If the answer is either Sharon Graham or Simon Dubbins for General Secretary, it’s a poor question. There is no real choice. Neither candidate seems to offer the vision for the future of the union I’d like to see. There is no open democratic left in Unite that organises across all the issues facing members (though I’d encourage members of Unite to sign up for the Unite Grassroots Climate caucus here. ) Unlike the last few elections in the union there is no rank and file candidate offering a different path to two long standing bureaucrats.
So was it a Freudian slip that I nearly threw my uncompleted ballot paper away in the recycling and had to sort through a pile of rubbish to recover it? I still think on balance I will vote for Simon Dubbins in this contest but I completely understand why many comrades are spoiling their ballot papers.
What I find more difficult to understand is why some activists I respect are calling for a critical vote for the incumbent Sharon Graham. Rs21 for example spend probably more of their article criticising Graham than saying very much about Dubbins at all. But like much of the left (SWP, Socialist Party at least) they make a point which I don’t think they substantiate of calling for a critical vote for Graham.
This is the core of their argument in part of the introduction to the piece:
While Dubbins talks left on Palestine and climate, his support for the Labour Party makes these positions almost meaningless. With majority support on Unite’s Executive Council, Graham now has no excuse for failing to deliver. Our priority must be to exploit the industrial space her approach opens up, while ensuring that union policy on Palestine and climate is upheld, irrespective of her position.
So what is ‘the industrial space’ that Graham’s approach supposedly opens up? The authors quote Unite’s own statistics about the number of strikes the union has engaged in under Graham’s leadership and the amount of money won in improved pay. It would be not only churlish but inappropriate to dismiss the victories that have been won for members in a difficult political and economic climate. But look at the statistics more closely. 1,801 disputes involving 280,000 members means an average of 155.5 workers in each of these – pretty small fry given the depth of the cost of living crisis.
Rs21 does make a partially accurate critique of the most significant dispute under Graham’s leadership – the Birmingham bin strike. They say:
The sustained support for the Birmingham bin workers has been crucial and much appreciated. Still, there has been no clear plan to win, for example, through a sustained effort to spread action to other parts of Birmingham City Council or the refuse departments of neighbouring councils. It is frustrating that union communications always centre Graham herself rather than the efforts of workers themselves. When activists are trying to convince workers that the union is a tool for their own collective organisation, rather than merely being a third-party service provider they buy a service from,
Their complaint about taking agency away from workers in dispute is absolutely pertinent but completely inadequate. It is not enough to say there was no clear plan to win – there was a total failure to bring out other unite members working for Birmingham or other local councils or to work with other council unions who could have been won to seeing that an attack on the conditions of refuse workers was not some isolated policy from the Labour council – with the explicit support of the Starmer government but the harbinger of things to come. The work of Strike Map, the mass pickets, the outreach to the agency workers brought in as scabs all very useful but not a substitute for spreading the strike.
And where was Graham herself or even the calls from the union urging members to support the mass pickets – I don’t think in such a make or break situation the unspoken threat of sequestration is a sufficient enough excuse for abstention in this crucial situation. And if what I hear is true, that Unite officers met with Reform candidates in the city prior to the local elections that’s even less excusable. It’s one thing to deal with the far right if they become the employer – having campaigned as hard as humanly possible to prevent this – but this gives the disastrous impression of not really seeing a major difference …
Graham has been and continues to be disastrous on political issues. For revolutionary socialists politics is not defined by what is debated or decided in Westminster (or the Dail, Stormont, Holyrood or the Senedd – all chambers where Unite has members).
On Palestine Rs21 quotes a number of her crimes – to which I would add the failure of her office to send out a single mailing urging members or branches to turn up on any pro-Palestine event including those many, many miles from arms factories. There is also her refusal to ask to speak – or send a substitute – on the platform of demonstrations against the genocide which for hundreds of thousands of people – including potential trade unionists – define the politics of their generation.
On climate, in the context that the lack of a maximum temperature at work and the growth of water guzzling data centres undermining members jobs and conditions, Graham’s disastrous approach is spelt out in this press release issued by the union in April 2025:
“The government’s position on oil and gas is putting jobs and national security at risk. Blocking oil and gas production in the North Sea, especially now is simply an act of monumental political self-harm. Domestic gas from Jackdaw and oil from Rosebank are essential for jobs and for energy security”.
It is true that more recent statements move from merely arguing against no new extraction of fossil fuels to “no ban without a plan.”
Here Rs21 are correct to argue that we need a worker-led just transition as an alternative to Graham’s empty rhetoric but one key way of moving in that direction is for the union to devote resources to developing precisely the sort of plan that could deliver this. It’s ironical – although as I will argue later not out of character – that Graham seems to think such plans are the job of politicians not workers themselves. The conference being held in November in Manchester to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the historic Lucas plan is a key opportunity not only to explore the lessons of the past but to urgently debate the best ways to develop worker-led plans in the context of the environmental emergency threatening us all. It is to be hoped that the struggles of the GKN workers in Italy will be a key part of those discussions.
Another key area that needs examining in this contest is the relationship between trade unions and Labour. Rs21 again: While Dubbins talks left on Palestine and climate, his support for the Labour Party makes these positions almost meaningless. Later they say
“Dubbins is a member of the Labour Party. His manifesto focuses on holding Labour to account, demanding investment and rebuilding public services rather than advocating a political break from the party. This creates a contradiction between his internationalist rhetoric and his continued support for a party complicit in the genocide in Gaza”.
I want to disentangle this.
Of course the complicity of Labour in the genocide in Palestine deserves total condemnation. For thousands upon thousands this has been the key reason for breaking with Labour. But Labour has been a pro-imperialist party since its foundation and its murderous legacy on Palestine goes back before the creation of the Israeli state. And at the same time there are many who remain within Labour. MPs, councilors, trade union delegates, ordinary members, fighting to change that legacy and at the same time doing everything they can to organize solidarity with the Palestinian people.
The reasons they do that are myriad and this piece doesn’t have scope to explore all of them in detail. Two – perhaps different sides of the same coin – deserve mentioning.
On the one hand the trade unions, especially the affiliated unions, have both a structural and a political input into the decision making process of Labour which they don’t currently have into any other political party. It’s true that Polanski has spoken about his long term ambition to see trade unions affiliating to the Green Party but despite raising this almost 11 months ago we are a long way from this, Nor is the balance sheet of trade unions who disaffiliated from Labour very positive, The FBU did this in 2004 primarily over the strike breaking actions and rhetoric of the Blair government but reaffilated in 2015 to support Corbyn’s leadership of the party, While the political context was clearly different, there was little to show for the eleven years of going it alone.
Fair enough it is very unlikely there will ever be another Corbyn-like figure as Labour leader, but on the other hand the alternatives are not attractive either. Your Party is almost certainly dead, if not at least in terminal decline. The Greens, even for many of their own members, have not yet passed the test on Palestine, and as explained above while it makes sense to explore the possibilities of affiliation that’s likely to be a long and winding road.
It also seems rather misplaced to criticize Dubbins for using his manifesto to attempt to hold Labour to account by demanding public services are rebuilt. In this Dubbins is not significantly different from leaders of unaffiliated trade unions such as the NEU’s Daniel Kebede rightly calling on Andy Burnham to end unfunded pay awards, as well as to make the investment that is needed to make SEND reforms a success. And look at what has been reported of Sharon Graham’s own speech to the Tolpuddle martyrs festival the week of Burnham’s coronation, its not substantively different from Dubbin’s approach.
And I don’t think it helps the fight against climate change or the struggle for Palestinian freedom to dismiss them as therefore useless. If the leadership of one of the biggest trade unions in Britain was to back those organising against expanding the extraction of deadly fossil fuels and/or the export of arms produced in Britain to the Israeli state used in the genocide that would give a huge boost to those struggle. I’m not saying that I trust Simon Dubbins to deliver on these things should he win – but for sure I think the political context would be much more favourable.
That’s why In the end, after a fair bit of deliberation, I’m off to post my ballot paper having voted for Dubbins