Uk, Sharon Graham elected leader of the Unite union. Good or bad news for Starmer?
The article by Daniele Meloni
Surprise elections for Unite, the largest Labor-affiliated union (and one of its largest financiers). With over 46,000 votes Sharon Graham became leader of the union, which boasts 1.4 million members in the transport, manufacturing and construction sectors. As the British media have highlighted, Graham is also the first woman to hold the position of Secretary General of the union created in 2007 from the merger of Amicus and the legendary Transport General Workers' Union (TGWU).
Surprise win for Graham, then. Yes, because the now former secretary, the Corbynian Len McCluskey, supported another candidate, Steve Turner, favored by the bookmakers and defeated by 5 thousand votes. And also because the leadership of the Labor party supported Gerard Coyne, who came third among the preferences of 12% of the members who participated in the votes.
It is still too early to say whether Graham's election is good or bad news for the party leader , Sir Keir Starmer, who immediately congratulated her. Of course, among Sir Keir's objectives there was certainly that of reducing McCluskey's power in the United, and even more so that of not seeing a candidate on radical left positions arguing with his new national-reformist course. For this, Labor breathed a sigh of relief when the assistant to the general secretary of the union, Howard Beckett, had to withdraw from the dispute after publicly expressing his contempt for the Tory interior minister, Priti Patel, of which he called for his abandonment on a rubber dinghy in the middle of the sea.
Still, Graham is anything but a reformist and it is to be expected that she will not have liked the restorative words that Starmer has spoken in favor of the revived Tony Blair. The new leader received support from the Socialist Workers Party throughout the campaign. A movement that, at the time of the war on terror supported by Blair's New Labor, founded the Stop The War Coalition, in the now distant 2001, and that in the 1970s created quite a few headaches for the Labor government of Harold Wilson and the major UK union leaders , including TGWU secretary, Jack Jones, for the income policies pursued by executive and social forces.
Be that as it may, Graham said he did not want to deal with factions within the Labor party, but that he wanted to focus on Unite members, take up their demands and protect their rights at work. This could be godsend for Starmer, easing his ability to extricate himself between Blair's nostalgics and Corbyn's. The sore point, however, concerns the funding of Unite to Labor. If with McCluskey the then secretary Jeremy Corbyn could count on an influx of several million pounds into the party's coffers, already last October the contributions had been cut by 10%, about 1 million pounds. Graham said there will no longer be "any blank checks" and that "the results obtained will determine the sums available to Labor."
The new leader – 53-year-old Londoner from Hammersmith – has a reputation that shakes not only Starmer but British big business as well. As head of the Organizational Department, she has dealt with the disputes with British Railways and Crossrail in the recent past and led Unite's attempt to unionize Amazon, exerting pressure on the top of the companies and dealing personally in the moments when the negotiations were hottest. . Iain Watson, political correspondent of the BBC , said: "With Graham we expect a focus more on industrial policies than on Westminster politics".
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/uk-sharon-graham-eletta-leader-del-sindacato-unite-buona-o-cattiva-notizia-per-starmer/ on Thu, 26 Aug 2021 08:24:53 +0000.