When the Labour Party was founded in 1900, it was not so much a party as a pact: an agreement between the working-class men and women of this country, and those who promised to speak for them. From the trade halls of South Yorkshire to the shipyards of Glasgow, the labour movement gave this new party its money, its votes and its soul. It wasn’t born in Westminster, but in the roar of a crowd that wanted dignity to be a birthright, not a rare privilege.
More than a century on, that pact has never been in greater danger. Labour governs again, for the first time in more than a decade, and is about to deliver the greatest expansion of workers’ rights in generations – yet one of its strongest allies, Unite the Union, stands on the picket line shouting at Downing Street.
Unite has never looked so alone. It is at war with the Labour government it helped elect, at war with its fellow unions, at war with Labour councils, and at war with its own staff. Members of the GMB have even accused it, damningly, of union-busting. Sharon Graham, Unite’s general secretary, threatens to cut Labour’s political funding like some rogue monarch withdrawing royal favour from an ungrateful courtier. But if anyone’s lost their crown, it’s Unite.
