As the fall out from Angela Rayner’s resignation and the Cabinet reshuffle roll onwards, Labour is completing its steady pivot to the Right. Shabana Mahmood has been promoted to Home Secretary to take a harder line on migration while Pat McFadden as Welfare and Pensions minister will crack down on benefits spending. Anyone could have predicted this.
Meanwhile, Labour’s National Executive Committee, firmly now in the hands of the Starmerites, has jammed through an extraordinarily condensed timetable for the election of Rayner’s replacement as deputy leader. The battle is a potential flashpoint for discontent with Starmer’s leadership, but the hasty timetable and high entry requirements will severely limit the contest. Former Cabinet minister Lucy Powell, a close ally of Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham, is the most likely oppositionist to make the cut against presumed leadership loyalist, Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson. For the Labour Right, a smooth coronation of Phillipson would be the preferred outcome, cementing their hold over the party — both symbolically and in reality.
The new line on the economy at least has the benefit of clarity. With anaemic growth and global economic headwinds hindering job creation, the leadership is now emphasising its pro-business credentials. What better way to do this than ditch the “political indulgence” of its programme for workers’ rights? As Keir Starmer shreds more and more of his original pledges, Labour-backing trade unions may find themselves forced into confrontation. The question is whether, after years of looking the other way, they’re still capable of mounting a fight.
Labour’s original “Employment Rights’ Green Paper”, published in September 2021, represented one of the most comprehensive pro-worker platforms in decades. Overseen by Corbyn-era Shadow Cabinet survivor Andy McDonald and drafted in close consultation with the unions, it put forward a minimum wage of £10 an hour, a ban on zero-hours contracts, and perhaps most radically the introduction of sectoral bargaining across the economy.
McDonald resigned shortly after its publication, citing the leadership’s lack of ambition in delivering its promises. Responsibility fell to Rayner, in what was then her expansive portfolio as deputy leader. Under her stewardship, the original pledges were watered down (sectoral bargaining was removed) into a much-reduced manifesto commitment before being introduced to Parliament last October as the Employment Rights Bill. Despite its limited scope, McDonald himself welcomed it as “a historic Bill”. Critically for Starmer during “Phase One”, it had been enough to buy industrial peace and limit noises off from the union movement, even if it fell short of their initial hopes.
“Phase Two”, as Stamer wants to call it, has a different colouration. With a grim Budget settlement on the horizon, including more than likely further tax rises, the Employment Rights Bill is an easy target for business lobbying. The argument is familiar: if the government wants more jobs, it must make hiring cheaper by cutting back on all those costly workplace protections. Already the lobbying has begun. The Financial Times quotes anonymous chief executives welcoming Rayner’s departure as “good news” and suggesting that “sensible amendments” to the Bill would be forthcoming. Some in Number 10 are reportedly seeking to “kill” key parts of the Bill.
The stage is being set for a confrontation with the unions, although whether they rise to the occasion is a different question. Some of the battle lines were being drawn up earlier this week at the Trade Union Congress’ annual shindig, its Brighton Conference. General Secretary of Unite, Britain’s second-largest union, Sharon Graham made her traditional threat of withholding affiliation fees from Labour over some or other infraction. This year, it was in support of Birmingham’s bin workers: some are set to lose £8,000 a year in pay as a result of the Labour-run council’s bungled reorganisation of the city’s refuse collection. This is a classic old-school labour dispute of the kind the whole trade union movement could rally round, and so they did at the TUC. But as the strike threatens to stretch into its second year, it is also exposing the severe weaknesses of the movement.
“The stage is being set for a confrontation with the unions.”
Graham was elected in 2021, promising to focus on the “workplace not Westminster”, a break from her predecessor Len McCluskey’s overtly political strategy. In office she has failed to ignite any syndicalist fervour. Unite’s membership figures have been fudged, falling from 1.08 million in 2020 to 870,000 in 2023. Even if the union disputes this, refusing to release official figures, it is in line with declining numbers of trade union membership overall. Despite the 2022 wave of strikes, and hopes amongst some on the Left that this might revive union activity, union membership is down to just 22% of the workforce at 6.4 million, is overwhelmingly concentrated in the public sector, and is increasingly ageing.
The result in Unite is that while Graham has a certain verbal radicalism — talking up to the skies her contempt for the Westminster machine — the union has not delivered much for its members nor challenged Labour’s Rightward shift. Where McCluskey and those around him sought to actively apply pressure onto the Labour Party via candidate selections, active sponsorship and support for MPs, and eventually supporting the robustly pro-union Corbyn, Graham has diverted political pressure by abdicating from “Westminster”.
Unite has become not just depoliticised, but in practice frequently an active prop for the government. Graham’s support for increased defence spending and Heathrow expansion echoes longstanding trade union positions. But, unlike McCluskey who actively sought to shape Labour policy, Graham has backed off. In doing so she has handed the government a free pass. Her set-piece interview with The Guardian at TUC Conference threatened that Labour has just “one year” to get this right; deferring, once again, the moment of reckoning with Starmer’s Labour government and handing the initiative straight back over to the party leadership.
Meanwhile, in the country’s other dominant union, Unison, there is a faint glimmer of political hope with the General Secretary election due for the end of November. Traditionally, at least over the last two decades, the Left vote has been split between “grassroots” candidates, allowing the well-entrenched union Right to come up top. Unison has been a reliable ally of Starmer’s leadership, crucially helping swing Labour’s internal National Executive Committee towards him. This year, current General Secretary and reliable Starmer ally Christina McAnea faces a single Left candidate, social worker Andrea Egan. Egan pledges a thorough “review” of Unison’s relationship with Labour, has attacked McAnea’s “cosy” relationship with the government, and was herself expelled from Labour in 2022 as part of the Starmer faction’s ongoing purge of the Left. In theory, the significant prize of Unison’s General Secretaryship is now open to the Left; in practice, the route there is likely to be somewhat rockier, with Unison’s own National Executive Committee elections in June seeing the Right win back control after a number of years in the minority. In the absence of industrial struggles, and with a leadership keen to point to the benefits of proximity to government whilst carefully pitching Leftwards — McAnea has recently criticised Starmer’s overtures on migration — a victory is by no means assured.
But the question of who the unions represent today is becoming increasingly complex. The Labour Party and trade unions both now draw primarily from the same group of employees. Public sector employees have long been more likely to vote Labour but in the last few decades union membership has also swung decisively towards them. Today, almost half (49.9%) of public sector employees are in a union, compared to only 12% of the private sector. University graduates are more likely to be in a union than those without a degree, and likewise more likely to vote Labour.
Where a sharp differentiation emerges is in age. While the over 50s are today the most likely to be in a union, it is the under 40s who are most likely to vote Labour. The difference, most likely, comes out of the experience of those entering work before or after the 2008 financial crisis. Those starting work before could find themselves with a few years in employment, and relatively secure, potentially owning a house before the calamity; those entering afterwards are more likely to be in poorly-paid, insecure work, and still renting. Unions can speak to the securely employed; political parties of the Left to the insecure.
The outcome on the union side is likely to reinforce institutional conservatism: a slowly declining and ageing membership catered to by entrenched bureaucracies that make some noise to win political favours from a Labour government, but which have few interests in the harder tasks of workplace representation, let alone militancy.
Starmer in Phase Two — anti-migrant, anti-union Starmer — may yet win a victory over a listless trade union movement, gutting his government’s own Employment Rights Bill. At least some of those around him would welcome a confrontation, simultaneously allowing them to appease the business lobby and posture as tough to the Reform-inclined. In reality, it is unlikely to do his government, nor him personally, any political good. Reform will continue to harry on migration and now both the eco-populist Greens and, if it emerges, Corbyn’s new party will harry him on workers’ rights. But worst of all will be the treatment of the hundreds of thousands of insecure, poorly paid workers in this country, promised a modicum of protection. It is this sizeable constituency that neither the Labour Party nor its affiliated trade unions appear interested in representing. The stage is set for new political forces — of the radical Right, or the Left — who can speak to their interests.
