Graham’s Unite nominates disgraced right-wing GS candidate who wrote for S*n – SKWAWKBOX

Gerard Coyne nominated for West Bromwich East parliamentary candidacy

Sharon Graham’s Unite union has nominated the twice-failed and disgraced former general secretary candidate Gerard Coyne to be Labour’s candidate for the West Bromwich East parliamentary seat.

Coyne, an EDL-linked candidate who ran on a similar ‘keep Unite out of Westminster’ slogan to Graham, was sacked by the union after data breaches during his first, dirty campaign to take over the union – a breach that led to him emailing people who were not even members of the union. Coyne was foolish enough to admit that his campaign had used member data provided to him by fellow right-wingers in the Labour party – a blatant breach of data laws, since none of the members had given their permission for their data to be used by him.

Coyne was also censured by the union for during the campaign for his tactics and his team boasted about having access to huge amounts of cash and ‘patronage’ for the campaign, which was strongly linked to destructive former Labour deputy leader and former MP for West Bromwich East, Tom Watson.

Coyne also went to the reviled Murdoch S*n to smear rival Len McCluskey and, after losing the 2017 general secretary election, tried to use the courts to overturn the result – a bid that ended humiliatingly, with the judge dismissing his bid, in which he had accused the union of things in fact done by him, as ‘inconsistent, confusing and weak’ and ‘improper‘.

Despite his disgrace, Coyne then made another bid for the general secretary position, coming a poor third. Now Sharon Graham’s Unite is backing him to be a parliamentary candidate.

Graham’s tenure as general secretary has been marked by worrying allegations: trying to have evidence against her husband destroyed – he was on a final warning from the union for his conduct and was the subject of a string of bullying and misogyny complaints, but now holds a senior position in her team; she has been the subject of intense protests in Ireland over Unite’s treatment of Irish union legend Brendan Ogle, who did not support her bid to become general secretary; ‘dark money’ spending on social media ads for candidates in the recent Unite executive election who supported her – and the union was accused of allowing her supporters to stand for election despite ineligibility and even racist comments.

Graham has also been criticised for cosying up to Labour leader Keir Starmer after running – like Coyne in 2017 – on a platform of pulling the union out of Westminster politics. Now, the supposed leftward direction in which she was going to take the union is in further question after Unite’s support for the woeful ‘Labour First’ tool Coyne.

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