The UK Unite Union Election Result

international | worker & community struggles and protests | other press Monday November 22, 2010 12:53 by pat c

Result of UK Unite Union Election

Len McCluskey has been elected leader of the UK's biggest trade union, Unite. His win, with 101,000 votes, will see him take over from joint general secretaries Tony Woodley and Derek Simpson who have been in post since the union formed in 2007.

Grassroots candidate Jerry Hicks came second in the election with 52,000 votes. McCluskey had the Unite bureaucrats behind him but many on the Left also supported McCluskey against HIcks. Working on a shoestring budget Jerry has achieved a magnificent result.

Gerry Downing reports on the campaign. Full text at link.

The campaign to elect Jerry Hicks as Unite general secretary has provoked an outbreak of political bile from those elements on the left which have made the strategic decision to throw their lot in with the trade union bureaucracy and their Stalinist bagmen.

In the lexicon of the bureaucracy these are the ‘good Trots’. The ‘bad Trots’ are those who fight to overthrow capitalism and to defeat their agents within the labour movement: the Labour Party leaders and the trade union bureaucracy, who are the main barrier to the class struggle and so to the advance of the working class to revolutionary consciousness. The bureaucracy has various rightist, Stalinist and fake leftist ‘good Trot’ defenders - in reality renegades from Trotskyism, even as they understood it. For example Counterfire, a rightwing split from the Socialist Workers Party, supports McCluskey, as does the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty.