Back in 2021, before she was even elected general secretary of the union, Sharon Graham was already questioning whether Unite should divorce itself from Labour. During her campaign to succeed the highly politicised leadership of Len McCluskey, Graham said that Unite’s “obsession with the Labour Party needs to end.”
The end may be near. On July 11th, 800 Unite industrial and regional representatives gathered in Brighton for its policy conference, where they voted on what could soon be regarded as a landmark motion in the history of the modern British left: to suspend the membership of Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner and to “re-examine” the union’s long-standing funding of the Labour Party. Only a “handful” of people stood against it.
“There seems to be a bit of shock that the conference voted that way,” Graham told me. “There were only a handful of people that voted against that in a group [which] represents 1.1 million workers. That should be a red flag for the government.”
The source of Unite and Graham’s anger is the protracted strikes by waste refuse workers employed by Birmingham City Council – over job reform and hefty pay cuts – and the unsatisfactory response from the Labour-run local authority, as well as their national colleagues in Westminster. “The abdication of responsibility here has been outrageous,” Graham said of Labour’s response to the action, which began last summer, and has seen tens of thousands of tons worth of rubbish rot on the streets of England’s second city. “Leaving these workers to wither on the vine is not what I expect from a Labour government.”
Rayner, whose ministerial brief covers local government, has deferred responsibility to end the strikes to Birmingham City Council: “This is a local dispute, and it is right that the negotiations are led locally,” she told the Commons in April.
But Rayner’s justification for absconding soon switched from giving the council autonomy, to “legal reasons… which is very odd,” claimed Graham, “because there is no legal reason why [she] couldn’t get involved.” The government-appointed commissioners that help manage the council’s operations – following it declaring effective-bankruptcy in 2023 – also report directly to Rayner.
Rayner eventually got involved in the dispute. “She visited Birmingham [in April], and went to speak to the leader of a council [John Cotton]… who’s not been in one single negotiation,” Graham said. “[Rayner] went to speak to the strike-breakers – the agency workers who broke the dispute – but didn’t have one conversation with the [still-striking] workers. She didn’t ask to meet them; didn’t ask to sit down somewhere, talk to them; didn’t want to really understand what was going on.”
Does Graham consider this scabbing by Rayner, a former trade union rep? Graham declined to offer her own view but instead echoed the frustration of her members: “I think there’s something wholly wrong with a decision to ignore workers who are losing up to a quarter of their pay, and essentially picking a side. That’s what it felt like for the workers. They were extremely upset about what happened that day.”
Despite Labour and Rayner’s ties to the unions, the industrial unrest represented by the Birmingham strikes is a “microcosm of the whole,” according to Graham. In the same week that Unite turned against Labour, resident doctors voted to stage five days of industrial action.
“I don’t expect to win every conversation with the Labour government,” said Graham, “but… I expect a Labour government to intervene, and I certainly expect Angela Rayner – who talks about workers’ rights – to see what is happening, roll her sleeves up and find out what’s going on. She didn’t do that. That’s not acceptable, and our conference took the decision to suspend her membership.”
Competition will be fierce to secure Unite’s vast funding if it severs ties with Labour. The split would be particularly costly for Labour, which receives £1.4m a year in affiliation fees from Graham’s union. According to an internal document, the party is in a “difficult financial position” and is operating under a “recovery plan” in 2025 to bring its finances to a “planned but manageable deficit.” It estimates needing “at least £4m to adequately resource the 2026 elections.”
Is Graham tempted to channel Unite’s heft toward the emerging Sultana-Corbyn party – or even the “eco-populist” Greens under rising figure Zack Polanski?
“That’s all a sideshow,” she said of the speculation. But following any hypothetical disaffiliation from Labour, Graham added: “I think it’s more likely that we would focus on building a strong, independent workers’ union that was the true, authentic voice for workers – and use that power to move political debate.”
Still, just because there is no imminent threat to Labour’s union funding, that doesn’t mean Keir Starmer and his party can afford to be complacent. People who “flirt” with the disaffiliation question typically assume it’s only ever about “the internal Labour [Party] squabble of the day,” Graham noted. That may have been true before – but not now.
“Actually,” Graham added, “this is the first time that this has been done because of workers” – something she says Labour has lost perspective on. “Before the election, I couldn’t go on a picket line [without] people saying: ‘We need a Labour government’… [Now] I go to those same picket lines to negotiate, and those same people are saying: ‘What the hell is going on here?’”
Unite’s threat to withdraw its funding and affiliation is seemingly not a bluff. “Let’s put it this way,” Graham began, reflecting on the overwhelming decision taken at Unite’s meeting last week, “had that policy conference been a rules conference – because at a rules conference, we determine [our] affiliation to Labour – then those workers would have voted to disaffiliate.” The next Unite rules conference is scheduled for 2027.
That gives Labour time to fix things. And outreach has already begun. “There have been conversations in relation to the government itself, but I don’t want to go down that road [publicly],” Graham revealed. “I don’t want to scupper anything… in that regard.” After airing their dirty laundry for all to see last week, Labour and Unite are now seemingly conducting marriage counseling in private.
But existential questions for both Labour and Unite remain. “Now, we are affiliated to Labour, we have a history of being affiliated to Labour, but you can’t just blindly affiliate and blindly pay members’ money into an organisation that, those members feel, is not speaking for them,” Graham told me. “The Labour Party… [is] about being the voice for workers; not being embarrassed to be the voice for workers, but [being] very clear so that workers know, ‘If you vote Labour, they’re on your side.’”
“If more and more people are saying, ‘Hang on a minute, I’m not sure about that anymore,’ then it’s harder to justify the affiliation.”
[See also: Are Unite and Labour heading for divorce]
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