The Real Unite

Another day, another dollar. Or in this case just another act of open sabotage, as the UL campaign of desperate internal manoeuvrings continues…

This time the UL “and their allies” took a break from briefing the Sun, the Times (Ed: plus the Mail apparently…) and undermining the Birmingham bin strike, to dismiss a proposed policy conference motion on allegations of corruption under their leadership.

The UL voted on block to use a small majority on a Union sub-committee (Ed: that no one will have ever heard of…), to try and prevent any discussion of possible corruption at the Unite policy conference in July. Wording from the motion included:

“It is clear that issues regarding the Governance of our Union during that period, included a lack of oversight of both the General Secretary and Executive Council.
This conference is committed to ensuring that nothing like this is ever allowed to happen again.”

Most members will think, rightly, that it is an absolute joke that the faction in charge of the Union at the time of the alleged wrongdoing is now policing itself and trying to bury any criticism of its time in charge.

Let’s repeat. We are talking about tens of millions of pounds of members money here.

The motion went on to demand a new forum made up of Reps to help oversee decision making. But that was clearly way too open for the UL and their “allies”.

“Therefore, this conference agrees:
• That a temporary forum be established to provide maximum transparency to our decision making:
o To be made up of a broad range of lay Unite Representatives, financial decisions made by the General Secretary and Executive Council will be regularly reported and discussed.
o Members of this forum will be selected by lot from the ranks of Unite’s Workplace Representatives to help prevent factionalism and to preserve our representative democracy.“

Other motions to establish “forums” on other topics were waved through. Unsurprisingly they were sent in by the UL…

The game being played is not clever or subtle. On one hand they rule out motions that discuss alleged corruption under their watch, while on the other they brief the right wing press with fake stories about the Union’s finances and undermine strikes.

None of this is about the “union”, it is about a diseased faction gone bad and a few idiots playing games.

It’s time for them to go.