Tony Staunton and the Witch Hunt in UNISON

Apologies for lack of posts, I've not been up to blogging recently and I prob wont be blogging very often for a while. Thanks to Jon for blogging here and for chairing the Unison United left AGM for me.

Before I get into the post let me quickly say thanks to all those who voted in the UNISON NEC Elections, the ballot is now closed and we will have results in 3 weeks time (8th June)

I've blogged about Tony and the UNISON witchhunts+ before and all those being witchhunted in UNISON have my full support, they are being treated disgracefully by those currently in leadership roles in our union - it is telling that the busiest fringe meetings at our conferences over the last few years have been the anti witch hunt fringes, our members clearly do not want UNISON's priority to be attacking its own activists whilst blocking attempts for members to organise and ignoring some of the current problems of this government! (Lets hope that is reflected in the results of the UNISON NEC elections!)

Unsurprisingly the motion from UUL South west to the UUL AGM on Saturday supporting Tony Staunton was passed unanimously - at the same time UUL comrades in the south west were handing out the following leaflet outside the South West Regional Council - it is well worth a read!


MJ


"This time two years ago, Tony Staunton should have been standing for the South West General Seat for UNISON’s NEC. According to the recorded votes in the 2007 election, Tony stood a good chance of beating Steve Warwick, the incumbent whose NEC position secured his place as the national Chairperson of LabourLink, the Labour Party organisation inside the union. Instead, Tony was disqualified from standing because he had been suspended from office pending disciplinary action. At the time he was the long-standing Branch Secretary of City of Plymouth UNISON, elected member of the SW Local Government SGE and reserve on the National LGC, elected member of the Social Services national Group, a long-serving member of the SW Regional Committee and Chair of our Regional International Committee.

In 2008, the Certification Officer ruled that UNISON had acted unlawfully, yes, broken the trade union Laws, by preventing Tony from standing for the NEC. Nationally employed senior officers of UNISON quickly threw more money at a legal team to Appeal the decision. In April 2009, the Employment Appeal Tribunal in London threw-out UNISON’s Appeal, and formed a stronger judgement in favour of Tony (UKEAT/0376/08 - on http://www.employmentappeals.gov.uk/Judgments/judgments.htm )


Earlier, in January 2008, Tony had been expelled from UNISON, and you may think that vindicated UNISON’s position. After all, even if elected, he would not have been able to take his seat. But his was a fight to prove his innocence, throwing back charges of misappropriation and theft to which he was found not guilty. The rest of the charges, pumped-up to a ludicrous repetitive list that, in fact, relied on a few e-mails, phone calls and one word document all referring to the Socialist Workers Party, were seen to be enough to expel a leading national lay activist who began serving UNISON’s predecessor, Nalgo, in 1974 and was always openly a member of the SWP – a legal political party.

Now, the chickens have come home to roost. At Prime Ministerial level, leading Labour Party apparatchiks nationally have been found to have misused e-mails yet most stay untouched and in-place. In UNISON, according to a series of articles this year in Private Eye, UNISON has used staff-time, computers, resources and funding to support the campaign of Dave Anderson, duly elected as MP for Blaydon on Tyneside (Private Eye, P27, 20th March 2009). Two-wrongs do not make a right, but Tony continues to proclaim his innocence in a way those in the Labour Party are busy covering-up their transgressions.

Of course, the latest revelations of widespread petty corruption by MPs fiddling expenses and being “creative” with their claims render all the charges against Tony appear miniscule by comparison, and his punishment over-harsh. It may be that time has moved on and this is all water under the bridge. UNISON has lost its’ court battles, and backed-off.

Tony is now Chair of the Plymouth City Council UNITE Branch, and back as Secretary of Plymouth’s Trades Council, active as a solid trade unionist in the City. But don’t think it hasn’t taken a massive toll on his health and his family’s time and energy. Individual struggles against injustice always do.

This is even more the case with Yunus Bakhsh, the Newcastle Health Branch Secretary similarly witch-hunted and expelled from UNISON. At the EAT, UNISON decided to link Tony and Yunus together into one case, in the hope of muddying the water. It didn’t work. But the case of Yunus goes on – sacked from his job as a psychiatric nurse and expelled from UNISON on the evidence of a UNISON member, the wife of a regional UNISON official, who was allowed to have her evidence submitted as anonymous even at Appeal. Yet the contents of the UNISON case against Yunus, supposedly secret, were being reported even before Yunus saw the paperwork, on websites run by fascist white supremacists. Stormfront, the vile Nazi website, proclaimed they had “some real and substantiated dirt on this nasty piece of immigrant stock”. How strange then that the chief (anonymous) witness for the prosecution was found to have links on her Facebook SNS account to people connected with this site and to the fascist BNP local leaders. She was forced to resign from UNISON and her husband to not seek re-election.

Yunus faces the loss of his house and long-term unemployment. He protests his innocence despite serious depression and deteriorating health. The witch-hunt may have appeared as something on the fringes of the trade union, something about “those lefties” best left to those who know. But who should know, and what should we all know now about the history of these expulsions? What was the purpose, and who should be held accountable for at least £50,000 worth of expenditure by UNISON in pursuing these two activists? What was the real intent?

National UNISON leaders are placing rule changes before Conference 2009, seeking to get in place the sort of powers that the Certification Officer and the Law says are illegal and must not happen. Some at the top of the UNISON want to enshrine the fact that members who face allegations are deemed guilty until finally proved innocent. In essence, if members can be suspended ahead of a national election period, and that suspension would prohibit them from standing in the election, unscrupulous national figures could suspend anyone who posed a real threat to the existing and preferred elected leadership.

UNISON have tried to win this ability through the courts and have failed. Now they are trying to hoodwink conference into “tidying-up” a flawed Rule Book. Rubbish! Suspension leaves the member innocent until the full outcome of disciplinary and Appeal hearings. Until then, they must be able to stand for election and pursue their innocence. Otherwise, the trade union is nothing more than an autocratic dictatorship run by self-appointed employed henchmen and women. We have little time to fight for true transparency and bottom-up democracy in our trade union. Questions must be asked.

UNISON’s UNITED Left want Tony and Yunus reinstated back into their chosen trade union, and UNISON to regain its once proud record as the Movement’s most democratic trade union. Please help us. Tony can be contacted at Tony.Staunton@Plymouth-tuc.co.uk. "

Thanks to the South West United Left supporters for this!

Don't Mention the Peoples Charter!

With the owner of this blog currently laid up (get well soon MJ!) I thought I would pop by and offer some measured comment upon the Final Agenda for UNISON National Delegate Conference which has now hit the streets.

In view of the consequences of criticism of the Standing Orders Committee (SOC) in some cases I do want to make clear that nothing I say should be construed as an attack upon the SOC!

It is - as ever - I am sure just unfortunate coincidence that creates the appearance of some motions and amendments being ruled out of order for political reasons. This year the unfortunate coincidence has affected the topic of the Peoples Charter (supported of course by UNISON Scotland if not by the STUC).

A motion from Southwark branch was ruled out of order on the grounds that it was insufficiently clear (and not as I at first said in this post on the grounds that it breached the Rules on the Political Fund. (I was thinking of the Somerset motion which set out the details of the "People not Profit" Charter, and which was ruled out on those grounds). Tony Woodley and Paul Kenny have reportedly withdrawn their support for the Charter on the misconcieved grounds that it is a vehicle for disaffiliation from the Labour Party.

Amendments from the Islington and LFEPA branches which refer to supporting the Peoples Charter without rehearsing all of its contents have also been ruled out of order on the grounds that they are "not sufficiently clear".

I think that both the original motion and the amendments are quite clear. The Peoples Charter is now easy to find online and to read - and its contents are entirely consistent with UNISON Conference policy.

A cynic would think that it was imperative to prevent a Conference vote since its outcome would be to support the Charter...

This is precisely what was done in recent years to motions seeking support for the Public Services Not Private Profit Campaign, an impressive joint union mobilisation which organised (for example) a lobby of Parliament which was considerably better than that which the TUC did "officially".

This was also a topic on which the views of Conference could be predicted with some confidence - and which Conference was never therefore permitted to debate (I recollect being told that SOC were advised that the Campaign would have to be funded from our Political Fund - and therefore could not be discussed at Conference - on the basis that the main funders, PCS had paid for it from their Political Fund. This was at a time when PCS did not have a Political Fund!)

The SOC is an independent body but it is not immune from official influence, and from the view that UNISON doesn't really like joint campaigns it doesn't control, particularly if they are associated too closely with certain critics of the Government.

In the case of the Peoples Charter however, the Scottish Region has already taken a sensible and pragmatic line. I hope that the days of UNISON seeming to adopt a sectarian approach to genuine broad based labour movement campaigns are well and truly numbered.

We shall see.

Update on Wednesday evening.

I am indebted to a commentator in the comments box on this post for correcting an error I made above, I hope that I have made corrections whilst honestly acknowledging that error. The validity of the point I am making was not affected by that error.

What would prove that I was wrong would be if the leading members of the UNISON NEC were to propose, at our June meeting, that the NEC endorses the Peoples Charter. Scottish Regional members could make this suggestion in accordance with the policy of the Scottish Council...

Malcolm

Just a quick up date, there are a number of tributes up on Malcolms blog now so please take a look - there is also a lovely tribute in the
Sutton Guardian

The funeral is tomorrow so I wont be blogging for a few more days im afraid.