Welcome to Downstream here on Navaramedia. My name is Aaron Bastani. This week's guest is

Len McCluskey, General Secretary of Britain's largest private sector union in Nights until 2020.

McCluskey is most widely known for his support of Jeremy Corbyn's Labour leader,

with the night backing the Islington MP since 2015. As a result, McCluskey had a front-row seat

throughout the Corbyn leadership, witnessing some of the biggest stories of the decade from Brexit

to 2016 chicken coup and the 2017 and 2019 general elections. But he was also familiar with both

Ed Miliband and Keir Starmer's Labour leader, saw the collapse of Labour in Scotland and was a

leading player in an emerging anti austerity movement after 2010. What did all of that accomplish?

What lessons can be learned? And are Britain's trade unions now better placed to fight against

falling living standards today than they were a decade ago? Len McCluskey, welcome to Downstream.

Thanks for inviting me, good to be here again. You start in the world of work at 18?

Yep, you go down the docks in Liverpool. How do you go from that, somebody who's not from a

powerful family or even a massively political family, supercoming one of the most powerful

trade union leaders in the country? Well, I suppose I was a child of the 60s and of course

everything was changing in the 60s. People would be coming politicised by the Vietnam War,

by the civil rights movements in America. Indeed, the civil rights movements in Northern Ireland,

the Catholic civil rights movement, which is very close to Liverpool to Catholic City.

So it was a kind of very vibrant period and I came from a working class background where

it was solidly labour. It was kind of more or less accepted that you labour was the party that

would be on the side of working people, Harold Wilson, had just been elected in 64 and the game

is 66. So it was all happening, guys. So you would recall the romantic image of Shay Guevara

on t-shirts everywhere and so I knew a little bit about what was happening in Cuba and

...