Len McCluskey

Leonard David McCluskey (born 23 July 1950) is a British trade unionist.

He was General Secretary of Unite the Union, the largest affiliate and a major donor to the Labour Party.

Leonard David McCluskey was born in Liverpool, Lancashire, on 23 July 1950, the son of Leonard, a painter-decorator, and Peggy ( Margaret Fulton), a housewife who reportedly politically inspired her son.

He failed the 11-plus, but passed the 13-plus, intended for late developers.

A Catholic, he attended Cardinal Godfrey Technical High School, a grammar school, in Anfield.

Leaving school with three A-levels, in history, economics and general studies, he began his working life on the Canada Dock, part of the Port of Liverpool.

McCluskey joined the Transport and General Workers' Union (T&GWU) in 1968, and became a shop steward for the union the following year.

He was involved in unionising the white collar staff in the Liverpool docks among whom previously there had been an absence of trade union organisation.

After joining the Labour Party in 1970, he became an officer of the T&GWU in Merseyside in 1979 and was its campaign organiser throughout the 1980s.

Employed by the Mersey Docks and Harbour Board (the Mersey Docks and Harbour Company from 1972) as a ship’s planner, he drew maps indicating the location of cargo in the hold so it could be retrieved at the unloading port.

He worked for the company for 11 years.

As a young adult, he spent some years working in the Liverpool Docks for the Mersey Docks and Harbour Company prior to becoming a full-time union official for the Transport and General Workers' Union (T&GWU) in 1979.

During the 1980s he became a close friend of Tony Mulhearn and Derek Hatton, then deputy leader of Liverpool City Council, and supported the Militant tendency.

McCluskey was elected as the National Secretary of the T&GWU General Workers group in 1990, and moved to London to work in the union's national headquarters.

In 2004, he became the T&GWU's national organiser for the service industries.

In 2007, he was appointed as the Assistant General Secretary for Industrial Strategy of the Unite the Union, a merger of the T&GWU and Amicus.

He defines himself as being on the left of the union, and has been given the label of "Red Len" in the British press because of his involvement in Unite's dispute with British Airways.

"I would never, ever deny that", he told the Liverpool Echo in 2009 "but I never became a member".

He added: "In the end I decided that Militant was too sectarian from a political standpoint to be effective. But I believe that on the chief issues they were right".

He expressed regret in 2009, and again in 2011, that the Labour governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown did not reverse the legislative changes affecting trade unions of the immediately preceding Conservative governments.

McCluskey was elected as the general secretary of Unite in 2010, and was re-elected to his post in 2013 and 2017.

A member of the Labour Party, McCluskey is on the party's left.

He was a key backer and supporter of Jeremy Corbyn during his time as Leader of the Labour Party.

In a speech at the 2010 Durham Miners' Gala he said political developments in Cuba and Venezuela should be better known, and suggested the reason they were not was because of "the fear of the good example".

Unite and McCluskey backed Ed Miliband to become the next Labour leader in 2010.

The votes of members of Unite, plus Unison and the GMB, were enough for Miliband to be elected leader over the preference for his brother, David Miliband, of party members and MPs in the electoral college (by then 33 per cent each) which was in force at the time.

In 2010, McCluskey ran for election as General Secretary of Unite to replace joint-General Secretaries Derek Simpson and Tony Woodley, who had both announced their retirement.

On 21 November 2010, it was announced that McCluskey had been elected to the post, beating Jerry Hicks, Les Bayliss and Gail Cartmail.

He gained 101,000 votes in a total 16 per cent turnout of around 1.5 million members.

In December 2010, McCluskey wrote in The Guardian that "there is no case for cuts at all", the government's "austerity frenzy" being "whipped up for explicitly ideological reasons" to complete "Thatcherism's unfinished business by strangling the welfare state".

Simpson retired in December 2010, and Woodley followed shortly after that, leaving McCluskey to take office as the General Secretary on 1 January 2011.

However, in March 2012 the industrial correspondent of the Press Association, Alan Jones, distinguished McCluskey during the BA dispute from the former National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) leader Arthur Scargill: "I think he's more willing to cut a deal".

In 2013, McCluskey announced that he would be running for re-election as General Secretary.

He was re-elected in April 2013 with 144,570 votes against Jerry Hicks with 79,819 votes on a turnout of 15.2 per cent.

In September 2013, Hicks complained to the trade union watchdog, the certification officer, that the result should be declared void as 156,000 ballot papers had been sent to people no longer paying union subscriptions.

However, the union was obliged by law to give them a vote (very few actually voted).

In an April 2013 interview for the New Statesman, McCluskey urged Miliband to drop three "Blairite" shadow ministers from his frontbench team.

A spokesman for Miliband said McCluskey did not speak for the party and the "attempt to divide the Labour Party is reprehensible" and was "disloyal to the party".

Labour politician Jon Trickett told George Eaton in 2016: "He got to the top through force of personality, intellect and organising skill".

He argued in June 2016, that the changes made by those governments have "left the lowest paid and the most vulnerable workers in our society in dire straits".