Unite members have until 11 August to choose between Sharon Graham and Simon Dubbins as general secretary. Workers Power calls for an abstention and for activists to organise independently of both leadership factions.
The candidates embody competing strategies within the union. Graham has put more union resources behind disputes than the preceding leadership. Dubbins has better positions on Palestine, migrant workers, climate change and the far right.
But Graham asks members to endorse industrial action controlled from above and tied to the interests of British industry. Dubbins offers a return to the apparatus and Labour lobbying that dominated Unite before 2021. Neither offers a ‘better terrain’ for building what’s needed—an independent rank-and-file current with its own socialist programme.
Stolen valour
Graham’s campaign claims that Unite has conducted more than 1800 disputes involving 280,000 members and won £700 million since she took office. Her leadership has authorised action more readily and paid substantial strike support. That is a change from the inertia of the previous United Left-backed Len McCluskey leadership.
But the headline figures tell us little about what was demanded, what settlements were reached or who controlled the negotiations. They turn the collective achievements of workers who organised, picketed and sacrificed wages into ‘Sharon’s wins’.
Even Birmingham, held up as proof of Graham’s determination, should make activists cautious. After more than a year of all-out action, what has emerged of the proposed deal appears underwhelming. Unite did not wait for the strikers’ verdict before hailing the still-unpublished proposal as a ‘vindication’.
The wider record is one of sectional disputes with no generalised result for the class. Unite has not drawn its workplace struggles together into a movement against austerity or used its industrial strength to confront the Labour government. At Port Talbot, Grangemouth and Vauxhall Luton, it organised neither occupations nor a coordinated fight for public ownership. Graham instead links jobs to more fossil-fuel extraction, arms production and the competitiveness of British capitalism.
Double chains
The Socialist Party, Socialist Worker and rs21 all acknowledge, in different terms, Graham’s failings on Palestine, militarism and climate. They nevertheless support her because they believe her industrial record and the defeat of the old officer faction provide better conditions for workplace organisation. The Socialist Party describes the new Executive Council majority as a platform on which to build; Socialist Worker says Graham provides ‘better terrain’; rs21 urges activists to exploit the industrial space her leadership provides.
All three call for conscious political intervention. Socialist Worker and rs21 also advocate rank-and-file networks. But they both treat Graham’s industrial course as terrain that can be defended while its politics are corrected from below.
But that terrain is not politically neutral. Under Graham, militancy remains in double chains: bureaucratic control over the conduct and settlement of disputes, and an industrial nationalism that binds workers to British arms production, fossil fuels and national competitiveness. The same leadership that authorises strike pay also determines whether struggles are coordinated, what demands are advanced and where action stops. Graham’s politics do not sit outside her industrial strategy. They set its limits.
Unite has formal policy in solidarity with Palestine, but Graham’s promotion of arms contracts and denunciation of Palestine solidarity campaigns against arms factories show what happens when that solidarity conflicts with ‘jobs first’.
Counterfire backs Dubbins because he is better on Palestine, climate and the far right. But his campaign rests on Members United, which combines the old United Left, the right-wing Unite Alliance and much of the officer apparatus. Its plan is to restore Unite’s influence ‘in the halls of political power’, hold Labour to account and support politicians who support the union. Progressive campaigns conducted through the old apparatus and renewed pressure inside Labour will not give members control of their union.
A restoration of the ancien régime, even with Unite reaffiliated to Stop the War, is not a plan for rebuilding the fighting organisation on the shop floor and political terrain that we need to stop Burnham’s rearmament programme.
The formal calls for rank-and-file networks do not alter the strategy actually pursued. These recommendations reproduce the Broad Left method that has dominated the organised left’s union work since the late 1960s: rally activists behind a preferred wing of officialdom, win positions in the machine and subordinate independent organisation from below to that project. Under a Labour government, the price is especially high. Activists need to coordinate resistance when it collides with Labour councils, ministers and the priorities of the state. A current built around its preferred officials is least able to act when those officials narrow or redirect the struggle.
An independent course
The problem with the ‘better terrain’ argument is that it accepts a battlefield chosen by rival wings of the apparatus, then congratulates itself on finding the firmer patch of ground. A little more industrial leeway under Graham or encouragement for political activity under Dubbins can’t substitute for an independently advanced rank-and-file programme, on which any case for critical support would have to rest. Without its own map and line of march, the left is not exploiting the terrain— it is following its preferred officials across it.
Activists need to organise inside Unite around a definite programme. Members should control disputes through mass meetings, elected strike committees and votes on demands, tactics and settlements. Workplace representatives should press for coordination across sites, sectors and unions. The defence of jobs requires occupations, public ownership and workers’ plans. Industrial struggle must be combined with opposition to austerity, racism, anti-migrant politics and imperialist war.
The immediate steps will differ across Unite’s sectors. Activists who agree should find one another through the workplace and union structures available to them, cooperate in disputes and political campaigns, and argue consistently for member control, wider coordination and working-class independence. Common work can begin to establish regular links and a recognisable current inside the union.
Voting for neither only has meaning if we carry that political independence into the daily work of building a current committed to the interests of the whole working class.
- Now read: Sharon Graham: a mid-term report
