Unite, the largest union in the UK, will consider slashing donations to Labour by half, general secretary Len McCluskey has suggested. Speaking in Cambridge on Wednesday evening, he acknowledged that the relationship between Unite and Labour needed reform, telling the audience to expect a significant announcement next week.

He pointed to internal Unite polling, which indicates that only 50 per cent of the union’s members are Labour voters. Unite currently gives around £3 million per year to Labour.

In an interview with Varsity, McCluskey said that the Tories use him “as a kind of baseball bat to hit Ed Miliband over the head with. And we’re conscious of that – that means I have to be a bit more careful of what I say and how it can be distorted.”

He also added that “from time to time the media need an ogre – I’m the current public enemy number one.”

The media will “try to use that to destroy the message of people coming together, resisting and trying to defend the way of life that we’ve been used to for the past 65 years,” he said, “since the end of the war and the creation of the welfare state.”

McCluskey also repeated the calls he made on Newsnight this week for Ed Miliband not to join with the Liberal Democrats should they fail to achieve an outright majority in 2015.

Speaking about his predictions for next year’s elections, he told Varsity: “I think Labour will end up as the largest party, and I think they may just fall short of an overall majority.” He said that it was up to Ed Miliband to “offer a radical alternative.” Nick Clegg, he said, is a “soggy Lib Dem sieve”.

McCluskey was in Cambridge to address the Trinity Politics Society, where he launched a new leverage campaign targeting the private healthcare “vultures” he says are preying on the NHS.

He was damning in his criticism of the government’s healthcare reforms, saying that Unite will ensure politicians are “accountable” for their actions, which he argued amount to “robbery in plain sight.”

He addressed the Cambridge students specifically, urging them to aspire to more than “a big house in the country” and driving a Porsche. He acknowledged that he was speaking to “our future generation of leaders.”
Regarding the allusion to changes to the financial relationship between Unite and the Labour party, a spokesperson for Unite said yesterday: “the level of our affiliation to the Labour Party and funding will be discussed next week by our executive council.”