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‘Unite has a psyche of fighting back’
After 11 years leading Britain’s biggest union, LEN McCLUSKEY talks to the Star about how Corbyn changed Labour forever, the current gap in left leadership and Unite’s continued role amid what promise to be turbulent times ahead
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The June 2025 attacks on Iran have heightened the risk of a wider war, exposed the fiction of a rules-based international order and left ordinary Iranians trapped between external aggression and internal repression, says the Committee for Defence of Iranian People’s Rights
While pretending to seek peace, Europe is heading toward a collision course with Russia – using security guarantees, troop deployments, expropriation and censorship as tools, writes SEVIM DAGDELEN
A WWI hero, renowned ornithologist, medical doctor, trade union organiser and founder member of the Communist Party of Great Britain all rolled in one. MAT COWARD tells the story of a life so improbable it was once dismissed as fiction
LEN McCLUSKEY’s 11-year leadership of Unite covered a period of intense political turbulence — Conservative-Lib Dem “austerity,” Brexit, the rise and fall of Corbynism, a global pandemic.
Proud as he is of having helped build a strong “fighting-back” union, which he is confident will go from strength to strength under new leader Sharon Graham, he is best known to the wider public as a champion of the Labour left and the Jeremy Corbyn movement in particular.
Unite’s strategy is credited — including by many of its enemies, such as Peter Mandelson — with playing a key role both in the slight leftward shift of Labour under Ed Miliband from 2010 and the more dramatic turn to full-blooded socialism from 2015.
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