Solidarity, the right nationalist ‘trade union’, might not be nearly as much use to their members as a real union, but they are at least excelling in one area - splits and squabbles.

Over the past week, a very entertaining story has been emerging. It seems that Pat Harrington, General Secretary (and occasional commenter to this blog), has been suspended from his post by the President Clive Potter and Vice-Prez Tim Hawke, amidst allegations of financial irregularities. Apparently, the accounts the union needs to supply to the Certification Officer are delayed, after Potter believed the version of the accounts Harrington showed him was too unclear, and refused to sign them without seeing the full accounts. Hawke claims that an un-named Merseyside BNP member has been appointed Acting GS, until a new GS is found, and that the BNP are planning a hostile takeover of the union.

Harrington unsurprisingly has a different take on this, and as he still has the keys to the website, he’s letting everyone know about it by calling for an EGM in July to appoint a new (and larger) executive (Hawke is amusingly reduced to getting his message out via the Lancaster Unite Against Fascism blog). Harrington says that he and the BNP leadership believe that the troubles, and a leadership challenge, are being orchestrated by well organised far-left undercover saboteurs within the union. The BNP has in the meantime stopped recommending members to join the union.

What is going on? Both these explanations sound a little fishy. If there’s been any embezzlement going on, it’s rather cheap stuff, given the union has at most 100 subs paying members and can’t have any cash to speak of. Otherwise, Sherlock Holmes’ maxim could have us believing that any far-left groups are well organised enough to have done this.

And what does this bode for Harrington’s claims that Solidarity are BNP independent? If the BNP are now considering a takeover, maybe they were indeed more separated than most people thought (though won’t be very soon if the EGM goes ahead). Though how to square this with his claim on the union’s site that the accounts were audited by Kenny Smith (head of BNP admin) yet not shown to Hawke and Potter, and Harrington’s objection that the new AGS is not a BNP member of good standing?

Hat tip: Lancaster UAF
Bonus entertainment: Clive Potter is in the news again - from Unity

There’s a petition doing the cyber-rounds at the moment, encouraging people to press for a ballot on reversing the NUJ conference (ADM) decision on boycotting Israel. I’ve been thinking about this for some time, as I oppose the boycott, and was pretty dismayed when it went through. The case against the boycott, and the similar boycotts by UCU and Unison has been passionately argued by people from all over the political spectrum from Rory Cellan-Jones to Eric Lee to the AWL.

I don’t plan to sign it though. Not because of my support for the boycott, but because of my deeply unfashionable opposition to a major part of what the petition is calling for - going back on decisions made through the union’s democratic process. I’d sign a petition that said “not in my name”, to help make it clear the majority of union members were opposed to the boycott, but not to appeal against a done decision.

This opens up wider questions on exactly what union democracy is. For better or for worse (generally better), we have structures which govern how we work (the NUJ is one of those unions which are *very* keen on structures, with rules about what can be discussed in what years and so on). A common complaint is that we have a situation where a small number of people are very engaged in the workings of the union, and a good section of those people are from a far left political viewpoint not so widely represented amongst the union’s diverse membership.

I saw David Aaronovitch give an explanation of why he wouldn’t engage with the NUJ at a practical level, despite his theoretical belief in the importance of democratic trade unionism. To paraphrase him, you go to branch, and find four trots and a loony, who outvote you. So you have to persuade your friends to go along and outvote them, except none of your friends will thank you for this evening’s entertainment, and the trots are in any case happy to stay much later into the night than you to outvote you. Not only that, but once you’ve finally had your victory, you then need to do it all over again next time, as the trots (and presumably the loony) are always guaranteed to be there.

This is maybe less sinister than it sounds I think. It’s partly entryism, but probably more likely just because activists will be activists, and the kind of people who will volunteer for union work are also the kind of people who volunteer for political or community work too. It’s easy to knock our trotty cousins for using the union to reflect their concerns, but if they’re journalists too they have as much a right to membership as I do. And if I can’t be arsed to go to branch and they can, then I don’t have so much grounds for being miffed about it, when they’re the ones who end up shouldering much of the thankless, mundane and non-political work that the union needs doing on behalf of all our members.

We should look at what is turning people off engaging with branches. Is it the length of meetings (yup), the locations (yup), the format (yup), the publicity (yup), or the medium (yup)? Can we do more for people who can’t get along to the meetings? Can we do more online, or spread decision making over time? We complain about the political nature of the meetings, but that’s just a function of the natural interests of the people who turn up - Refresh the people and you’ll refresh the agenda. Problem is it’s stuck in a vicious circle at the moment, where new people are alienated and leave, and so there’s no-one there to support the next new people. None of this is unique to the NUJ - or even to unions - it’s a dangerous trait in the nature of democratic voluntary organisations.

Anyway, on the narrower boycott issue, maybe a good focus for the campaign could be working within NUJ structures instead. Co-ordinate people who are concerned at the boycott to go en-masse to their branches, opposing motions in hand, when it’s time to debate ADM, and then again when the motions are revised and submitted, and delegates to ADM elected. It should only take a dozen people to swing the vote in most branches and send a different crowd off to the seaside next year - in total 4 hours out of a year for anyone who is concerned. If it’s a single issue campaign, it’ll be considerably easier than Aaronovitch’s trots and loony puzzle.

The downside to this approach obviously is that it’ll take another 9 long months, and during that time, UK journalists are losing credibility with the international profession and with the people they want to talk to - of obviously especial concern to colleagues working in the Middle East. I don’t see a way around this though. If we ballot on a motion, do we also take petitions on any motion the SWP disagreed with? Do we put in a formal right of appeal to ADM decisions? This could leave us tied up in endless yapping, and uncertain on what we were agreeing to do at any point.

I agree to a large degree with our VeeP on this one. Plus I think it boils down though to being ‘tough luck’. We (the majority of members) screwed up and let this happen - through our own omissions. It happened by the rules, so we should change it by the rules. I’m making it a resolution to go at least to the next ADM motion branch meeting - see you there!

However, I fully acknowledge that my own position on this isn’t really any more coherent than the ballot petition position. I don’t want to change the rule that’s been decided, but I have no intention of obeying it, so am making myself a rebel against the union. If everyone just disobeyed all the rules, then there wouldn’t be much point in having them - so what am I playing at?

Well, I’m prepared to take centralised democracy some way. For example, I bought a Vauxhall car last month, rather than a Citroen, largely because of the Unite Peugeot/Citroen boycott - even though I don’t agree with the tactic of that boycott myself. But this one is a step too far. Maybe there’s something in that though, that the rules of the union will only work in practice as far as the membership will allow, and the union will gradually learn from its own mistakes in this way.

I’d (honestly) like to hear more from colleagues where I’m going wrong on this!

Unexpected tribute to Tony on the RMT’s website. Their latest poll: “Will you be glad to see the back of Tony Blair?” resulted more than two to one against, with 71% of people saying they’ll miss him.

Are Bob and his members mellowing now that he’s named the date, or is it maybe just that in time honoured RMT fashion they’d rather Blair saw their backs, than they his?

Just back from Singapore and Hong Kong. Much that’s strange to report (I’d never been to Asia before), but on a union-geek tip, I found this quite amusing: two official attempts to promote good workplace health & safety.

Singapore’s government might politely be described as ‘paternalistic’, so they don’t have the hang-ups about mounting an all-out irony-free H&S campaign that we might. “Shine at Work” is run by the unions, government and NGOs, and has impressive advertising all over the place - I saw a huge conversion of a bus shelter with posters and giant cutouts.

Best of all though is the official pop song of the Shine campaign, which you can download from the site. All together now: “When you do your job, Remember safety first. Always look, think, then you do. Working safely with a smile, For colleagues and your loved ones.”

Also Hong Kong, where the Science Museum has a whole gallery devoted to H&S at work - putting it on a par with dinosaurs or space travel. You walk through a scaffold tunnel, where objects drop scarily towards your head, find out how to lift heavy objects and work at height safely, and watch a frankly odd musical animatronic show, where Prof Safe introduces his friends the hazardous substances, and how to store them safely.

Someone needs to get the museum webmaster on-message though: “You can experience the thrill of potential hits by falling objects at construction sites”.

I reckon most of our safety reps would like this in the UK - there’s certainly enough of them to get our own H&S pop tune into the download charts 

Off to debate union blogging (amongst plenty of other stuff) with UNI’s Communicators’ Forum in their Asia Pacific region next week, so I’m sort of practicing what I preach and have made them a nice group live-blog for everyone who will be attending the conference (www.unicommunicators.org).

If you’re interested in what UNI-affiliated unions from other countries are up to online, then have a look from Wednesday-Friday next week, as I’ll be attempting to keep any interesting bits* of the dialogue reflected on the site for the folks back home.

* - Interesting for union geeks, that is. I admit this is stretching the usual definition of ‘interesting’ a little

Bonus joke:
My wife went to a very bad concert in South East Asia.
Singapore?
Terrible. And the rest of the band was even worse.