It's fine that McCluskey speaks out for his members but he should also educate them about the harsh realities out there
I've never met Len McCluskey, but Unite's leader strikes me from afar as a decent man and a smart one. So has he got it right this morning in using an article in the Guardian to accuse Ed Miliband's Labour leadership of selling out the working class to "discredited Blairism", last-gasp "neo-liberalism" and even to the ghost of the party's great villain, Ramsay MacDonald, over the coalition's cut programme?
He's certainly right about one thing. If, as he asserts – here's his text – Miliband and his shadow chancellor, Ed Balls, failed to ring McCluskey and fellow Labour barons on the TUC general council to forewarn them that they were about to engage in a delicate political manoeuvre then they deserve some stick. I fear they did not do a ring-around.
Labour bosses would not have been so cavalier about their loyal supporters and major financial backers in the old days when Labour leaders – sorry about this, lads – had more experience.
It's bad manners and it's very bad politics. As a well-connected union MP on Miliband's side in this one told me a few moments ago: "When Len's been insulted, as he was over this, there still a Liverpool docker inside him that takes offence."
That said, is his Guardian analysis and accompanying indignation – all amplified on the BBC at breakfast time because "Get Miliband" is the media herd's current groupthink – correct?
Or has he rashly signed off on an article written by teenage scribblers in Unite's research department whose earnest book-learning is matched by left-posturing rhetoric which denies them traction out there in the real world?
More a case of the latter than the former, I suspect, though the piece must have been fun to write. But McCluskey has done to the two Eds exactly what he accuses them of doing to him: shooting his mouth off without doing the courtesies.
It's pretty silly to accuse Ed Balls, a man who spent some of the best years of his life being awful – and worse — towards Blair, of becoming a Blairite, let alone of wanting to emulate Philip Snowden, Labour's coalition chancellor during the Great Depression.
Whatever his combative faults, Ed Balls is a clever well read fellow. Read his Fabian Society conference speech last Saturday – it's here on his website – or Patrick Wintour's Guardian interview on Saturday – and you can see here's a man whose has read a lot of economics and who understands more about the subject than (say) either Blair or Balls's old boss, Gordon Brown, let alone George Osborne. We'll come back to him.
That's not to say he's bound to be right. He wasn't right when he and Brown botched the new regulatory framework for the financial sector in 1997 and failed to trim the long boom, though they were in very good company, including David Cameron, Osborne, George Bush and Co.
They also borrowed too much off the back of buoyant tax receipts in the noughties so that the fiscal regime was instantly over-stretched when the banks went bust and had to be rescued. Not everyone made that mistake – though the Bushies did.
Nor was Labour candid enough quickly enough about its mistakes while Brown was in charge. That's partly what this weekend's recalibration – Ed Miliband backed Balls on the Andrew Marr Show – were about: an attempt to embrace realism about Britain's economic plight – and the wider plight of the north Atlantic economies – and its long-term impact on public expenditure and pay.
That's where the McCluskey teenies got it wrong. Balls wasn't abandoning Keynes or the insights he provided. In his Fabian speech he reminds listeners – teenage researchers among them I expect – that the great economist was never a "tax and spend" man either. But Keynes did say "look after the jobs and the deficit will look after itself "(that's my recollection, not Balls's) – whereas coalition policy has it the other way around.
The result – as Balls predicted from day one of the Osborne squeeze – is that the fragile recovery visible when Labour left office has evaporated.
All sorts of clever people are saying the UK economy was back in recession in the last quarter of 2011. We don't yet know for certain, but the news most days – including today's round of cuts in the armed forces, they're all jobs – is relentlessly gloomy, here and elsewhere.
Like the Costa Concordia we seem to be stuck on the rocks with insufficient liquidity to float us off. It's just been announced that inflation is falling – but that's a mixed blessing in times like these.
Even Standard & Poor's, the wretched credit rating agency which downgraded French sovereign debt last Friday (it slept during the boom years), complained as it did so that the prospects for France to grow its way to recovery are dire. That's the point Balls has been making since 2010 – don't cut too deep or too fast.
We understand why voters, who have had to cut their own budgets, weren't listening. It's a difficult message to sell, but governments aren't like households (whatever Mrs Thatcher said), they have deeper pockets. The coalition's emergency operation to keep the money markets happy – and interest rates low – has been a success, but the patient may be expiring quietly.
Even the ratings agencies will notice eventually – and may panic like passengers on the Costa Concordia who have suddenly realised that the captain and crew don't know what they're doing after all: trust in the confidence of leadership is important if panic is to be avoided (riots too), so psychologists assure us. Our AAA credit rating may be next to go: that will hurt public spending and make recovery harder still.
McCluskey knows all this because two-thirds of the way through his article – after he's accused Miliband of embracing the coalition's pro-banker consensus (it the opposite of the media's "Red Ed" jibe, though it won't stop them) – he admits that "of course" Labour can't commit itself on spending priorities or public sector wages so far ahead of the 2015 election. Exactly.
That's it really. It's fine that Len McCluskey speaks out for his members and voices their concerns, that's what they pay him for. It's right that there should be an articulate debate. But leaders should also educate their followers to the harsh realities out there – on pay, job security and pension rights. A lot of it is outside anyone's direct control.
A cynic can argue – they are already doing so – that Miliband must be happy to pick a fight with the unions (now that really is " Blairite") when what's happened looks more like a cock-up than fancy footwork.
What the Two Eds have got to do now is get out there with every shadow cabinet member who can string a sentence together and use this row to sell a more nuanced message.
Which is that when voters get cross with coalition strategy not delivering the resumed growth that the chancellor promised, cross enough to start listening to Labour again, Labour will have something useful and credible to say about the (limited) choices it can exercise to make things a bit more hopeful.