Len McCluskey: My party, my way, or the highway

So far the tensions in the Labour party over Ed Miliband’s plan to reform the link with the trade unions have stayed below the surface at this conference. The closest it came was, unsurprisingly, when Len McCluskey took to the stage. The Unite leader made another plea for the unions to ‘set our vision of how we will build our country in government’, and told the leadership (Ed Miliband had strangely disappeared from the stage at this point) that ‘if OUR party is to have a future it must speak for ordinary workers and it must represent the voice of organised labour’.

He also made his customary attack on the Blairite ‘Them’ that he likes to talk about whenever he defends the role of trade unions, saying:

‘Zero hours in another age. The only thing that stopped it then, and the only thing that will stop it now is strong trade unions.