Gary Smith, head of the GMB union – a union Starmer and 56 Labour ministers proudly call their own – is “embroiled in allegations of harassing and bullying women”, according to the Daily Mail. The union’s been accused of being a “‘vipers’ nest’” with “workers’ subs ‘used like confetti’ to fight complaints.” So much for their supposed commitment to workers’ rights…
According to the Mail, despite an internal 2020 investigation confirming four instances of bullying by Smith, he’s been allowed to keep his job as General Secretary. In a damning secret recording, Smith was caught telling a woman suing a colleague for sexual harassment, “We’ve got better lawyers than you,” before admitting the accused was a “scumbag,” but promising the union would “come out swinging” with its superior legal firepower. Meanwhile, the Times reports that dozens of former staff at the GMB trade union were given payouts totalling more than £800,000, with sources telling the paper that “significant amounts of those sums were spent settling cases with disgruntled former employees”. They said it “reflected the ‘culture of fear’ around speaking out among those working within the union”…
Ex-members told the Mail that the union is an “old men’s club,” dripping with sexism – though a GMB spokesman said “we categorically deny claims of a bullying culture and do not recognise our union in the accounts of these former members of staff.” Still, that £1 million a year the GMB hands over to Labour will taste a little less sweet now…
Gary Smith, the general secretary of the GMB, tells the New Statesman’s Rachel Wearmouth…
We import a huge amount of fracked gas and we import methane from America, which is basically fracked gas… Now we have a choice: we are either going to import gas that has been fracked somewhere else in the world and put on diesel-bombing ships or we take responsibility for our own carbon. If it can be done safely, and that is demonstrable, then it’s time that we took responsibility for our own carbon emissions. …the idea that the future is going to be all about electricity, or that we’re moving to a future simply about renewables, is just not true. … listen to unions that are in the energy sector, such as the GMB.
We should not get caught up in a bourgeois environmental debate driven by the bourgeois environmental lobby …The debate on the left needs to seriously talk about climate change, but it needs to be focused on jobs. And the renewables industry, and many of those who espouse it in politics, have no interest in jobs for working class communities. And we should stop pretending that we’re in an alliance with them. The big winners from renewables have been the wealthy and big corporate interests. Invariably the only jobs that are created when wind farms get put up, particularly onshore wind, have been jobs in public relations and jobs for lawyers.
GMB General Secretary Gary Smith says…
“If Labour wants to be the party of workers it is going to need demonstrate that not by empty slogans but about actually talking about the issues that matter to working class people. What Labour is obsessing about is putting workers on the dole rather than actually focusing on getting working class people back voting for them.”
Speaking to Sky News off the back of Rachel Reeves’ Air Passenger Duty hike, Ryanair chief executive Michael O’Leary said:
“Labour is dependent on those Red Wall seats, and yet every move she makes poisons economic growth and damages the UK’s recovery… it’s the Chancellor who stumbles from policy misstep to policy misstep… I think her policy decisions are incredibly stupid.”