The Real Unite

The Black Horse is a boarded up pub in Birmingham, sitting empty and unloved on a corner between Unite’s offices and the Aloft hotel. After the hotel building costs soared to over £100 million, there was no desire to spend more restoring the pub.

Blackhorse was also the name chosen by Len McCluskey and friends as a Special Purpose Vehicle company for the hotel project. It was this company which paid the bulk of the bills to the Flanagans. This extra layer made it harder to see what was going on as the costs kept climbing.

Blackhorse HCC Limited, to give its full name, was registered in August 2016. You can see all its official paperwork on Companies House.

It was registered with three Company Directors: Len McCluskey, and two others. A year later, some of the directors switched around. Now it was Len McCluskey, and four other members of his United Left faction, including current EC member Tommy Murphy.

It was Len McCluskey who signed off the accounts and other company documents.

How were these Directors, responsible for tens of millions of the Union’s money, appointed? Not by the Executive Council. It never discussed Blackhorse.

Not until 2021, when the subject came up after The Times broke the story on Birmingham. Then suddenly the EC talked about holding an election for these directors. No one seems to have thought of this before.

We hear that, when questioned as part of Unite’s corruption investigation, Tommy Murphy and other Blackhorse directors said they didn’t actually know they were directors for years. Did Len forget to tell them he’d put their names down?

Company paperwork is very clear, you have to confirm that “the person named has consented to be a director”.

But let’s leave that issue to one side. If Len didn’t tell them, none of the UL directors seem to have complained about it once they found out.

In the same way that the UL-run EC, through all of Len McCluskey’s reign, never asked a single question as the overcharging racked up. No questions about the Flanagans. No questions about Blackhorse. Keep quiet and follow the leaders.

Have a foreign holiday (sorry, solidarity delegation). Have a trip to parliament. Wave a flag while you’re doing it, and you can say you’re dead left-wing. Ooh Jeremy Corbyn.

All of the current Blackhorse Directors from the EC are UL supporters, including Tommy Murphy, Michelle Smith and one of Beckett’s former campaign managers, Eddie Cassidy.

That’s the UL way. And that’s one big reason we’re in this mess. If we want to rebuild the working class movement, if we want to actually take on the powerful, if we want to win, it has to start with cleaning up our union.