Sharon Graham wins after poor choice in Unite union leadership race

Sharan Graham has been re-elected as general secretary of Unite the union (Picture: Guy Smallman)

Unite union general secretary Sharon Graham has been re-elected.

She won 68,694 votes while challenger, Simon Dubbins, won 31,130 votes in the race to lead one of Britain’s biggest trade unions.

The turnout was around 10 percent. That compares with 15.8 percent in 2010, 15.2 percent in 2013, 12.2 percent in 2017 and a little over 10 percent in 2021.

Neither Graham nor Dubbins offered a socialist, militant vision of a union that builds strikes and resistance over pay and Palestine, conditions and climate change.

The challenge for socialists in Unite is to build at the base to go beyond the politics of both.

Graham’s victory reflects that many Unite members feared a return of the old regime as the main danger. Dubbins, Unite’s long-standing international officer, was part of former general secretary Len McCluskey’s cartel of failed hoteliers.

While making fiery speeches over austerity, they favoured “social partnership” with bosses over strikes and let major industries go to the wall.

They pushed Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour leadership to dump opposition to renewing Trident nuclear weapons.  

McCluskey accepted private jet flights and football tickets arranged by a construction firm building a hotel and conference centre for the union in Birmingham.

He described bosses of the Flanagan Group, which overcharged Unite at least £30 million for the project, as “good friends”.

It’s no wonder many Unite members did not want a figure associated with this corrupt cabal. Dubbins was standing for “Members United”, a lash up of the old right wing in Unite and McCluskey’s United Left faction.

Supporters of Dubbins argued Graham was “strike happy”. His manifesto pledged to bring disputes under the “oversite” of the national executive committee, which would have made it easier for the bureaucracy to stifle strikes.

In contrast, it has been far easier to strike under Graham’s leadership than it was under the old regime.

However, Graham has made right wing political interventions over war and climate change.  

The trade union leaders were all weak on Palestine when the genocide began—and have organised very little to this day. But Graham went further and condemned protests outside arms factories by Palestine Action and Workers For a Free Palestine.

It was rank and file pressure that pushed Graham to call it “genocide, pure and simple”—and say that she’d back any member who refuses to handle goods destined for Israel.

Graham, along with the GMB and RMT unions, has supported drilling for oil and gas in the North Sea as the planet burns.

This “jobs first” approach is rooted in what we would call sectionalism.  

This puts what appear to be the interests of a particular group of workers or union members ahead of the needs of the working class as a whole. For example, it says that investment in defence or fossil fuels is positive because it creates jobs in those sectors.

A key task for socialists in Unite is winning vision of how we can scrap the arms and fossil fuel industries without throwing workers onto the scrap heap.

How did Socialist Worker supporters vote?

The best choice would have been a rank and file candidate.

But faced with the choice of Graham or Dubbins, Socialist Worker supporters in Unite had to take a tactical decision over who to vote for.

Socialist Worker said its supporters in Unite “will cast a critical vote for Graham to stand with many of the best militants in the union”. “Of the two candidates, Graham provides better terrain than Dubbins to push for a different set of politics,” we said.

This sparked a welcome debate in the pages of Socialist Worker with several trade unionists arguing we should vote for neither.

We always said the key was building rank and file confidence and an alternative to the politics of the Unite bureaucracy.

This remains true now:

• Build Workers Against The Far Right networks, led by Stand Up To Racism (SUTR), among Unite members.

• Keep pushing Palestine solidarity in the union—and for the leadership to turn words into reality. Patiently build support among defence workers in Unite around the argument that their skills should be used for socially-useful production.

• Seize on every opportunity for strikes, make them a focal point of solidarity and push for escalation to win. Infuse those strikes with wider politics—for instance, anti-racist and Palestine activists going down to the picket lines or speaking at strike rallies to make the links between struggles.

Two key strikes are a major test.

The Institute of Cancer Research (ICR) strikers began an indefinite strike this Monday in their battle for pay restoration. Solidarity is a two-way street. If you raise the ICR strike with your workmates, it opens up a conversation about fighting back against your own boss.

Bus drivers in north London will begin a series of strikes on Friday over unsafe working conditions in the heatwave.

Let’s make the picket a place of solidarity—not just for trade unionists, but the climate movement too.  

And this is a good terrain to persuade union members about why Graham is wrong on fossil fuels and should back a just transition.

It can act as an inspiration for other workers to walk out during the heatwave.

Let’s use it to revitalise a political trade unionism that is based building at the base around economic and political questions in tandem.