It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Wednesday, December 11, 2024
Police charge Kurdish people in British state crackdown
The Kurdish community is angry at being labelled terrorists, facing violence from the British state on behalf of Erdogan's regime
Kurds demand and end to police repression (Photo: Guy Smallman)
The police have charged six Kurdish people who were arrested last month. They were accused of being supporters of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), a proscribed organisation in Britain.
On 27 November, police raided the KCC in north London and arrested seven people across the capital.
Police barricaded the KCC and kept the seven Kurds under arrest.
Following the charges, five have been released but one remains on bail as they are an asylum seeker. Those charged could appear in court as early as 20 December.
Days before the changes Kurds and their supporters rallied against police repression last Sunday in north London’s Wood Green.
The Kurds on the march chanted the Iranian slogan “women, life, freedom”, and ‘Turkish state—terrorist’’. They are incredibly angry at being depicted as terrorists when the Turkish state has a long history of repression, terrorism and torture.
Yet the Turkish government, headed up by Recep Tayyip Erdogan, is supported 100 percent by the British state.
The most recent raid and arrests are part of that support. A police leaflet repeated the terrorist slurs and caused great anger. As a result, the Haringey Labour Council leadership got involved and backed the Kurdish protesters.
Members of the community centre recently conducted a hunger strike and 2,000 people marched through central London.
Ibrahim Avcil of the Turkish and Kurdish migrant organisation Gik-Der said, “To my surprise, the local authority has been very good both in terms of criticising the police and the actions they have taken.
“They’ve also stood with those that were protesting in front of the Kurdish Community Centre for over nine days. And they also produced a leaflet for the hunger strikers on how they could look after their health,” he added.
“The whole labour movement needs to take up the Kurds’ slogan, ‘Britain—stop supporting the Turkish state’.”
UK
By Backing Public Ownership, We Can Tackle the Rise of the Far-Right – Ben Chacko
“We need a mass campaign offering the answer here. One which places the question of public ownership back at the heart of political debate.”
Leading Campaigners and voices for public ownership took part in the Arise Festival event: ‘Public Ownership and Control – Key to Tackling the Crises we Face’ on 3 December. You can read Ben Chacko‘s contribution published below or watch the event in full.
WATCH: ‘Public Ownership and Control – Key to Tackling the Crises we Face’. Hosted by Arise Festival on 3 December 2024.
Public Ownership is necessary. On a global scale, the scandals engulfing the last two UN climate summits, Cop28 and 29, with conference presidents and hosts striking oil and gas deals at the summits themselves, show what happens when you task the people who profit from an existing system with overhauling it.
Exactly the same problems arise when we expect a privatised, profit-making National Grid to prioritise a transition to cheap, clean and green energy. Or foreign-owned water companies to prioritise infrastructure maintenance, water safety and the environment over dividends and shareholder returns.
As we’ve seen, privatisation has landed us with the least reliable and most expensive trains in Europe, closed thousands of bus routes or run them down to be so infrequent they are no longer convenient to use (again while ramping up prices), removed our ability to control energy prices, gutted Royal Mail and fuelled a destructive reliance on outsourcing in essential services that worsens quality and workers’ pay and conditions. In the NHS, reliance on outside contractors and a privatised supply chain has been wasteful, inefficient and corrupt.
Despite the Thatcherite mantra, it has not driven innovation or improvements in efficiency. An article in the Financial Times this morning named 1980 as the year British and European labour productivity, having shown strong growth since the 1950s, began to fall behind the rest of the world. Britain has the lowest level of private-sector investment in the G7. CEOs only accountable to shareholders seeking short-term returns have not modernised or improved services, they have attacked wages, siphoned money out in unsustainable quantities and loaded up debt that we either have to take on publicly or risk the collapse of services millions rely on.
Public ownership is also popular. We Own It regularly updates us on the results of surveys and they are remarkably consistent in showing broad backing for public ownership of what were once considered the “commanding heights” of the economy: water, energy, transport including buses as well as trains, health and social care, often by big majorities. Labour’s abandonment of this agenda since 2020 is billed as part of a strategy to make it electable but this doesn’t stand much scrutiny. Labour has been seeking to make itself acceptable to big business, not to voters.
I want to focus today on the political dangers of this approach. We know that the British public want change.
Keir Starmer’s government claims both to have won a mandate for that change with its election win in 2024, and to be on course to deliver it. I think it had better deliver it, precisely because its popular mandate to be in power at all is so weak.
We saw in the last decade that political momentum has been with whoever represents a break with the status quo, which is unsurprising given the long-term decline in living standards with wages flatlining as the cost of living rises.
We saw it in the Brexit vote. We saw it too in the Corbyn movement from 2015, which official British politics wants to put behind us, but which is particularly important for us because it created a genuine mass movement of hundreds of thousands of people, and won the biggest increase in the Labour vote in 70 years, precisely on a programme of extending public ownership and redistributing wealth.
For a few years at least, this people-powered opposition changed the political narrative (forcing the Conservatives to abandon support for austerity, for example) despite the overwhelming hostility of the media and the political class. If we’re to change the narrative on public ownership, which the public wants but the political elite don’t, we need to pull off something similar just to get it on the agenda.
When it was defeated, it was defeated paradoxically by making the existing Conservative government look like the break with the status quo, by framing departure from the EU in those terms. It was Get Brexit Done which delivered the big Conservative majority of 2019.
The period since then has seen a really thorough clear-out of socialist policies, and a good number of socialists, from the Labour stable. Starmer still prides himself on this, regularly boasting of having changed the Labour Party and made it electable.
But removing popular policies from the political menu doesn’t mean people start supporting whatever they’re given. I think politicians underestimate the extent to which their artful suppression of Corbynism has driven alienation and disillusionment from the political system itself.
The 2024 election looks great for Labour in number of seats won, but it’s a castle built on sand. Its vote was half a million lower than at the disastrous election of 2019, more than two million lower than at the Corbyn surge election of 2017. The Conservatives, presiding over collapsing services and falling living standards, could not avoid being the main victim of the anti-status quo feeling in the country, but Labour only gained by default, not in actual support from real people. Its vote fell because people saw it as part of the status quo too and were not willing to vote for more of the same.
In that election itself, we saw a huge rise in the vote for a populist right-wing that looks and talks like a break with the system: Reform UK. Shortly afterwards we saw fascist violence spread across many of our towns. Mass mobilisations saw that off for the time being, but the sorry tally of council by-election results and most polls show a continued shift towards Reform UK among voters, most prominently among people who used to vote Labour.
The combined Reform-UK and Tory vote last summer was higher than Labour’s. Polls show Labour has lost its summer lead over the Tories, while Reform UK’s projected share of the vote keeps rising. Labour cannot, as it did under Blair, get more unpopular in government while maintaining power. It has to get more popular, and that means delivering improvements in public services. We know that these improvements depend on public interest being prioritised over private profits: on public ownership.
So in a way the left and trade unions need to find a way to save this Labour government from itself. Left to its own inclinations it will fail to make any tangible difference to the problems in public services, continue to lose popular support and collapse before an insurgent and increasingly racist hard right in a few years.
We need a mass campaign offering the answer here. One which places the question of public ownership back at the heart of political debate.
Not only can we put pressure on government, but this is terrain the far right can be beaten on. Farage is no break with the status quo, he is a tool of turbo-charged Thatcherism, an acceleration of the same privatising policies that have done so much damage in recent decades. Forcing discussion onto the role of the private sector in the NHS, in education, in water and energy systems, helps expose that.
The huge and resilient Palestine solidarity movement shows that this country is not politically apathetic. But the street and community campaigning for an economic alternative that we saw in the early 2010s, through the Coalition of Resistance and then the People’s Assembly, has become weaker.
Unions need more persuading to get behind such a movement under a Labour government than a Tory one, but only through such a movement can we apply the political pressure we need to win back working-class support and defeat the far right. We need to win the argument that protesting and organising for change is still something that needs to come from below, and can’t be left to discussions with ministers. As has been indicated, the NHS can be a unifying cause in this process.
Take back control was a slogan that resonated because people feel they have lost that control over the political and economic forces that shape our lives. But to control this country we need to own it.
‘Public Ownership & Control – Key to Tackling the Crises We Face’ was hosted by Arise Festival on 3 December 2024. You can watch or listen back on the Arise podcast.
“Every day that this genocide continues is unacceptable, and to be reluctant to act in the face of mass suffering is inhumane. Whether it’s University Chancellors, or Prime Ministers, we must stand together and make our voices heard.”
Warwick Students Union Disability Officer Mads Wainmain, recently addressed an online briefing held to mark the UN Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People on November 29th. You can read her contribution or watch the event in full below:
WATCH: UN International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People online briefing hosted by Labour & Palestine and Arise Festival on 29 November.
It is a privilege to mark this year’s International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian people alongside you all.
To introduce myself, I am the Labour Students Disability Officer and a Momentum NCG member, but I’m here in my capacity as Warwick Students Union Disability Officer and I will therefore focus on student activism and the demilitarisation of education.
I first of all want to acknowledge all of the lives lost, not just since October 7th 2023, but since 1948. It is a heartbreaking thing to acknowledge that the Nakba has not ended, but it is so important to remember that. The scale of loss and destruction is unfathomable, and every day that this genocide continues is unforgivable. Those responsible should be held to account, and I want to bring attention to Jess Barnard’s stance against Starmer’s continued involvement in these war crimes. Solidarity.
In the face of no Universities remaining in Gaza, I want to talk about how we can utilise our own Universities today to bring about divestment. Palestine Solidarity Campaign has found that UK universities have invested £430 million pounds in companies complicit in the illegal actions of the Israeli government. Students have responded nationally, with encampments and campaigns to pressure universities to divest. At Cambridge, Trinity College announced an end to investments in arms companies, KCL halted investment in Israel’s arms suppliers and Goldsmiths announced a review into its policies.
Within my own University, students have organised for change. Warwick Stands With Palestine held a 60 day encampment, culminating in an 11-day occupation of a Warwick Manufacturing Group building. This was the first occupation of WMG, a department with ties to the arms trade, through companies like BAE Systems and Rolls-Royce.
The Warwick Student Staff Solidarity Network had published ‘An Investment in Injustice’ in October of this year. Through a joint student and staff research collective, we have created a 44-page document detailing the Universities complicity in genocide, which I have a copy of here. It is available as a PDF for free on the Warwick UCU website if you wish to read it in full.
However, to give a brief overview, this report begins with a history of the occupation, from the origins of Zionism, to the Nakba of 1948, to today. It then develops into a full and meticulous study into the University of Warwick’s direct complicity with the arms trade and Israeli crimes. It was found that Warwick has accepted over £100 million in research funding from arms companies, and fails to acknowledge the dual use of these contracts. This makes negotiations difficult, as Warwick claims its investments with companies are purely for scientific advancement, failing to recognise that these advancements will develop technology used in war crimes.
For instance, the Computer Science Department has received £9 million of funding for a project developing technologies that could be adapted for autonomous weapons systems, alongside other contracts with dual-use potential. WMG has a partnership with Airbus on Project ZEST, a £19.5 million project, which is likely to have dual-use applications in military transport, given that the company is one of the world’s largest suppliers of advanced military aircraft. The Engineering Department is deeply complicit, as you can imagine, but the largest issue for me personally is a project completed alongside BAE Systems, Airbus, Rafael Advanced Defense Systems, and Thales. Rafael Advanced Defense Systems is an Israeli company that promotes its products as “combat proven” – namely, they are tested on Palestinians.
According to the SSSN report, which most of this has been taken almost word for word from anyway, but the outcomes of this project could significantly enhance military capabilities across various platforms, such as enhancing the design and operation of military aircraft, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles and missile systems.
Many of these contracts are covert, and the extensive level of research required students to work with staff to gain access to this information. The framework of utilising students and staff is essential, and hopefully the full PDF can demonstrate a methodology which is applicable to many other Universities and institutions. These reports and actions have not yet been acted upon by the University. WSWP is entering negotiations with the University management and the Vice Chancellor, Stuart Croft, and this report is able to provide transparency and accountability, greatly aiding these negotiations which is why I implore every University to conduct similar research.
However, there is still a sense of inaction and reluctance from the University. Every day that this genocide continues is unacceptable, and to be reluctant to act in the face of mass suffering is inhumane. Whether it’s University Chancellors, or Prime Ministers, we must stand together and make our voices heard. We all know that solidarity is not transactional, it is essential and there is real power in that.
As Akwaeke Emezi has said in their novel ‘Bitter’, hope is ‘something serious and deliberate instead of something wishful and desperate.’ The ability to practice hope is a privilege, but it is one we are afforded, so we must continue to hold hope that our efforts will not be in vain.
Still, it is important to remember during the course of our work that this is human loss on an unprecedented scale, which is being felt by people quite often far away from us. Whilst I have focused on student activism, hope and what we can materially do as activists in the UK, I feel it is important to remember the devastation that is occurring right now in this Labour Government’s name. I therefore want to read out two pieces of writing that I find particularly powerful.
It’s very Gen Z of me that the first piece I have is a Tumblr Post, but I think you’ll all agree it is moving and important, and I’m sure some of you will have seen it. So:
“I wake up thirsty and I think of Palestine. I go to the doctor’s office and I think of Palestine. A sign in the corner of the waiting room says ‘this is a place of healing, disruptive behaviour will not be tolerated’ and I think of Palestine. They probably weren’t thinking of bombs and snipers and mass graves in parking lots. I call my parents and I think of Palestine. I drive to the grocery store and I think of Palestine. I look at the clear blue sky and I think of Palestine. I put the dishes away and I think of Palestine. I feed my cat and I think of Palestine. I listen to music and I think of Palestine. I read poetry and I think of Palestine. I text my friends and I think of Palestine. I think of Palestine and I think of Palestine and I think of Palestine”
And now I will read Born on Nakba Day, a poem by Mohammed El-Kurd.
Your unkindness rewrote my autobiography
into punch lines in guts,
blades for tongues,
a mouth pregnant with
thunder.
Your unkindness told me to push
through,
look,
listen.
I was born on the fiftieth anniversary of the Nakba
to a mother who reaped olives
and figs
and other Quranic verses,
watteeni wazzaytoon.
My name: a bomb in a white room, a walking suspicion
in an airport,
choiceless politics.
I was born on the fiftieth anniversary of the Nakba.
Outside the hospital room:
protests, burnt rubber,
Kuffiyah’ed faces, and bare bodies,
stones thrown onto tanks,
tanks imprinted with US flags,
lands
smelling of tear gas, skies tiled with
rubber-coated bullets,
a few bodies shot, dead—died
numbers in a headline.
I
and my sister
were born.
Birth lasts longer than death.
In Palestine death is sudden,
instant,
constant,
happens in between breaths.
I was born among poetry
on the fiftieth anniversary.
The liberation chants outside the hospital room
told my mother
to push.
Listen: UN International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People online briefing hosted by Labour & Palestine and Arise Festival on 29 November.
The UN International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People online briefing was hosted by Labour & Palestine and Arise Festival on 29 November. You can watch it in full here and listen as a podcast here.
Mads Wainman is a history student at the University of Warwick and the Disabled Students’ Officer on the National Labour Students Committee. You can follow her on Twitter/X.
The UK government shouldn’t pin all of its hopes for economic growth on the finance industry
Such a strategy was tried in 1970s and came to grief in the mid-1970s secondary banking crash.
The UK government has pinned its hopes of economic rejuvenation on the growth of the finance industry. Such a strategy was tried in 1970s and came to grief in the mid-1970s secondary banking crash. It deepened economic crises and paved the way for the rise of neoliberalism. The government tried the same in 1980s and it eventually delivered the 2007-08 banking crash. The government provided £1,162bn of cash and guarantees to bail out the banking industry, and £895bn of quantitative easing to support capital markets. The government, besotted with the finance industry, is returning to the failed strategy of further financialisation of everyday life through outsourcing, private finance initiatives (PFI) and creeping privatisation of the National Health Service.
Finance is central to the workings of a capitalist economy. We all make use of banks, debit/credit cards, insurances, pensions; foreign exchange and a variety of financial services, but can do without the incessant speculation and frauds that are so common in the finance industry. Is finance really the “crown jewel in our economy”, as the Chancellor claims? In 2023, it contributed £208.2bn to the UK economy, 8.8% of total economic output, and 1.17m jobs. The slick City PR machine never tires of exaggerating its importance. It claims that some 2.4m jobs across the UK are in finance. But only 678,000 work directly in the City of London. It claims that 1.1m work in the finance industry and anther 1.4m work in related professional services. The point to note is that majority of accountants, lawyers, actuaries, IT experts are spread out across the economy and do not mainly work in the finance industry.
The finance industry claims that in 2023 it paid £110.2bn in taxes. This is extrapolated from a survey of 82 finance firms. The scare quotes around the findings are that “PwC has aggregated and anonymised data from professional and financial firms to produce study results, which have not been verified or audited for accuracy”. So the industry’s tax contribution cannot be independently corroborated.
The headline tax amounts are not what they claim to be. The alleged £110.2bn tax contribution includes £61.8bn of taxes collected from others. For example, £40.1bn of income tax and national insurance is collected from employees and borne by employees, not the industry; £4.7bn is tax deducted at source i.e. borne by investors and £17bn VAT is borne by customers. That leaves £48.3bn tax borne by the finance industry, including only £14.2bn corporation tax, and £3.9bn of bank levy and surcharge.
Too many politicians are mesmerised by the vast amounts spent on clever bets in the world’s financial markets. One commentator noted that the world GDP is around $105 trillion but the “value of the financial derivatives which arise from this activity – that’s the subsequent trading – is $667 trillion …in terms of the things it produces, that business is useless. It does nothing and adds no value”.
Vast amounts of money are wagered on the price of shares, bonds, derivatives, food and commodities. Money is simply transferred from A to B, and is not invested in productive assets. This organised gambling produces no benefit to society in aggregate, “because every gain is matched by an identical loss. It all sums to zero”. The punters play with other people’s money but collect vast salaries and bonuses.
The scandal-ridden finance industry is bloated. In 1970, its assets were worth about 50% of UK GDP but by 2022 its assets hit £27 trillion, compared to GDP of £2.5 trillion. A large part of this are complex gambles, a bit like someone placing bets on horses and treating betting slips as an asset. When the race is run the betting slips either result in gains or become worthless. This is the reality of gambles on derivatives and complex financial instruments. The industry’s size has no relationship with any economic activity and it is parasitical on the real economy. .
Neither the government nor the City acknowledges the havoc caused by the finance industry’s speculation and its role in depriving skilled labour to more productive economic sectors. Research shows that between 1995 and 2015 the finance industry made a negative contribution of £4,500bn to the UK economy, which effectively wiped off two-year’s gross domestic product. Of this loss around “£2,700 billion is accounted for by the misallocation of resources where resources, skills and investments are diverted away from more productive non-financial activities into finance. The other £1,800 billion arises from the 2008 banking crisis”. Endless scandals since 2015, such as dud financial products, pension scams, London Capital and Finance, Woodford Equity Income Fund, Connaught Income Fundand others have reduced the contribution of the finance industry to the economic wellbeing of the country.
Almost all UK banks have been involved in mis-selling financial products, tax dodges, sanctions busting and illicit financial flows. Successive governments indulge them. The Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) was the biggest banking fraud of the twentieth century, and was closed by regulators in 1991. To date, there has bene no investigation. In 2012, HSBC admitted “criminal conduct” and was fined a record $1.9bn by the US authorities. No action was taken in the UK. Instead, the then Chancellor George Osborne secretly wrote to the US authorities and urged them not to prosecute HSBC as the bank was somehow too big to fail. Inevitably, the City is magnet for illicit financial flows. A UK Minister stated that around 40% of the dirty money in the world is going through the City of London and other crown dependencies.
The UK has one of the world’s largest finance industries, and at the same time businesses are starved of capital for investment in productive assets. The City is hollowing out the economy. In 2023, only £18.8bn in total was raised on the London Stock Exchange. The share buybacks were £46.9bn for the same period. As a Bank of England economist put it “among UK companies, share buybacks have consistently exceeded share issuance over the past decade … In other words, over the past decade the equity market no longer appears to have been a source of net new financing to the UK corporate sector”.
Raising money from capital markets brings its own challenges as finance degenerated into a rent-seeking activity. The City expects higher dividends. In 1970, major UK companies paid out about £10 of each £100 of profits in dividends, but by 2015 the amount was between £60 and £70, and rising. The Bank of England noted that “80% of publicly listed businesses that underinvested answered yes when asked if financial market pressures for short-term returns were an obstacle to investment. 40% of privately owned businesses also answered yes”. The lust for short-term returns is accompanied by a squeeze on labour and investment.
Inevitably, the UK has been bottom of the G7 league for investment in productive assets in 24 out of last 30 years. It ranks 28th among 31 OECD countries. This is despite the state-backed Private Finance Initiative (PFI) programme, which ran from 1992 to 2018 and guaranteed corporate profits. The finance industry invested £60bn in schools, prisons, hospitals, roads, street lighting and military equipment with agreement to receive repayments of over £306bn.
The stark truth is that the City does not have the appetite for long-term planning, investment and risks. As a result the UK economy is becoming more insecure. It imports roughly 40% of its food and 40.8% of energy needs. The government wants to build 1.5m new homes, but the UK lacks building materials. The UK is the world’s largest importer of bricks and imported over 500m bricks in 2022, and 30%-40% of its cement. Rather than building industrial capacity, the finance industry is focused on cash extraction.
Successive UK governments have failed to empower regulators or clean-up the City. There have been no effective corporate governance or regulatory reforms. Almost every law has been bent to support the City and it has delivered little of value in return. Instead of relying upon the City the government could create its own bank to direct and support investment in emerging industries and technologies, but such interventions are not on the political agenda. Governments can back more productive industries, but rarely do. For example, the manufacturing sector accounts for around £518bn; 23% of GDP; and 7.3m jobs. Every £1m of manufacturing activity supports a further £1.8m through indirect and induced multiplier effects. But the government backs the finance industry, which continues to find novel ways of gambling and enriching a few. The normal rules of capitalism are suspended as failed banks are always bailed out. This fuels more gambling and predatory practices. The casino economy is unlikely to deliver prosperity or happiness to the masses.
Prem Sikka is an Emeritus Professor of Accounting at the University of Essex and the University of Sheffield, a Labour member of the House of Lords, and Contributing Editor at Left Foot Forward.
UK
We need a fairer UNISON, one that puts members first – Andrea Egan
“I will continue to be fearless in speaking up for oppressed people around the globe, including calling for an arms embargo on Israel whilst working with our international trade union allies to share advice and best practise.”
Andrea Egan, Candidate for UNISON General Secretary
With over 1.3 million members and an income of £200m, I am proud to be a part of Britain’s largest trade union. However, I have been left disappointed in UNISON’s current General Secretary and her allies’ failure to exert the union’s influence to improve the lives and conditions for our members. For far too long, UNISON’s bureaucracy has been sluggish in implementing democratic decisions chosen by our members, which has resulted in a membership left disillusioned by top-down decision-making, bureaucratic inefficiency and waste. This has to change.
In 2022 I was proud to be elected President of the union. During my year-long tenure, I supported the implementation of UNISON’s first Race Discrimination Panel, gave support to the launch of trans ally training and championed the UNISON’s disabled workers passport. I led on the Organising to Win programme which has done so much to support members to secure substantial improvements to pay and conditions. However I was prevented from doing more by a minority in our union who didn’t want change.
That’s why I’m standing to be UNISON’s General Secretary to bring about a transformation of our union, ensuring branches and members have the power to secure crucial wins within the workplace. If elected, I will conduct a review into the union’s machinery to ensure our policies are not just words on a piece of paper, but are fully implemented. To make sure that I remain true to my principles and close to our members, I will only take the salary of a social worker and channel the rest of the £166,000 pay packet into industrial action and welfare funds. I believe actions speak louder than words.
Furthermore, there should be zero tolerance for any forms of discrimination in UNISON. A commitment to anti-racism, trans allyship and celebrating diversity is essential to a thriving organisation. So within my first 100 days of being elected, I will convene a meeting with all self-identifying groups within the union to listen and adhere to their demands for a truly inclusive environment
What’s more, I will continue to be fearless in speaking up for oppressed people around the globe, including calling for an arms embargo on Israel whilst working with our international trade union allies to share advice and best practise.
I started working life as a low-paid children’s care worker and later became a social worker. It’s with this first-hand experience that I take pride in vociferously campaigning on the issues affecting our members. This includes attending demonstrations, lobbies and picket lines, defending our public services from austerity, coordinating anti-racist events and leading the union’s first industrial action against the academisation of secondary schools in 2008. I have fought for social justice my entire life and now I want to use my experience to transform the entire way our union works.
I believe that everyone has a right to a wage they can live on, a house they can live in, a health service that can look after them, education for their children and the ability to retire with dignity. I will fight for these objectives. If you are a UNISON member and want to fight for them too, it would be fantastic to have your support.
You can support Andrea Egan’s campaign for UNISON General Secretary here. Her campaign is supported by Time for Real Change, rank and file UNISON activists determined to make UNISON democratic, transparent and successful.
You can follow Andrea’s campaign for UNISON General Secretary on Twitter/X.
UNISON former President Andrea Egan launches her campaign to be the union’s next General Secretary
December 9, 2024
Andrea Egan, President of UNISON in 2022/23, has announced her candidacy as General Secretary in forthcoming elections to the union. UNISON is Britain’s largest trade union with 1.3 million members and an income of almost £200 million. Andrea’s campaign is being supported by Time for Real Change, rank and file UNISON activists organising for a more democratic, transparent and successful union.
Andrea started work in the 1980s as a children’s care worker before later qualifying as a social worker. She was instrumental in leading UNISON’s first strike action against the academisation of schools back in 2008. During her time as President, she supported members to commence implementation of the Race Discrimination Panel. Andrea has played a leading role in the Organising to Win strategy to improve pay and conditions for the union’s members.
If elected, Andrea has pledged to take the wage of a social worker and channel the rest of the £166,000 General Secretary pay package into funding welfare and industrial action funds. She has committed to conducting a review into the union machinery, championing its diverse membership and standing up for oppressed people around the globe.
Andrea Egan says: “I’m standing to be General Secretary to give power to ordinary members, implement the decisions they’ve voted for, end bureaucratic waste and start winning the real improvements to pay and conditions all members deserve. I’ll take the wage of a social worker and conduct a comprehensive review of how the union operates. It’s time for UNISON to change – it’s time to win.”
David Jones, UNISON NEC member, adds: “We at Time For Real Change are delighted to support Andrea’s campaign for General Secretary. For far too long, UNISON’s bureaucracy has been slow to act on democratic decisions made by members. This has got to change, and it can under new leadership.”
The Government’s new legislation does not allow unions to generate as much leverage over employers as they need, explains Gregor Gall.
Based on last year’s figures, by January 4th next year at around one o’clock in the afternoon, the average earnings of chief executives of the top 100 companies will have surpassed the average salary for a whole year for a full-time worker in Britain. The value of what chief executives bring to the table is not one hundred and twenty times more the worth of what the average paid worker brings to the table. This is just one of the most startling instances of the continuing economic inequality in Britain.
Even though the Labour Government’s employment law reforms, embodied in the Employment Rights Bill 2024, were born out of ‘Labour’s Plan to Make Work Pay’ (previously entitled ‘A New Deal for Working People’), it is clear these proposed reforms will not make work pay for most workers.
The Employment Rights Bill 2024 sets out reforms to union recognition, collective bargaining and industrial action. But the problem is that the Bill does not provide a right for unions to have access to workers for recruiting and organising. It simply gives them the right to ask a government body for this access but that government body has no powers of enforcement.
This then undermines the significant improvements being made to the right to union recognition (and thus also collective bargaining on pay) through lowering the levels of worker support needed to gain it from an employer. And in only one instance is Labour proposing to set up the machinery for a sector-wide ‘Fair Pay Agreement’, namely, the adult social care sector. Lastly, while some of the most onerous obligations on unions when undertaking industrial action have been removed, many remain so that unions are still somewhat shackled. The result is unions are not able to generate as much leverage over employers as they need.
Let’s look at some of the detail of this. There will be a mechanism for facilitating union access where certain criteria are met. A union will be able to ask an employer to enter into an access agreement, and that if the employer refuses, the union will be able to then apply to the Central Arbitration Committee (CAC), which can effectively impose an access arrangement. As with the process for gaining union recognition, the application for access will not be a quick or easy one. Indeed, the process will essentially mirror that of the (as yet unamended) process for applying for union recognition.
But just as tellingly, if an employer fails to observe an access agreement or a CAC-imposed arrangement, there is no means for compelling the employer to comply. A union can make another reference to the CAC to have a financial penalty imposed upon the recalcitrant employer, but this is payable to the Government and not the union.
This means that the to-be-welcomed reforms of the statutory union recognition procedure are gravely undermined by putting obstacles in the way of taking advantage of the reforms. In other words, employers will still be able to freely practice anti-unionism in order to stop unions meeting the reduced thresholds for union recognition. Union recognition is essential for carrying out collective bargaining on pay and other terms and conditions. We know from the 1970s that it is the coverage of collective bargaining on wages – around 80% – that made that decade the most equal in economic terms by social class that Britain had ever been.
These reforms include deleting the current requirements for unions to (i) have the support of at least 40% of all those entitled to vote in the proposed bargaining unit in a recognition ballot and its replacing by the requirement of a simple majority of those voting to win the ballot, and (ii) to demonstrate in an application to the CAC that it is likely to win a recognition ballot (by worker support via a petition or by membership density) and replacing this with the requirement that the union only need to show a minimum of 10% membership in the proposed bargaining unit for the application for recognition to be accepted and progressed to the next stage of adjudication.
This is typical of Labour – essentially giving with one hand and taking away with the other or representing two steps forward and one step back.
Gregor Gall is a visiting professor of industrial relations at the University of Leeds and author of the ‘Mick Lynch: The making of a working-class hero’ (Manchester University Press, 2024), reviewed here on Labour Hub.
Gregor Gall will be spealing alongside Maria Exall on Thursday 12 December, at 6pm at an online briefing for trade union activists: Employment Rights Bill: what’s the latest, what should we be fighting for? Register to attend here.
Online briefing for trade union activists: Employment Rights Bill: what’s the latest, what should we be fighting for?
