I have had the results of the UNISON NEC elections, about which reports have already been made elsewhere.
The turnout is unimpressive, in the only all-national constituency (for the “additional members” seats, the turn out is 6.5%, although since nearly one in seven ballot papers was spoilt the effective turnout is just 5.6%). However, elections are decided by those who vote and the results stand on any turnout.
Although the higher turnout in the General Secretary election no doubt gives the General Secretary a sound mandate, members of the NEC have a democratic mandate which no other paid official of the Union has.
As this is a personal blog on which I express my personal opinions as an individual member of the NEC I shall express both my disappointment that some friends and comrades were not elected, but also my pleasure at the election and re-election of some fellow NEC members.
I note that all those members of the NEC previously elected on a “United Left” ticket have been re-elected (for those reading this blog with an eye to the UNISON Rule Book I stress that I make this observation as a point of information and without any intention to influence anyone in any way!!)
Furthermore, candidates of “the left” have won three out of four of the directly elected seats for each of the health and local government service groups. No one could interpret this as a vote of confidence in the strategy adopted by UNISON’s leadership in recent industrial struggles in either health or local government. (Though if anyone thinks otherwise please do say!)
Even in the leadership heartland of the North West Region a new left member of the NEC has been elected. Amongst those displaced from the NEC are a former and putative future President of the Union. The message of these results to those who really run our Union is that we need to take a harder line against the Government and employers.
The message to those who style themselves the “sensible left” on the NEC is that there are now a whole number of real Labour left-wingers on the NEC happy to work with them on an issue by issue basis but not prepared as a matter of principle to be hostile to other socialists in our Union and to be sectarian towards serious labour movement campaigns such as “Public Services Not Private Profit”.
If the UNISON leadership wish to engage seriously with those newly elected to the NEC they have every opportunity – not least by supporting the Public Services Not Private Profit Campaign. If not, well then we shall see…
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3 comments:
interesting election results. If 1 in 7 ballot papers were spoiled it may be timely to find out if they need to be simplified?
But a question that has always been puzzling me -we get members on the NEC -how do we ever find out what they get up to? You at least report back -but certainly in the London region I have never seen any other NEC members do likewise. It is particularly irritating as they are holding the women's seats -and the majority of our membesr are women -but the only nec member to report back to us is a man(for which I thank you).
it is when anonymous commentators thank me that I remember why I continue to allow anonymous comment!
the official reports made to the Regional Committee and Council are generally made on behalf of all Regional NEC members - I have encouraged other NEC members to blog (for example) thus far without success
I hope some of our new NEC members may consider opening up the process of reporting to the membership as I have tried, and will continue to try, to do
Anonymous, it's not necessarily the case that one in seven ballot papers were spoiled. It's probable that most of those invalid votes were returned by members who voted in other elections on that ballot paper but decided for whatever reason to not vote in that particular election.
The number of invalid votes for the regional seats is much less (the South West female seat was only 3.1% invalid) so that suggests that there is a significant group of people who will vote for region, but not have an opinion on the national constituencies.
One idea that think would be good to increase the visibility of NEC members is to task every NEC member with the delivery of policy. Every year at Conference, we instruct the NEC to do all sorts of things, but there's rarely any follow up. If there was a report sent to branches after Conference saying "Conference decided this, the NEC member leading on this will be ..... " then the union would be a lot more active and we can vote for and against NEC members depending on how well they do their jobs.
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