Integrity, Authority, Unity - and sacking other people...

For just one of my seven terms as an elected member of the UNISON National Executive Council I served alongside a young UNISON Branch Secretary from the North West Region, Angela Rayner.

She was a supporter of the UNISON leadership on most occasions, whereas I tended to be a critic (not to say an irritant). We sometimes therefore found ourselves on different sides in various votes but I never doubted her commitment to the trade union - and if, as it turned out, she harboured (or was encouraged to harbour) Parliamentary ambitions, she was hardly alone in this among the leadership’s supporters on the NEC.

I was never completely convinced by Angela Rayner as a Corbyn supporter (any more than I was by the UNISON Centre generally), but she deserves credit for standing up to serve in his Shadow Cabinet when so many resigned in 2016 and it was this loyalty to our Party (ahead of loyalty to the majority faction of the PLP) which gained her the experience which made her a credible candidate for Deputy Leader last year.

Unlike most senior Labour Parliamentarians these days, Angela Rayner came up through the ranks of our trade union movement and today’s over-hasty dismissal of her as Chair of the Party is a slap in the face not just to one working class woman but to the working class movement generally - and to UNISON in particular. If UNISON’s new General Secretary has nothing to say about this then she will have set a most unfortunate tone for the future.

To see someone who rose to the leadership promising “Integrity, Authority and Unity” move within twenty four hours from accepting full responsibility for the Party’s generally (but not universally) poor election results to sacking other people (starting with the elected Deputy whom he has no power to remove from that role) is a truly startling display of the absence of all three of the originally advertised qualities.

Where Labour performed well in Thursday’s elections (in Wales, Manchester, Sefton, Preston, Worthing etc.) it did so by rooting itself in communities and articulating a clear defence of those communities against the Tory Government - it is the absence of such a vision from the top of the Party that needs to be remedied and no amount of reshuffling ambitious nonentities in the Palace of Westminster can do that.

I can, at least, see how I ought to conduct myself in the aftermath of disappointing by-election results in Brighton. I should say that, as Chair of the Local Campaign Forum, I take full responsibility and then I should phone round other people suggesting that they resign their positions…