The McCluskey Case, Union Bureaucracy, and Lessons for Your Party

Breaking the Bureaucratic Chain

Introduction: A Cautionary Tale

On the evening of Friday 28 November 2025, the night before Your Party’s founding conference formally opened in Liverpool, Jeremy Corbyn hosted a fringe event billed as a night of ‘music, poetry, and politics.’ The event, held in the conference venue’s hall alongside the stalls, featured Corbyn, Laura Smith, and Len McCluskey—the former Unite the Union general secretary whose tenure has been the subject of serious corruption allegations. McCluskey read poetry on stage. Hecklers were removed by security.

The decision to give McCluskey this platform was not merely a questionable choice about associating with a figure facing serious allegations. It was a public signal of whose network shaped the nascent party, and a warning about the dangers socialist organisations face when they become entangled with trade union bureaucracies, however ‘left’ their credentials.

This document examines what the McCluskey case reveals about union bureaucracy, draws on the theoretical insights of Ernest Mandel and the practical lessons from Spain, and offers concrete recommendations for Your Party activists and union members who wish to build a genuine working-class party free from bureaucratic domination.

The Unite Scandal: What Actually Happened

The Birmingham Hotel Affair

The Unite interim report of July 2025 documents a building project that epitomises bureaucratic mismanagement and potential corruption. A union-funded construction project in Birmingham, budgeted initially at £7 million, eventually cost £96.5 million—nearly fourteen times the original estimate. Independent valuations of the completed facility, which includes a hotel and conference centre, came in at between £27 and £29 million, meaning approximately £70 million of members’ money remains unaccounted for, or wasted.

The contract went to the Flanagan Group, described as headed by a ‘close personal associate’ of McCluskey. An estimated £15 million in profits accrued to this contractor. The internal Unite report alleged that McCluskey had received private jet flights and football tickets paid for by the Flanagan Group, though McCluskey’s lawyers denied this. The report found no evidence of who had appointed Flanagan Group, but that McCluskey had signed the contract, a claim McCluskey said he had no recollection of.

The ‘United Left’ Faction and Systemic Control

The scandal was not simply about one corrupt project; it revealed systemic failures rooted in factional control of the union. McCluskey belonged to the ‘United Left’ faction, which for over a decade dominated Unite’s Executive Council (EC). The Bark & Co. independent governance report concluded that ‘United Left dominated the EC’ and ‘that may well explain why there was almost no scrutiny of the escalating costs and other issues.’

The faction’s actions were ‘much more strongly linked to the goal of winning and holding power within the Union’ than to left-wing ideology. Control of the EC meant control of appointment panels for union officers at both regional and national levels. Of 42 EC Officer appointment panels convened between 2018 and 2020, 37 were dominated by United Left and their allies. The vast majority of successful candidates were members or recognised supporters of the faction.

To step outside the faction could be a ‘career killer.’ The perception and reality of United Left as a necessary gateway to a future within the union was a considerable part of its power. Few openly opposed the faction, regardless of their real views.

The Political Smokescreen

Most significantly, the Unite report identifies how left-wing credentials functioned to deflect accountability:

‘On the rare occasions when questions were raised, the dominant faction would turn to an alternative source of validity: the political smokescreen. It was here that a leftwing political veneer was most valuable to the leadership, providing a ready argument to dismiss critical questions.’

This is what makes ‘left’ union bureaucrats so difficult for socialist parties to navigate. Their credentials are not simply fraudulent - the bureaucracy does win real gains for workers, and that is the source of its legitimacy. But these gains are delivered within limits set by the bureaucracy’s structural position, and left rhetoric serves both to maintain credibility with members and to deflect criticism when the leadership acts to contain struggles or protect its own institutional interests. The ‘political smokescreen’ works precisely because there is real fire behind the smoke. Anyone raising concerns about governance, financial accountability, or democratic process can be dismissed as politically suspect—playing into the hands of the right, undermining solidarity, attacking the left.

McCluskey’s Departure and the Graham Leadership

In August 2021, McCluskey announced his retirement as general secretary after ten years in the role. In the lead-up to electing his replacement, the United Left faction held a hustings and ballot to determine a single candidate, which was won by assistant general secretary Steve Turner. Turner, seen as close to McCluskey, was subsequently endorsed by McCluskey for the election.

However, in a result that surprised many, Sharon Graham won the election in August 2021, defeating the McCluskey-backed candidate. Graham took office as Unite general secretary the following day. It was Graham who commissioned the independent investigation into the Birmingham project and the wider governance failures of the McCluskey era. The Unite interim report of July 2025 is the product of her determination to expose what had gone wrong.

This succession matters for understanding the current situation. The corruption allegations relate to McCluskey’s tenure, not to the current leadership. Graham’s investigation represents a genuine attempt at accountability. But the networks established during McCluskey’s decade in power did not disappear with his departure from Unite: they found new institutional homes, including in the formation of Your Party.

The Murphy-McCluskey Connection and YourParty

The Unite scandal is particularly relevant to Your Party through a direct personal and political connection. As of 2025, McCluskey was the partner of Karie Murphy, the British trade unionist and political strategist who served as chief of staff to Jeremy Corbyn during his time as Leader of the Opposition (2016-2019) and as Labour’s acting general secretary in 2019.

Murphy became co-director of Corbyn’s left-wing political project Collective in 2025. More crucially, in September 2025, Zarah Sultana cited Murphy’s alleged ‘sole financial control’ over the newly formed Your Party as justification for unilaterally launching the party’s membership appeal—an attempt to create an alternative power base in the grassroots membership, independent of the bureaucratic apparatus.

Discussions among party members identified Murphy as responsible for the controversial expulsions on the eve of the founding conference. Many expressed concern that the same people who had controlled the party’s formation would continue to run it indefinitely—that bureaucratic networks already captured the new formation before it had properly begun.

Historical Context: The Falkirk Affair

The Murphy-McCluskey political connection predates Your Party by over a decade. In July 2013, allegations of vote rigging emerged in the Falkirk constituency during Labour’s candidate selection process. A consultation over an all-women shortlist was abandoned over fears that not all members had been invited to participate. This was thought suspicious because Unite’s preferred candidate was Karie Murphy.

Unite had paid for scores of people to join the Labour Party in line with the union’s political strategy. Ed Miliband called in the police to establish whether there had been criminal behaviour. The police investigation was dropped in July, Murphy withdrew as a potential candidate in September 2013, and the Labour Party investigation ultimately found no wrongdoing. Charges against Murphy and the CLP’s chairman, Stevie Deans, were dismissed.

The episode nevertheless illustrated the methods by which Unite under McCluskey sought to influence Labour Party selections, and the close working relationship between Murphy and the McCluskey-led union apparatus. A Miliband spokesman at the time said McCluskey’s ‘attempt to divide the Labour Party is reprehensible’ and was ‘disloyal to the party.’

McCluskey himself had threatened to disaffiliate Unite from Labour and launch a new workers’ party in March 2014 if Labour lost the 2015 general election—a threat that, according to Jim Pickard of the Financial Times, could cause Labour to cease to exist in its current form. Following Labour’s electoral defeat, McCluskey found fault with the party’s policy proposals, which he thought were ‘not particularly radical’ and believed the party had ‘fallen for the Tories’ austerity trap.’

The trajectory from Falkirk to Your Party thus spans more than a decade: the same network of union bureaucrats and political operatives, the same methods of organisational control, and ultimately the realisation of McCluskey’s threatened alternative to Labour—but with his partner and political ally Murphy in a controlling position within the new formation.

A Note on Personal Relationships and Political Analysis

The Murphy-McCluskey relationship is noted here not as a matter of private life but as a concrete expression of the network of personal connections through which bureaucratic power operates. We are not interested in individuals’ personal arrangements; we are interested in understanding how an unelected layer exercises influence across formally separate organisations.

When the same people, connected by personal as well as political ties, hold key positions in a major trade union and a new political party, that network becomes a legitimate subject for political analysis—not because the relationship is scandalous, but because it is structurally significant.

From a Marxist perspective, we analyse material relationships and networks of power. The bureaucratic layer that Trotsky analysed does not operate through formal structures alone; it consolidates through personal relationships, family ties, and social networks that remain invisible if we treat them as purely private. Mandel observed how professional functionaries in workers’ organisations come to constitute a distinct social layer with its own ‘autonomous interests’—a layer that reproduces itself through what he termed ‘negative selection,’ where advancement depends on conformity to the apparatus rather than on commitment to workers’ self-emancipation. We are examining precisely such a layer: professional political managers whose interests and social connections may diverge from those of the class they claim to represent.

The workers’ movement has always grappled with this tension. The Bolsheviks discussed family connections among the bureaucracy; Trotsky noted how the Soviet apparatus reproduced itself partly through social and family networks. When analysing the British Labour right, it is entirely legitimate to note overlapping social circles and personal connections, because this is part of how political tendencies cohere and reproduce themselves. The same standard must apply to the left.

The key distinction is this: the bourgeois press uses personal relationships to substitute for structural analysis (scandal replaces politics), while we use them to illuminate structural analysis (personal networks reveal how bureaucratic power actually operates, rather than how it formally claims to operate). The test is whether mentioning the relationship advances political understanding or merely adds prurient detail. In this case, the Murphy-McCluskey connection directly explains the transmission mechanism between union bureaucracy and party control that would otherwise remain abstract.

The Friday Evening Platform

McCluskey’s appearance at the Friday evening fringe event, in this light, was not incidental. The event was organised by Corbyn and explicitly advertised through Corbyn supporters’ groups. It publicly signalled whose network shaped the party’s launch. For members and observers watching, it communicated that Your Party’s leadership was embedded in the same bureaucratic milieu—the personal relationships, the factional methods, the financial dependencies—that had produced the Unite scandal.

The removal of attendees by security added a further dimension: some dissent from this network’s dominance would be physically managed rather than politically engaged with. These were not all the same. For example, shortly after Corbyn and McCluskey’s event began, security removed a small group of activists from the Revolutionary Communist Group (RCG). They had begun to heckle, demanding that Corbyn say the new party will denounce Zionism (their recurrent demand and, given Corbyn’s decades of opposition to Zionism, one that disgusts and frustrate him). On Saturday, a conference stallholder who was involved with the group Stand Up To Racism (linked to the SWP) was also forcibly ejected, without their belongings, from the conference center. A security staff member indicated that the removal was ordered by the conference organizer, Karie Murphy.​ This was the atmosphere in which the founding conference operated—an atmosphere already shaped by bureaucratic control because of the expulsions of SWP supporters (including a bemused Alex Callinicos, who had not joined Your Party).

Understanding Union Bureaucracy: The Mandel Framework

Ernest Mandel’s analysis of trade union bureaucracy provides essential theoretical tools for understanding the McCluskey case and its implications. Mandel recognised that trade unions have a ‘dual character’—they are both necessary organisations for defending workers’ immediate interests and prone to bureaucratic deformation that can turn them against their members’ long-term interests.

The Centralisation Paradox

Mandel argued that union centralisation is necessary to counter the growing concentration of capital. To resist this would be to act in the interests of capital. However, the process produces contradictory results:

‘The same centralisation that allows poorer wage earners to negotiate more favourable wages and working conditions than they could achieve on their own threatens to turn against the militants and radicals once a trade union apparatus is bureaucratically deformed and self-perpetuating. It threatens to undermine the whole basis of trade unions if it degenerates into systematic passivity on the part of trade union members. An ever-smaller circle of functionaries takes the central decisions—including compromises in collective bargaining—without involving a broader layer of activists in the decision-making process.’

This precisely describes what happened in Unite under McCluskey. The United Left faction controlled the central decision-making structures, appointment panels, and financial oversight mechanisms. Members became passive recipients of decisions made by an inner circle.

Capital’s Pressure on Union Leaders

Mandel observed that capital puts pressure on union leaders to discipline activists and ‘clear out’ the ‘unpredictable’ militant elements from enterprises and union organisations. If a certain line is crossed, unions ‘degenerate and cease to be independent trade unions.’ This threatens the position of the bureaucracy itself, because ‘capital and the state can no longer trust it to control the workers and channel their activism.’

The bureaucracy thus finds itself in a contradictory position: it must maintain enough credibility with members to retain control, while simultaneously managing workers’ militancy in ways acceptable to capital. Left-wing rhetoric serves this function perfectly—it maintains credibility while avoiding genuinely disruptive action.

The Remedy: Broadest Internal Democracy

Mandel countered bureaucratic deformation with a demand for the ‘broadest internal trade union democracy’:

‘This means not only the duty to inform, question and consult widely with the membership and activists before any important decision is taken, but also the right of minorities to associate in order to coordinate their efforts at trade union meetings, at least to some extent, just as effectively as the apparatus can.’

Mandel’s position, as summarised in Manuel Kellner’s excellent book, was that revolutionaries working inside broader workers’ parties should ‘maintain their own structures and means of expression (especially publications) and become part of a clearly anti-capitalist left wing within these parties.’ This implies political independence rather than subordination to union leaders, however ‘left’ their credentials.

The Spanish Warning: CC OO, UGT, and the PSOE

The Spanish experience provides a stark parallel to the British situation and demonstrates where subordination to union bureaucracy leads.

The River of Public Subsidies

In Andalusia, after 18 years of uninterrupted PSOE government, the major unions CC OO and UGT ‘explicitly support’ the Socialist party, being ‘grateful for the river of public subsidies on which the subsistence of their apparatuses depends.’ This created a political relationship where union apparatuses received sustained funding in exchange for political support—and political quiescence.

Strong accusations emerged that unions like CC OO and UGT had become ‘too corrupt or subordinate to the State,’ being ‘transformed into champions of the State against the right of nationalities.’ The ‘ossification of unions’ in Andalusia impeded genuine representation of agricultural workers, requiring alternative organisations like the Jornaleras de Huelva En Lucha to provide support.

The Andalusia ERE Scandal

The 2008-2013 Andalusia ERE scandal demonstrated the ultimate consequences of this relationship. Billions in unemployment funds were diverted as fraudulent early retirements benefiting union officials and allies, leading to convictions including former Socialist regional presidents. Union officials became direct beneficiaries of public money channelled through the party-union nexus.

The Spanish sources document structural corruption as the ‘lifeblood of accumulation mercantilism’ through which large fortunes are amassed, with thousands of individuals implicated in hundreds of cases over two decades. The annual cost of corruption in Spain was estimated at 40,000 million euros. Bankers, businessmen, and politicians acted in unison to enrich themselves illicitly using public money.

The Lesson for Your Party

The Murphy-McCluskey relationship suggests a similar dynamic potentially emerging in YourParty—where union bureaucratic networks provide organisational capacity and resources, but in exchange gain influence over party decision-making. When parties become reliant on union subsidies and platforms, they lose the capacity for independent criticism. The Unite interim report’s findings about how the United Left faction controlled appointment panels shows how such networks reproduce themselves. When these methods transfer to a political party, you get conference manipulation, selective expulsions, and control over which motions reach the floor—precisely what YourParty members experienced at the founding conference.

Recommendations for Your Party Activists

Drawing on the theoretical framework and historical evidence, the following recommendations aim to help Your Party develop as a genuine working-class party rather than an appendage of union bureaucracies.

1. Assert Organisational Independence

1. Financial transparency: Demand full disclosure of all funding sources, particularly from trade unions. No individual should have ‘sole financial control’ over party resources. Establish independent financial oversight with rotating membership.

2. Diversify funding: Build a broad membership dues base rather than relying on large donations from union treasuries. Dependence on bureaucratic funding creates dependence on bureaucratic politics.

3. Refuse subordination: Party positions should never be adjusted to preserve relationships with union leaders. The party must retain the capacity to criticise any union leadership, including those considered ‘allies.’

4. Platform independence: Do not provide platforms to union leaders facing serious corruption allegations. The McCluskey appearance at the Friday evening event damaged the party’s credibility and signalled bureaucratic capture before the conference had even formally begun.

2. Build Democratic Structures

1. Branch sovereignty: Real power must reside in local branches, not central committees controlled by factional networks. Branches should have genuine autonomy over local activity and meaningful input into national decisions.

2. Conference democracy: All member-submitted motions should receive fair consideration. Standing orders committees must be genuinely representative, not mechanisms for leadership control. The founding conference’s manipulation of motions and speakers should never be repeated.

3. Right of recall: All elected officials, including MPs, should be subject to recall by their constituencies. This was reportedly adopted at the founding conference—it must be vigorously implemented.

4. Minority rights: Following Mandel, minorities must have the right to organise and coordinate their positions. Factional organisation is not inherently problematic—factional control that suppresses democracy is the problem.

3. Develop Independent Political Analysis

1. Publications and education: Maintain independent publications and educational programmes that develop members’ capacity for political analysis. Do not rely on materials produced by union bureaucracies or their allied organisations.

2. Study bureaucracy: Ensure members understand the dynamics of bureaucratisation—in unions, parties, and states. Mandel’s work provides essential starting points, as does the history of Spanish, British, and other labour movements.

3. Resist the ‘political smokescreen’: Be vigilant against the use of left credentials to deflect legitimate criticism. When someone invokes their socialist credentials to avoid accountability, that is precisely when scrutiny is most needed.

4. Orientate Toward Rank-and-File Workers

1. Support union democracy movements: Work with rank-and-file members fighting bureaucratic control rather than cultivating relationships with top leaders. The Unite members now demanding accountability deserve support.

2. Build class-struggle tendencies: Following Mandel’s recommendation, work to build organised tendencies within unions that counteract conservative inclinations through democratisation and provide alternatives to existing leadership.

3. Connect with unorganised workers: The ‘ossification of unions’ in Spain required alternative organisations to represent workers the official unions had abandoned. YourParty should actively work with precarious, platform, and other workers poorly served by existing union structures.

Recommendations for Union Members

The Unite scandal is not unique—it reveals dynamics present in union bureaucracies across the movement. Union members seeking genuine workers’ democracy should consider the following.

1. Demand Democratic Accountability

Challenge the culture of compliance that allowed the Unite scandal to develop. The Bark & Co. report found that factional dominance ‘helped create a culture of compliance’ where oversight bodies ‘abdicated their oversight responsibilities.’ Executive councils must function as genuine scrutiny mechanisms, not rubber stamps for leadership decisions.

Support reforms like those now being implemented under Sharon Graham: independent financial oversight, professional procurement processes, gifts policies, and—crucially—governance structures designed to reduce factional dominance. The Democracy Commission’s consideration of ‘additional oversight bodies elected by lot’ deserves serious attention.

2. Build Independent Rank-and-File Organisation

Do not rely on ‘left’ leaders to deliver change from above. The Unite case demonstrates that left credentials provide no guarantee of democratic practice or financial probity. Rank-and-file organisation independent of all bureaucratic factions is essential.

This means building networks that can coordinate across branches, share information, develop alternative policies, and hold all leaders accountable—regardless of their political positioning. The right of minorities to organise must be defended and exercised.

3. Connect Union Struggles to Political Organisation

Unions alone cannot achieve fundamental social change. Political organisation is necessary. But political parties must not become vehicles for union bureaucracies to extend their control. The relationship should work the other way: politically conscious workers should bring democratic demands into both their unions and their parties.

Where YourParty branches exist, union members should participate—but as advocates for workers’ democracy, not as transmission belts for bureaucratic influence. If the party leadership shows signs of bureaucratic capture, members must be willing to challenge it.

4. Learn from International Experience

The Spanish experience with CC OO and UGT demonstrates where subordination to party-state networks leads. The Andalusia ERE scandal was not an aberration but the logical outcome of unions transformed into ‘champions of the State’ dependent on ‘rivers of public subsidies.’

Study these experiences. The patterns repeat across countries and decades. Bureaucratisation is not a British peculiarity but a structural tendency that must be consciously resisted through organisation and political education.

Bottom line: Breaking the Chain

The McCluskey case and its connection to YourParty through the Murphy network illustrates a fundamental challenge for socialist politics: how to relate to union bureaucracies without being captured by them.

The answer is not to reject work in unions—that would be sectarian and self-defeating. Unions remain essential organisations for workers’ immediate defence. Nor is it to avoid building broad workers’ parties—that would abandon the field to bureaucratic politics.

The answer is to maintain political independence while engaging in both arenas. This means building organisations with their own democratic structures, their own financial base, their own publications and educational capacity, and their own political analysis. It means supporting rank-and-file union democracy movements rather than cultivating relationships with top leaders. It means being willing to criticise ‘left’ bureaucrats when criticism is warranted—and recognising that left credentials often serve as a ‘political smokescreen’ to deflect accountability.

The Unite interim report offers hope: democratic reform is possible when members organise to demand it. Sharon Graham’s investigation and the Democracy Commission represent real steps toward accountability. But lasting change requires sustained rank-and-file organisation—in unions and in parties.

YourParty has the potential to become a genuine vehicle for working-class politics. That potential will be realised only if members assert democratic control over the party, break the chain of bureaucratic dependency, and build an organisation oriented toward workers’ self-emancipation rather than bureaucratic manoeuvre.

The founding conference’s problems—the controlled motions, the selective expulsions, the filibustering speakers, the Friday evening platform for a figure under corruption investigation—were not accidents. They were symptoms of bureaucratic capture. The remedy is not to leave, but to organise. The remedy is not despair, but democratic struggle.

The trajectory from Falkirk in 2013 to Liverpool in 2025 shows how bureaucratic networks persist and adapt. McCluskey threatened a new workers’ party over a decade ago; now his partner controls its finances while he reads poetry at its launch event. Understanding this history is essential to breaking its grip on the future.

The chain can be broken. But only if we understand what binds us—and consciously work to break free.

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Postscript: The Triangular Struggle and the Limits of Bureaucratic Reform

A Note on Sharon Graham’s Palestine Record

A reader has raised a serious critique of the preceding analysis: that it presents Sharon Graham’s reforms as straightforwardly progressive without examining her administration’s record on Palestine solidarity. The critique deserves a substantive response, because the evidence it points to does not refute the article’s argument about bureaucracy; rather, it deepens and complicates it in ways that strengthen the case for rank-and-file organisation.

The Evidence

Between 2021 and 2024, the Graham administration systematically blocked implementation of Unite’s democratically adopted Palestine solidarity policy. The mechanisms were strikingly familiar: the Executive Council Chair repeatedly ruled motions on Palestine ‘out of order’; the General Secretary issued explicit instructions to union staff not to support campaigns against arms factories; and at least one senior officer was threatened with ‘gross misconduct’ and the loss of their ex-gratia pension for speaking at a ceasefire rally.

The March 2024 ‘First Claim’ directive codified this suppression, asserting that the union’s primary loyalty was to ‘the protection and advancement of our members’ interests at work’ and that Unite would never ‘support any course of action which is counter to that principle.’ In practice, this granted the defence sector a veto over international solidarity work.

The 2025 Policy Conference forced a dramatic reversal. Faced with seventeen motions from branches and regions, the leadership executed what observers called a ‘volte-face,’ adopting one of the strongest anti-arms trade resolutions in the Western trade union movement: a full arms embargo on Israel, support for members who refuse to handle weapons, and recommitment to BDS. Yet three months later, only one of twenty action points had been partially enacted. The resolution remains, in the assessment of activist branches, a ‘dead letter.’

The Triangular Framework

How should we understand this apparent contradiction: a leadership that pursued democratic accountability on financial governance while deploying bureaucratic suppression on international solidarity?

Ernest Mandel’s analysis of bureaucracy provides the answer. Mandel understood trade union officialdom not as uniformly reactionary or uniformly progressive, but as occupying a contradictory position between capital and the working class. The bureaucracy’s interests sometimes align with the membership against capital; sometimes align with capital against the membership; and sometimes diverge from both in pursuit of its own institutional preservation.

The Graham faction’s campaign against the Birmingham Hotel corruption was simultaneously in members’ interests (£70 million unaccounted for is a genuine scandal), in the faction’s interests (it delegitimised United Left control of the apparatus), and a vehicle for consolidating a particular vision of trade unionism (the ‘industrial syndicalist’ current against the ‘political unionist’ tradition).

The suppression of Palestine solidarity, conversely, served the faction’s base in the defence sector while deploying the same bureaucratic methods the article criticises in McCluskey’s United Left: procedural obstruction, administrative discipline, threats to dissenters. The ‘political smokescreen’ concept cuts both ways. If McCluskey used left credentials to deflect accountability on financial governance, Graham used industrial militancy credentials to deflect accountability on international solidarity.

The Lesson for Your Party

The reader’s critique therefore strengthens rather than refutes the article’s central argument. The lesson for YourParty activists is not ‘ally with Graham against McCluskey’ or vice versa. It is that bureaucratic factions deploy democratic rhetoric selectively, in ways that serve their particular power base and the sections of the membership on which that base depends.

Graham’s reforms on financial governance are real. The Democracy Commission, the independent oversight mechanisms, the exposure of factional corruption: these represent genuine gains for union democracy that activists should defend. But they do not abolish the bureaucratic layer; they transfer control to a faction with different priorities. Where those priorities conflict with broader membership demands, as on Palestine, the same mechanisms of suppression reappear under different management.

This is why the article’s recommendations for rank-and-file organisation, independent political analysis, and vigilance against all bureaucratic factions remain essential. The chain of bureaucratic dependency cannot be broken by backing one faction against another. It can only be broken by building democratic organisation from below that holds all leaders accountable, regardless of their political positioning or which reforms they have championed.

A fuller analysis of the Unite Palestine case and its implications for understanding the triangular struggle within trade union bureaucracies will follow in a subsequent article.

December 2025