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!