Len McCluskey has been re-elected leader of the Unite union in a narrow victory that has been greeted with relief by supporters of the Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn.
The incumbent defeated his opponent, Gerard Coyne, after a bitter month-long campaign that culminated in Coyne’s suspension from his union role 24 hours before the vote declaration.
McCluskey won 59,067 votes (45.4%), Coyne won 53,544 (41.5%) and grassroots candidate Ian Allinson took 17,143 (13.1%), on a turnout of just over 12%, the union announced.
Coyne’s team was hoping for a high turnout of up to 20% of the membership, which they believed would have ensured a surprise victory. McCluskey’s vote dropped from 144,570 in 2013 when the turnout was nearly 15%.
The result was a boost for the Labour leader and the left of the Labour party.
McCluskey is a close ally of Corbyn and is expected to use Unite’s influence to push through rule changes that will ensure a leftwing candidate will be able to stand in any future Labour leadership election.
It is also a personal triumph for McCluskey, 66, a former worker from Liverpool’s docks who resigned in December and stood again in the hope of a renewed mandate so he could see through “the Corbyn project” to its conclusion.
The result has dismayed many MPs who believe that Unite under McCluskey holds too much influence over the party leader’s office.
McCluskey may seek to punish some anti-Corbyn MPs whom he has criticised as traitors. He could also reignite an ongoing feud with Labour’s deputy leader, Tom Watson, who he accused of putting up Coyne as a candidate.
Coyne’s camp will this weekend take legal advice over unsent and late ballot papers and what they see as a flawed electoral process.
Coyne, who ran a campaign alleging that McCluskey was misspending members’ money and was too involved in national politics, responded to the result with a statement calling for McCluskey to change the way the union was run.
“The union machine consistently attempted to bully and intimidate me, something that has continued even after the close of polls,” he said.
“Turnout has fallen disastrously. Many members have reported to me that they did not get their ballot paper at all or, if they did, that it arrived literally on the day polls closed and so was useless.
“This was no vote of confidence, with falling turnout and a halving of Len McCluskey’s previous vote.”
The result will not stop an ongoing row within the union over McCluskey’s support for Corbyn or the union’s decision to discipline Coyne just hours after ballot boxes were closed.
Hours before the result was known, a Labour peer compared the way the union had suspended Coyne with methods used by North Korea’s regime to deal with dissenters. Lady Prosser, a supporter of Coyne and former president of the Trades Union Congress (TUC), said the union had refused to say why he had been suspended.
She told BBC Radio 4’s World at One: “To hear that he has been suspended and the union is not saying why, that just looks like something that might go on in North Korea.”
The suspension came just hours after the ballot was closed on Wednesday afternoon, amid reports that the result was extremely close.
Unite, which has 1.4 million members, making it Britain’s biggest union, gives Labour £1.5m a year.
Unite’s acting general secretary, Gail Cartmail, urged the union to pull together and blamed the low turnout on an outdated voting system imposed upon unions by law.
“The turnout in this important election can give no cause for satisfaction and, while the tone of the campaign will not have helped, the underlying reason remains the archaic and expensive balloting system imposed on trade unions by law,” she said.
“The sooner we can move to secure and secret workplace and online voting, the better for union democracy.”
