Unite’s battles with Starmer reveal a union at odds with itself.
Don’t you hate it when someone who is generally wrong says something true? Like that trick people pull when they read out a benign quote by Hitler and then ask you if you agree without telling you who said it. This is how I would feel if someone read out the following to me: “we led the first Industrial Revolution, and we are nowhere in the fourth” only to then inform me it was written by Unite’s General Secretary Sharon Graham. She has been on the warpath over Christmas, priming the membership for her re-election campaign, which is coming up in mid 2026. But as a Unite member myself, and Keir-Starmer-do-better martyr, I have to ask: what’s the point of her intervention beyond boosting her own re-election chances?
Unite the Union’s trajectory is a textbook study of how to lose influence, political power and, eventually, relevance. Graham’s initial promise was to refocus Unite on industrial action and away from Labour Party infighting; a noble aim, in theory. Unite is one of the largest unions affiliated with Labour, and until recently was always its biggest donor. They hold a seat on Labour’s ruling National Executive Committee, which reserves more than a quarter of its places for trade union representatives. During the Corbyn years, Unite’s then General Secretary Len McCluskey was omnipresent in the party. As Labour struggled with big donors, Unite stepped in to fill the gaps.
Since the change of leadership in both party and union, however, the two organisations have taken divergent paths. Starmer has vowed not to be beholden to the unions and to put the national interest first; Graham criticised the Westminster obsession of McCluskey. Since then, Unite has been mired in a dark period of self-reflection after a valuation Graham herself commissioned revealed that the Birmingham hotel the previous leadership sank £110 million of members’ money into is worth just £37.5 million, prompting her to attack Unite’s McCluskey and his allies. Still, even the staunchest union-supporting Labour members raised an eyebrow earlier this year when Unite’s policy conference voted to suspend Angela Rayner’s membership and to “re-examine” its relationship with the Labour party altogether.
Given this vote, and how true Sharon Graham’s comments ring with most Labour members, you would expect Unite members to be supportive of their leader’s tireless crusade against the Labour Prime Minister. Alas, the overwhelming feeling is that Graham’s leadership has brought much pain for little gain, fighting big flashy battles that drain the union’s resources and toxify its public image for underwhelming tangible benefit for the workers it represents. She was elected on just 37.7% of the vote, with a 10% voter turnout to begin with, but now disgruntled members are becoming louder. Since last year they have formed a new slate called ReUnite, aiming to reharmonise Unite’s relationship with the rest of the trade union movement – and the Labour Party. On Christmas Eve Steve Turner, a McCluskey ally and retired Assistant General Secretary at Unite who ran against Graham in 2021, posted a measured criticism of Unite’s media shenanigans that some Labour MPs would say out loud – were they not dependent on union funding: “The fight to Reunite our union and end a toxic culture of top down, centralised control led by a paranoid, narcissist starts with our EC Elections.”
Those unfamiliar with Labour and union infighting may think there is ‘ideological’ factionalism at play, but both dominant slates in Unite are on the left. When they fight over genuine political issues, it is sometimes a tactic of signalling rather than an insurmountable political misalignment, except on complex matters like balancing Palestinian solidarity and defence-sector job security. Unite’s problem is more one of personality. It prides itself on taking on big battles and winning, and struggles to redefine itself when it has a Labour government in place that is fundamentally supportive of unions in ways no government has been in decades.
Sharon Graham herself has, on paper, an almost implausibly heroic background in union organising. Her activism began at 17, when she successfully led her first walkout – as a silver service waitress, no less – to win better pay and conditions for casual workers. Before becoming General Secretary, she was Head of Organising and Leverage, where she cultivated a 100% success rate leading campaigns against union-hostile bosses. The leverage bit is key: Graham made her name not through patient negotiation but through aggressive, creative pressure tactics, targeting supply chains, shareholders, and reputational vulnerability. By any metric she was – until now – exceptionally good at her job, when her job was winning industrial disputes. From this perspective, a Labour Prime Minister like Keir Starmer is a gift to her leadership style.
Hostility towards Starmer may feel natural to a militant union like Unite but no matter how much the Labour Party may triangulate, or how much its Blairite wing believes a close relationship with the unions is a curse more than a blessing, there is a reason left-wingers like me would never abandon the Labour Party. There can be no viable left-wing movement without a party rooted in the institutional traditions of worker organisation. If confronting and reforming capitalism is the lofty goal of every social democrat and socialist, then unions must be foundational to any project. Only strong unions, with leverage, are capable of holding capital to account. This is, among other aesthetic and cultural reasons, why I could never defect to the Greens or any new party which lacks Labour’s union roots. And why, despite my grievances with United’s leadership, and despite being a freelancer with no employer, I still pay my Unite membership fees.
If solidarity is our God, the Unions are our churches.
Another insight we get from the reaction to Graham’s latest attacks on Starmer is that Labour remains allergic to two impairments the Conservatives always embraced as superpowers. As much as we take to regicide like a juvenile asylum seeker being fed Balkan chicken nuggets, we also suffer from chronic tall poppy syndrome. We hate attention seekers, especially if the attention helps the seeker’s position at the expense of the collective.
So when the Times and the Telegraph have splashes of Sharon Graham shooting down the Labour Prime Minister, with a list of grievances identical to the ones every Labour MP and member keeps under their pillow, as far as the party and broader trade union movement is concerned she is doing little more than cementing her own reputation in preparation for her re-election campaign.
After last year’s welfare reform debacle, a union-connected Labour staffer put it bluntly: Starmer’s days are numbered, because no Labour leader survives a clash with the unions. His condition remains critical, but since conference it has at least stabilised—for a simple reason. Labour’s unwritten taboos of “no regicide, no tall poppies” were breached when the northern prince, Andy Burnham, proved a little too adept at commanding attention and sniping at the leadership. MPs who, before conference, spoke to me in the language of guerrilla warfare emerged afterwards as converts to appeasement.
Graham’s comments are of questionable intent, not only because of her timing, but because they are so obvious. The voices still willing to defend Starmer on the airwaves are exceedingly rare, mostly people angling for safe Labour seats in a future election and consultants dependent on loyalty capital. Even they look like hostages when they are cast as the pro-Starmer panellist on the GBNews or Newsnight couch. I am not saying I look down on the loyal trooper; I shamelessly enlist myself as one under any Labour leader because, being Greek, my dysfunctional conceptualisation of loyalty is that it’s either blind or it’s nothing. But when even the PM’s former attack dog, Paul Overden, is calling for a government with a spine in the paper of record, you’re hardly loyal—to the party or even the leader—if you’re willing to lie to him about the obvious: he’s on his way out. Perhaps that’s something we can all unite around.
