UNISON NEC elections - nominate the candidates seeking positive change!

This is one of those blog posts prepared without using UNISON resources, because it addresses the important question of internal UNISON elections – to our National Executive Council (NEC) – and so UNISON resources cannot be used to campaign in the election (that can get people into trouble!)

Diligent readers of this blog will know that your blogger is standing down after what will have been fourteen years on the NEC, having been given time off for good behaviour. In my absence (and I honestly don’t think that this is cause and effect) the rank and file left in the union probably has a good chance of increasing the numbers on the NEC who stand for an effective, campaigning and democratic trade union.

Supporters of all three of the defeated candidates in the last General Secretary election (who between themselves outpolled the successful incumbent) have come together with the shared intention of challenging all those who supported the failing status quo then and continue to do so now. The candidates seeking the necessary change in UNISON are organising under the banner of the UNISONaction Broad Left and the following statement of purpose;

UNISONaction Broad Left - What We Stand For

Over 400 conference delegates attended the launch of the group at National UNISON Conference in June 2016.

The meeting was convened to discuss the lack of effective leadership throughout UNISON at National level in most union structures.
UNISON is meant to be a lay led union but currently the majority of the NEC, most service group national committees and the national Labour Link Committee are dominated by the internal aims of some national officers rather than led to the needs of UNISON members.

This lack of effective leadership is one of the central factors behind the inability of the union to seriously challenge the continued destruction of our public services, the cut in our real earnings of over 25 % in the last 8 years and the escalating attacks on our pensions.

These issues are absolutely central to our members.

Yet even where members voted for action on pay and pensions that action was undermined by prevarication, delay and the overwhelming desire of officers, supported by the majority of the national leadership of our union, to end the disputes at the earliest opportunity rather than seek real improvements for lay members.

That lack of real leadership has cost our members dear.

Activists who seek to challenge this position are increasingly threatened with individual disciplinary action to silence them and warn off others.

Our UNISON democracy is circumvented in some ways and grossly abused in other instances.

UNISONaction Broad Left believes this situation cannot continue and the union needs to be cleaned up.

To do that means electing an alternative leadership throughout our structures.

UNISONaction Broad Left is composed of a wide range of activists of different views on some issues but who are working together to bring about positive change in our union to benefit our members.

Wherever possible UNISONaction Broad Left will seek to get agreed candidates to stand for all national lay posts in future with the aim of electing a new national lay leadership to bring about the changes needed.

We would welcome UNISON activists to join us and we have contact groups in every area which you can be involved in.

All personal contact details will be confidential and kept securely and clearly no UNISON resources will be used in our activity

A national UNISONaction Broad Left site is being developed to update activists and assist in work to replace the majority of our national leadership.

If UNISON is to even try and fight to represent our members interests there is no option but to change our national leadership who year after year have failed our members.

Please consider joining us and playing your part in building a more democratic stronger union and ensure we achieve a national leadership capable of delivering that.

As things stand, it is reported that the following candidates are seeking nomination in the following seats for the National Executive Council elections;

UNISONaction NEC Slates

Service Group	General	Female	Male	Reserved <£9.42 per hour
Community	Kieran Grogan	Janet Bryan	-
Energy		-	-	-
Healthcare	Neil McAllister	Jordan Riviera	Roger Hutt	-
HE	Sandy Nichol	Kath Owen	-	-
Local Govnt	Paul Holmes,	Jane Doolan Andrea Egan	Paul Gilroy	-
Police and Justice	Declan Clune (SE)		-	-
WET	John Jones	-	-	-
National Seats
Black Members	-	April Ashley	Hugo Pierre
Young Members	Josie Cartwright	-	-	-
National Disabled  Seat	Roger Lewis (Gt London)	Pam Howard (NW)

Regional NEC Seats

	General	Female	Male	Reserved
Eastern			Jonathan Dunning	Pauline (aka Polly) Smith
East Midlands			Gary Padgett
Gt London		Sonya Howard Helen Davies	Sean Fox
Northern
Northern Ireland
North West	Tony Wilson	Evelyn Doyle Karen Reissmann	Steven North	Natasha Hall
Scotland	tbc	tbc	tbc
South East		Jacqui Berry Diana Leach	Dan Sartin
South West			Berny Parkes
Wales		Mia Hosling	Mark Evans
West Midlands			Dave Auger	Shazziah Rock
Yorks and Humberside		Greta Holmes Sarah Littlewood	Adrian Kennett	Vicky Perrin

                                   

The online presence of the UNISONaction Broad Left is expected soon and I will post a link here as soon as I can.

In the mean time, UNISON activists who want UNISON to be the better trade union which it has the potential to be should try to get appropriate candidates from the lists above nominated by their branch.

Each branch can nominate for candidates in their own Region, and in any Service Group in which they have members, as well as making nominations for the “national” constituencies for black members, disabled members and young members.

UNISON resources may not be used for campaigning – the election procedures are available online on the UNISON website as is the nomination form (also in word format) (if you are nominating more candidates than can fit on one form you need to complete and submit multiple forms).

Good luck to all those candidates seeking nomination in the hope that they can help UNISON realise its potential!

UNISON and the New Education Union?

Looking ahead, as one presumably should at the beginning of January, it is clear that one of the most significant developments in public service trade unionism over the coming year or two will be the emergence of the New Education Union (NEU) should members of the National Union of Teachers (NUT) and the Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL) vote to merge.

I have commented here before that, whereas this proposed merger can be seen as a major step towards the “professional unity” sought by many teacher trade unionists for so long, the fact that it appears the NEU will (like ATL) admit into membership teaching assistants (for whom the non-teaching unions, particularly UNISON, are currently the recognised trade unions) means that the advent of the NEU is being viewed with alarm by some at the UNISON Centre.

School support staff in general (and teaching assistant in particular) form one of the largest occupational groups within UNISON, organised in those of our local government branches which cover local authorities with responsibility for education. UNISON is currently backing our teaching assistant members in Derby and Durham in fights against pay cuts (proposed as a result of an unimaginative and penny-pinching approach to the implementation of single status).

School staff are already fought over by UNISON and the GMB – from a UNISON perspective, certainly in London, schools are the largest source of complaints from UNISON branches about GMB “poaching” of members – yet overall trade union density amongst school staff who are not teachers is very much lower than the (generally high) union density amongst qualified teaching staff.

The NEU, which will face limited scope to recruit non-trade unionists in teaching grades but will also face the significant challenges arising from the changing structure of education provision (and funding cuts), will likely be impelled (after a year or two of merger induced stasis) to recruit teaching assistants, and – since it is always easier to recruit to a trade union someone for whom the first argument about the necessity for union membership has already been won – it would seem that the scene will be set for a three way membership war between UNISON, the GMB and the NEU.

Abandoning, for a moment, UNISON “chauvinism” and looking at things from the perspective of a potential member working as a teaching assistant in a school, you can see that this offers a tricky choice. The support staff unions can offer national recognition as well as knowledge and experience of Green Book conditions of service – and, at least potentially, a strong and independent voice for those in schools who are not qualified teachers. However, the NEU is much more likely to offer school-level union organisation, with a local representative on site and – given the higher union density among teachers – the NEU will be the largest, and certainly the most visible, trade union in each school.

Particularly bearing in mind the declining value to local government workers of national collective bargaining, the balance of that comparison does not look too favourable from the point of view of the support staff trade unions. You can see that a newly appointed teaching assistant, looking to join their first trade union might well be attracted by the NEU (particularly since they are most likely to be the first union to approach them, being more likely to have a representative in the school).

There are, however, hundreds of thousands of school staff in UNISON and the GMB and in its early years a new trade union struggling to define itself will probably have neither the resources nor the will to try to win many of those already in membership of other TUC affiliated trade unions to its ranks, particularly since the bulk of the local activists of the NEU will have come from the NUT and will be used to work collaboratively, rather than competitively, with the support staff trade unions.

Nevertheless, it is worth thinking about whether there is some way in which our trade union movement can offer, to teaching assistants and other school support staff, both the benefits of the workplace organisation which the NEU will likely have and the relevant experience and national recognition of the support staff unions – since if we can do that we can also avoid devoting energy to wasteful competition.

I wonder whether a model applied in the completely unrelated area of health care senior management might be worth dusting off and examining.

Managers in Partnership (MiP) is a sort of “joint venture” trade union between UNISON and the First Division. It says of itself;

“MiP was launched in 2005 as a joint venture by Unison, the largest public service union, and FDA, the specialist management union. It was set up to provide trade union representation tailored to the needs of managers in healthcare, and its structures reflect this.

MiP is a national branch of Unison and a sector of FDA and members are entitled to all the benefits of membership of both unions. MiP is affiliated to the TUC through the FDA. MiP has its own policy making body and is not affiliated to any political party.

MiP's overall strategy and budget are determined by its management board, which is made up of senior paid and lay officials from Unison and FDA.”

MiP launched in June 2005 with 3,800 members, growing to 4,500 in its first nine months and now claiming 6,000 members. 

As a member of the UNISON NEC at the time of the creation of MiP I recollect the controversy which attended its birth, as many health branches were concerned that the concentration of NHS management grades into a single “national branch” would fracture local relationships – but the purposes of this blog post is not to assess the successes and/or failures of MiP per se.

The question which I think UNISON members need to consider – and perhaps try to engage in dialogue with teaching union colleagues around – is whether or not some elements of this model could not be applied, on a much larger scale (and with considerably more lay democracy) to school support staff generally, or teaching assistants in particular. MiP was created because both UNISON and, to a lesser extent, the FDA were trying to organise senior managers in the National Health Service but neither union was achieving the results they sought, and they recognised that by combining the benefits of each trade union they might recruit more members.

Whatever the differences between the circumstances of support staff in schools and senior managers in the health service (and they are legion) there is at least some similarity here, in that a trade union which combined the best of what the NEU and UNISON had to offer could recruit, organise and improve the working lives of thousands of unorganised support staff in schools.

Although there would be numerous, and probably insurmountable, obstacles it is at least a theoretical possibility that trade unionists could be members, at one and the same time, of a sector within UNISON’s local government service group and of a “sector” (or such other language as might come to be chosen) within the NEU.

There is no legal or logical impediment to those members being able to participate in the democratic structures of both trade unions (just as individuals who now choose to be members of more than one trade union may do so) and, as to the level of subscriptions which would be payable and how these might be divided between UNISON and NEU, this is also not a question which is, in principle, insoluble.

I have, of course, stopped mentioning the GMB...

This is not the moment to try to make Brexit work for working people

This moment has been coming for a long time.

In the early twentieth century, British politics grew up from being a battle between “liberal” and “conservative” wings of the ruling class and became, by the mid-twentieth century about the conflict between representatives of the working class and of the ruling class.

After the working class had had to be armed to put back into its bottle the nazi djinn released by a bourgeoisie terrified by the October revolution, our Party formed our greatest ever Government which built a welfare state that underpinned a generation of progress for working people, leading to the pinnacle of support for our movement (in 1979).

However, the impossibility of reforming capitalism into a society which could sustainably be organised in the interests of the working class in the long term meant that the economic crisis created for the ruling class by the power of our side was resolved (in the absence of a socialist leadership of our class) – by Thatcherism – through our defeat and at our expense.

As we were defeated domestically so the (terribly flawed and often horrendous, yet real) global alternative to capitalism was destroyed by the failure of its bureaucrat leaders to foresee that they could never win a global arms race with rapacious global capitalism.

The “fall of the wall” began (or accelerated?) a process of decomposition of social democratic parties (in Europe at least) which has been perhaps most pronounced in Greece but has been universal. Much of the political left deluded ourselves from time to time that this was a positive development. Some still do.

Right wing social democracy sought salvation in the Blairite “Third Way” and an ultimately doomed marriage between social and economic liberalism, a dream that could only be sustained for a while – whilst the economy permitted the ruling class to afford it.

The economic crisis which made the “Third Way” unaffordable led to Conservative Government in the United Kingdom (as it has eclipsed social democracy through most of Europe) and the reaction to the revealed irrelevance of the flaccid careerists who had dominated the Blair/Brown Labour Party has led to the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn.

Your blogger welcomes Corbyn’s leadership as I welcomed his candidacy even before it had become fashionable to do so (and if I abstain from the national Momentum “organisation” created to give organisational form to a fan club it is only because I despise and despair of the careerists who flutter around it as flies surround a cow pat).

However, I understand and appreciate that just at the same time that a socialist has risen (for the first time) to lead the Labour Party, so the class struggle has been eclipsed as the organising principle of British politics because of defeats previously inflicted upon our movement. The tragedy of the 2015 General Election was not simply the first Tory majority in 23 years but that the decision to call a referendum on the EU would reorganise our national politics around an internal disagreement within the ruling class.

This has now happened. The key political question in the UK is not currently whether you are for the working class or the ruling class. It is whether you are for the xenophobes and isolationists or the “globalising” exploiters. (For the avoidance of doubt, your blogger takes the latter side as should all internationalists and socialists).

Obviously the task of socialists is to (re)build the working class movement (in part in the hope that we can develop our national polity in the direction of class politics once more). Any socialist outside the Labour Party is merely a political tourist now – and within the Labour Party we must of course support the socialist Leader of the Party.

However, we cannot possibly offer uncritical support to a leadership which is plainly unable to fathom the depths into which the national polity is sinking. To suggest that Labour can make “Brexit” work for working people is a lie that should not be told.

The sad but simple truth is that we cannot prevent the marginalisation of Labour whilst our politics is fundamentally defined by a dichotomy which is not class struggle (any more than the working class in the occupied six counties have been able to build a working class party under the shadow of a polity dominated by the national struggle).

This is most certainly not a failure of “Corbynism” (if such a thing exists) and the solution is not a triumph of the residual Blairite careerists who form the majority of the terminally unimpressive Parliamentary Labour Party (or of the elements of the trade union bureaucracy who support them).

However, neither the ragged remnants of right-wing social democracy flying the flag for “Progress” nor the rag, tag and bobtail upon whom the current Party leadership are forced to rely appear yet to have faced the reality of the change wrought upon our national polity and the consequences of that change.

This would be the point in such a blog post at which the reader might expect a (more or less) trite answer to the problems previously identified.

I am happy to disappoint.

I don’t know the answers to any of the problems posed above.

Neither do you.

We have some thinking to do.

The future role of UNISON employees in elections for General Secretary?

Continuing the theme of sharing with you, poor reader, the meanderings of my muddled mind arising from three days in the recent hearing before the Assistant Certification Officer (without touching upon the matters in the case itself) I have been asking myself about the proper relationship between a trade union and its employees.

This is a topic which has been the subject of debate in our movement for more than a century. I have frequently blogged on the topic of the trade union bureaucracy – although these days I fear this sort of discussion can end up in a Rule I investigation (!)

Clearly large trade unions need to employ staff to carry out various functions that it would be impractical for members to carry out for ourselves. It is to be hoped that many of those we employ will be committed to the principles of trade unionism and UNISON has inherited a tradition that employees of the union may remain, or become, members of the union which employs them.

In UNISON our Rule Book says that staff can be members of our trade union, at Rule C.2.9, but that they shall not be members “of any branch or of any Group or of any Region” (Rule C.2.9.2.2).

That is a rule which, to the casual observer, might be said to be honoured in the breach – since there is a “National Staff Branch” of UNISON which, even if it exists only for the convenience of administration of membership, does nevertheless exist in breach of UNISON Rules.

Rule C.2.9 precludes members who are employees from voting for membership of any lay body (such as the National Executive Council) whereas it explicitly provides (at Rule C.2.9.3) for a right to vote in a political fund ballot. Interestingly the rule is silent on whether members in accordance with Rule C.2.9 have the right to vote in elections for General Secretary, although the convention appears to be that they are given that right.

UNISON members reflecting upon what (little) we have achieved since 1993 need to be prepared to rethink our trade union from first principles and therefore, in the first place, we need to debate whether or not it is appropriate that staff employed by a democratic lay-led workers' organisation should themselves be members of that organisation.

On the assumption that the status quo expressed by Rule C.2.9 survives critical examination of its merits, we then need to think about whether or not the election of a General Secretary is, like the election of our National Executive Council, something from which those members who are UNISON employees should be excluded in future – or whether it is, like a political fund ballot, a part of our trade union democracy in which our employees should be included.

I incline towards the former point of view, but I certainly think that it is unacceptable that our Rule Book is silent on the question of whether or not staff, who are UNISON members, should have a vote in the election of their own boss.

Do we need a General Secretary?

Now that the hearing of evidence in front of the Assistant Certification Officer is over and the complainants and the Union are waiting for Wednesday 22 February when we shall reconvene to make our closing arguments in relation to the complaints concerning last year’s election for General Secretary it is time to begin thinking further about the future of our trade union.

I don’t intend to go into the evidence which was heard this week, or the arguments which will be put next year. The time for that will be once the Assistant Certification Officer has issued her decision.

However, there are questions which UNISON members need in any case to be thinking about, not least as elections to our National Executive Council come round and the deadline for submissions to next year’s National Delegate Conference looms.

One question which popped into my mind this week was whether we really need to have a General Secretary at all. Our Rule Book (Rule E.3) says that we must – but the law only says that if you have a general secretary they have to be elected by the membership (unless they hold office for less than thirteen months).

Branch-level elected positions in the trade union can be job-shared in accordance with Rule G.4.1.5 but our Rules say we must have one – and only one – General Secretary. This certainly entrenches hierarchy at the top of our organisation and I cannot see why it should be essential for a trade union governed by an elected lay Executive to have such a hierarchy of paid staff.

In principle there is no reason why we could not have a senior official responsible for (say) publicity, responsible to a lay communications committee, a senior official responsible for organising, responsible to a lay organising committee and so on. Unity and coordination could be provided by the elected lay National Executive Council (NEC), rather than by a secretariat of paid employees.

Certainly it is the existence of this secretariat which raises the question of how to design, improve and strengthen democratic checks and balances (which are at present seriously inadequate). In the early years of UNISON the Presidential Team (a phrase which does not in fact appear in the Rule Book) was developed by lay members of the National Executive in order to provide lay oversight and scrutiny of senior officials, but in my time on the NEC I have rarely noticed it performing this function.

Realistically I suppose it is this latter question (how to improve democratic safeguards and lay scrutiny) we need to think about, but in doing so, it is at least worth bearing in mind that we don’t necessarily have to have a General Secretary, and that if we are going to keep the role in future we should be certain that the position adds value and effectiveness to our organising.

It's not over til it's over...

Three days of hearing evidence before the Assistant Certification Officer in central London are over - but we are now looking for dates in February for the parties to make their closing submissions.

It will be some time after that before we know the outcome. The hearing has, however, brought various matters into the public domain.

I may not restrain the urge to comment further.

The strange death of municipal England - the role of the trade unions?

Your blogger, as someone who was a student of local government even before I was an employee, can do no better than recommend this free essay in the London Review of Books on “the Strange Death of Municipal England”.

Seriously, go and read that now. Even if you don’t come back here.

Before starting work in local government thirty years ago, I knew that in successive struggles in the twentieth century socialists in English local government had fought to defend a model of autonomous, redistributive and adequately resourced municipal government.

In Poplar in the 1920s and Clay Cross in the 1970s, Labour Councillors defied unjust laws rather than abandon the interests of their working class electorate – and in the 1980s Thatcher fought the “enemy within” in local government with quite as much determination as she fought the trade unions.

The abolition of the Greater London Council and the (less lamented) Metropolitan County Councils in 1986 have arguably been more significant in the long term than ratecapping, although it is that struggle, particularly in Liverpool and Lambeth, which is better remembered - both by those of us who celebrate that defiance and by those who have built entire lives running away from it.

At the time what was significant about the defeat of the poll tax was the end of Thatcher – but a generation on we can also see that the replacement Council Tax has helped to facilitate the continuing decline of the autonomy and legitimacy of local government.

As the last Peace and Nuclear Affairs Officer of the (nuclear free zone) London Borough of Lambeth your blogger is an authentic relic of the 1980s “loony left” – and as the last Branch Secretary of the Lambeth Branch of the National Association of Local Government Officers (NALGO) also a relic of a time when the organisations of the local government workforce defended local government.

Because alongside the tragedy of the death of municipal England is the role of the trade unions representing the local government workforce in providing little more than well informed commentary.

The largest collective bargaining unit in the economy is the local government workforce in England, Wales and Northern Ireland (since Scotland broke away). This enormous chunk of the trade unionised working class is organised largely in the three largest trade unions – who between themselves have half the membership of the TUC.

Yet neither our trade unions nor our trade union movement as a whole have prioritised the defence of local government over the past generation. This failure has reached its culmination in the period since 2010. During the Coalition Government, local Councils shed a fifth of their workforce, and the remaining four fifths lost a fifth of their real income.

So, perhaps if we want better to comprehend the “strange death of municipal England” we need also to consider the state of local government trade unionism.

Of which more later.

What will the Certification Officer hearing mean for the future of UNISON?

I have kept to the promise I made not to provide a running commentary on preparations for next week’s hearing in front of the (Assistant) Certification Officer of complaints made in connection with the election for UNISON General Secretary last year. Being in possession of some three thousand pages of documents and statements in a total (now) of ten large files, I shall of course have a fair bit more to say soon – and not all of it as a pantomime.

I have certainly learnt things from the preparation of this hearing which I would not have learnt had I relied upon being given straightforward answers to questions as a mere member of the ruling body of the trade union. Whatever the outcome of the hearing, we must and will ensure that UNISON members have the opportunity to become familiar with every detail of what went on in the course of the election, so that members can make our own judgement about  our own trade union.

What I see now is what I have known for years, with greater understanding as each of the thirteen years I have already served on the National Executive Council (NEC) of UNISON has passed – UNISON is a top-down, hierarchical and bureaucratic organisation directed by a small number of senior officials in conjunction with a few leading members of the Executive (though the role of the lay part of this partnership is strictly subaltern).

There are some on the left who might, historically, have said “so what?” to this observation and, whilst I am something of a troublesome ultra-democrat (with incipient anarcho-syndicalist tendencies), I could see the argument that we ought not to trouble ourselves too much if our trade union was less democratic than we might wish if it were delivering for our members.

However.

The history of the period since 2010 in particular is a history of UNISON “battening down the hatches” in order to try to ride out a storm which shows no sign of abating. In the service of this strategy we abandoned prematurely the fight to defend public service pensions in 2012 and subsequently failed time and again to smash the pay freeze which has driven down the living standards of those of our members whose jobs we have been able to defend.

Therefore, in order to protect the continued existence of our trade union as an institution, we have deliberately refrained from supporting assertively the interests of our members. Our members have responded to this strategy as one might expect, with declining participation and interest in our union, as it delivers less for them.

From within the organisation this truth cannot be acknowledged, as a culture in which criticism is seen as disloyalty has risen over the years. Each success is applauded. Each failure is ignored. Critics are condemned or humiliated.

The combination of undemocratic, “top down” bureaucratic control with ineffective performance in collective bargaining is toxic for the future of UNISON. Ultimately, the most energetic commitment to organising cannot keep such an organisation growing in such a cold climate.

Therefore we need change.

Members need the new UNISONAction Broad Left – and activists need to show discipline and humility to build the coalition which is emerging to change our trade union.

We need candidates in every seat in the forthcoming elections to our National Executive Council (NEC) who are committed to change – and we need one such candidate for each seat.

Now is not the time for timidity. Nor is it the time for ego.

I do not regret my decision to stand down from our NEC. I am allowed to have a life, and now that I have the opportunity of happiness I intend to take it.

I will miss the opportunity of being part of a larger left on the NEC, seriously trying to reverse the decline of UNISON – but I will miss it far less if the seat I currently occupy is filled by Sean Fox, Secretary of the Haringey branch and representative of London on the National Joint Council Committee, who has the experience and judgement to do the job we need to be done.

A UNISON Christmas Carol

A spectre is haunting a large building on the Euston Road.

Well, given the season, three spectres maybe. Each, in turn, is troubling the slumber of those who sleep there.

First, there is the ghost of elections past, a spectre who reminds the sleeping souls of where UNISON was before the 2010 General Election (when we had considerably more members than we have now – and had not failed to defend public service pensions nor failed to smash the pay freeze). Perhaps this spirit makes those who dream of it reflect upon who they once were and what they might have hoped to achieve?

Then there is the ghost of elections (recently) present – a jovial spirit inviting people to watch what people have been getting up to in the recent here and now – and remarking perhaps on other related current events. It may be that this ghost causes dreamers, on awakening to consider what they are doing now?

Finally however, there is the most frightening spectre, a silent and unspeaking shade – the ghost of elections yet to come.

Will the visits of these spirits be enough for the somnambulists of the Great White Elephant to change their ways?

Defending democracy outside the Supreme Court

The small crowd outside the Supreme Court this lunchtime included a small number of knuckle-dragging fascists, some adherents of the little-known school of thought which holds that Boris Johnson was sent to us by Christ (one of whom was dressed, inexplicably, as a leprechaun) and a range of other oddities (including a disgruntled former taxi driver from Crawley).

The only organised left-wing group was the Movement for Justice, who have correctly identified that "Brexit" is racist and should be opposed. For the first time in my life I held a placard from the MfJ - because they were the only people there defending the values of socialism and democracy.

Are the left content to allow the far right to hold the space outside the Supreme Court - or will other socialists be there later this week?