A row between the Labour government and Britain’s biggest trade union dramatically escalated today after Unite announced that it has suspended Angela Rayner’s union membership over her handling of Birmingham’s long-running bin strike.
In an emergency motion at its conference in Brighton, Unite also threatened to review its relationship with the Labour party more generally if Birmingham’s Labour-run council makes any of its members redundant.
Birmingham’s refuse workers have been on all-out indefinite strike since March over pay. Unite has urged the council to guarantee long-term pay for Grade 4 bin lorry drivers, warning that their pay could fall from £40,000 to £32,000 under new council plans. Negotiations have stalled, with council leader John Cotton saying this week that the authority has "reached the absolute limit of what we can offer".
As rats plague the city’s streets and rubbish continues to pile up, the government has become increasingly short-tempered with Unite. Both Sir Keir Starmer and Health Secretary Wes Streeting have attacked Unite’s “unacceptable” tactics after it prevented lorries from leaving the depot. And, this week, Rayner demanded the union accept the latest deal tabled by the city council, insisting the authority had "moved significantly to meet the demands of the workers".
Unite’s general secretary, Sharon Graham, responded to Rayner by branding the government's backing for the council as "disgraceful".
"People up and down the country are asking ‘whose side is the Labour government on?’ and coming up with the answer 'not workers'", she added.
While Unite’s very public announcement about suspending Rayner demonstrates the level of ill-feeling, this action alone is unlikely to cause the Deputy Prime Minister or her colleagues any sleepless nights. In fact, Rayner’s office has responded by saying that she already resigned her membership months ago and therefore can’t be suspended anyway.
More worrying for Labour is Unite’s accompanying announcement that it will review its wider relationship with the party - a thinly veiled threat to pull funding if tensions escalate.
Unite - which has donated £19m to Labour since 2019 - is the party’s biggest trade union backer.
Labour is less dependent on union financial backing that it was under Corbyn since it takes more from private donors than it did a few years ago. Even so, if the union chose to disaffiliate itself from Labour, this would still deliver Starmer a heavy financial blow.
Starmer’s government got off to a good start with the unions thanks to the string of public sector pay rises made in the aftermath of the election.
The PM also sought praise from GMB more recently over his decision to seize control of British Steel’s plant in Scunthrope to prevent its closure, with Andy Prendergast, the union’s national secretary, declaring: “We’re thankful that we actually have [a government] willing to take the bull by the horns.”
British Steel aside, relations between union bosses and ministers have come under increasing strain over the past year.
Christina McAnea, general secretary of Unison, lambasted the government for its (now reversed) winter fuel cuts and “heartless” welfare reforms, that had left her “baffled and speechless”.
The government's net zero drive has also put a strain on its relationship with GMB and Unite, with Graham labelling Ed Miliband’s plan to block new oil and gas licences in the North Sea “irresponsible”, adding: “There is clearly no viable plan for the replacement of North Sea jobs or energy security.”
Even the government’s flagship Employment Rights Bill - which sets out to give unions significantly more powers, for instance by lowering thresholds to industrial action - has failed to satisfy Graham, who has twice complained that the Bill has “more holes than Swiss cheese”.
That tensions would arise between Britain’s trade-union movement and a centrist Labour government is hardly surprising. After all, Blair’s government was accused of treating unions like “embarrassing relatives”.
But Blair didn’t have Nigel Farage lurking in the background, never one to miss an opportunity to paint himself as the only political leader truly on the side of “working people”. Perhaps one of the biggest concerns for this Labour government will be the potential for strained relations with the unions to play into Reform UK’s hands.
Caitlin Allen
Deputy Editor
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