Red Ed. Last night at the annual Jimmy Reid lecture, McCluskey spoke passionately of Miliband’s bold new agenda: ‘Ed Miliband’s speech to the Labour conference was – some would say – the most genuinely radical we have heard from a Labour leader for nigh on 30 years.’ He also welcomed the end of New Labour’s ‘neo-liberal’ dogma (you know, the policies which resulted in three general election victories). In reference to Ed’s energy policy: ‘that is not just a break with the coalition’s policies, it also represents Labour turning its

So far the tensions in the Labour party over Ed Miliband’s plan to reform the link with the trade unions have stayed below the surface at this conference. The closest it came was, unsurprisingly, when Len McCluskey took to the stage. The Unite leader made another plea for the unions to ‘set our vision of how we will build our country in government’, and told the leadership (Ed Miliband had strangely disappeared from the stage at this point) that ‘if OUR party is to have a future it must speak for ordinary workers and it must represent the voice of organised labour’. He also made his customary attack on the