By George Binette

The outcome of the election for UNISON General Secretary provided the Labour Party leadership with an unwelcome Christmas surprise. By a three-to-two margin, members of Britain’s largest union elected the left’s candidate, Andrea Egan, over incumbent General Secretary, Christina McAnea.

Egan’s clear-cut victory with 59.82% in a two-candidate contest marked the first ever win for someone who had emerged from outside the union’s full-time apparatus as well as the first time that supporters of the Labour left, Socialist Party and Socialist Workers Party had all rallied behind the same candidate.

Admittedly, turnout in the election was disheartening at just 7% of some 1.3 million members, though the figure was not vastly different from the previous elections of 2015 and 2020 when just under 10% of eligible members participated with four candidates running in each. And the extent of membership disengagement is not unique to UNISON: the 2023 election for the NEU’s General Secretary saw a turnout of just 9%, while last summer’s contest in the other main teaching union, the NASUWT, saw fewer than one in every 20 members vote.

Who was the winner (and loser)?

UNISON’s General Secretary elect, Andrea Egan, will assume office from Thursday 22nd January. Having worked in the social care sector, she eventually qualified as a social worker, becoming an active trade unionist more than 30 years ago. In recent years she has served as the secretary of the union’s Bolton Metro branch with around 5,000 members. She is currently a member of the union’s National Executive and was UNISON’s President between June 2022 and ’23.

Egan’s platform included an explicit commitment to remain on her salary as a social worker, so returning to the union’s industrial action and welfare funds a very substantial chunk of the current General Secretary’s £181,000 remuneration package. The Egan manifesto strongly hinted at the need for much wider strike action by UNISON members, stating bluntly, “We must be an organisation of collective struggle – not an insurance provider.”

Her 12-page “Time to win!” manifesto also included a pledge to “End subservience to Labour” that would entail a review of the union’s relationship with the Party. While promising a significant break with UNISON’s allegiance to the Starmer leadership on most crucial votes at Labour conference and its NEC, it almost certainly does not herald disaffiliation in the immediate future. Egan’s campaign emphasised its goal of a “member-led union,” accusing previous leaderships of being “slow and resistant to implementing the democratic decision of our members,” including policies agreed by UNISON conferences. The commitments to devolve power away from the union’s London HQ, to introduce greater transparency around full-time officials’ salaries and rewrite UNISON’s internal disciplinary procedures will undoubtedly have raised hackles among sections of the union’s bureaucratic apparatus.

While Egan retained the support of the overwhelming majority of those who had backed either Paul Holmes or Hugo Pierre in 2020, incumbent Christina McAnea saw her vote tally plummet by nearly 25,000 to fewer than 40,000. First elected in autumn 2020 as something of a ‘continuity Dave Prentis’ candidate, the 67-year-old Glasgow native had maintained a relatively low public profile for most of her term after several years as an appointed Deputy General Secretary. Despite UNISON’s long-standing support for Palestinian liberation, she featured at only one of the 30 national demonstrations staged since 7th October 2023. Though she moved a successful emergency resolution on the Gaza genocide at Labour’s late September conference, this was one of the few occasions where she clearly distanced herself from the Starmer leadership.

McAnea suddenly appeared on the BBC’s Sunday morning flagship programme with Laura Kuenssberg and just days later after the ballot had opened, she featured on Radio 4’s Any Questions. Criticisms of Labour under Starmer, while hardly ferocious, became slightly more strident. At the same time, McAnea’s campaign made great play of her role in pushing Labour’s centrepiece employment rights legislation, which has finally surmounted all Parliamentary hurdles in a diluted state, with precious little enhancement of collective union, as opposed to individual employee, rights.

None of this seemed to do her re-election bid any good. An endorsement from the Communist Party of Britain in the pages of the Morning Star also appears to have mattered little. Despite her supporters overturning the previous “Time for Real Change” majority in the spring’s National Executive elections and nominations from all but one of the union’s 12 regional committees, the distribution of branch nominations suggested the potential for an upset. With 206 confirmed nominations from branches, Egan had easily surpassed the previous record of any left candidate, while McAnea’s 270 reflected a notable fall from 2020. In all likelihood, the combined total membership of Egan’s 206 branches trumped that for McAnea’s 270.

Though the McAnea campaign had control over the union’s communications machine, the Egan camp had a superior social media presence and ground game with indications of much greater leafleting in local workplaces, regardless of which candidate might have won the branch nomination.

Fallout from the Result

According to a Huffington Post article, an anonymous but senior source at Labour’s HQ declared the outcome an “absolute fucking disaster – a massive loss for Keir.” Starmer himself offered perfunctory congratulations to Egan, while heaping praise on McAnea. On the other hand, former deputy leader, Tom Watson, urged Egan to apply for readmission to the Labour Party, which had expelled her in 2022 for sharing Facebook posts from the previously proscribed Socialist Appeal (now nucleus of the self-styled Revolutionary Communist Party).

There will undoubtedly be considerable debate among Egan’s own backers about the future relationship with Labour, but any decision to disaffiliate or even alter the Labour Link (Affiliated Political Fund) in any significant fashion will require a rule change and so a two-thirds majority at a National Delegate Conference. Those who devised the union’s rules at the time of the merger that created UNISON in 1993 took some care to insulate the Labour Link from left-wing pressure.

Some activists have expressed their fear of full-time officials leaving a “scorched earth” at UNISON HQ in the weeks prior to 22nd January. There is already controversy swirling around the appointment by the outgoing leadership of another Deputy General Secretary on a salary of £110,000. In short, Egan and her supporters will face significant obstacles in achieving real change, not least the scale of disengagement from the union.

Even so, her election signals the possibility of much greater resistance to pay erosion, job cuts and privatisation of public services through industrial action, and an end to Britain’s largest union lending all but unconditional support to the current government and the Labour Party more generally. Her convincing victory also offers an object lesson about the potential of left unity in action.

George Binette is a former Camden UNISON branch secretary, vice-chair of Camden Trades Council and former Trade Union Liaison Officer of Hackney North & Stoke Newington CLP.