UCU Commons is an organised group and stands a set of candidates in NEC and other union elections. Everyone who stands for election on our slate shares our values. Accordingly, we strongly endorse our candidates as first preferences when voting, and we only endorse other candidates in seats where no one on our slate is standing, or where multiple seats are up for election and we are standing fewer candidates than there are seats.
We do not endorse any NEC candidate aligned with any other grouping in union politics, whether or not that grouping is willing to call itself a ‘faction’ or not. There are four such groupings in existence, including us. They are: UCU Left, UCU Commons, the Campaign for UCU Democracy (UCUD), and a group which refers to itself as the “Rank and File Revolution”, but which does not declare itself publicly, instead preferring to trade on the benefits of positioning themselves as independents.
Below you can find our endorsements, and underneath those, our reasons. These endorsements are based in part on a set of questions we recently put to candidates. We pay particular attention in our reasoning to the positions of General Secretary and Vice President, both of which are elected roles of enormous importance in UCU.
General Secretary
We endorse Jo Grady for re-election to the post of UCU General Secretary.
Vice-President
We endorse David Hunter for election to the post of UCU Vice-President.
NEC seats
We endorse Mark Taylor-Batty for the North East HE seat. In London and the East HE seat we recommend giving your first preference vote to Robin Clarke, but we also endorse both Alison Hawkings and Nico Rosetti.
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Jo Grady for UCU General Secretary
We believe that on many fronts, Jo Grady has proven herself an effective union leader and that she has ably performed the core duties of a union General Secretary in a very challenging environment. In campaigning for re-election Grady’s positions and her manifesto resonate with many of our priorities and values in UCU Commons, including her inclusive vision for democratic participation in the union, her support for fundamental reforms to the Higher Education funding system including student distribution, realistic proposals to build up union density, and a clear-eyed view of the challenges ahead of us. Grady’s answers to our questions were also considered, honest, and serious, and she genuinely reflected on her time in office. She has worked hard all through the ballots and campaigns of recent years and has been involved in significant steps forward for union members, in HE, FE, and prison education. Grady is unafraid to say when she thinks she could have done something to a better standard or in retrospect made a better decision, which is a very important characteristic in any leader. She has been unapologetically out in front defending the rights and workplace dignity of LGBTQIA+ people both inside UCU and in the post-16 education sector. She is an excellent communicator and has a demonstrated ability to bring union priorities and issues to wider public attention.
Vicky Blake
Vicky Blake also responded to our questions seriously and at length, giving us genuine insights into her priorities and positions. She now appears to support some mechanism for distributing students across the sector, and reforming it away from the current free-for-all ‘market’ in students, which we welcome. Our endorsement deliberations turned on two key differences between her candidacy and Grady’s. First, we in Commons do not share Blake’s narrow vision of what constitutes “union democracy”, and we do not think additional branch delegate meetings and more special sector conferences, nor an uncritical adoption of every contradictory motion carried at Congress, is a healthy or appropriate approach to democratic deliberation and participation in our union. BDMs and special conferences are inherently exclusionary, as they privilege the views of a committed core of activists who are also often currently in positions of authority in UCU branches. When people collectively pretend that these mechanisms reflect the sentiments of all members, they do all members a disservice. BDMs and special sector conferences produce baffling and often contradictory results sometimes wildly out of step with the known preferences of the wider membership, which can, famously, alienate huge numbers of members. They also allow extensive forum shopping. An example of the damage these bodies can do occurred when Congress 2023 passed the infamous motion on Ukraine, which to be fair, Blake voted against and spoke against, although she then voted along with “Rank and File Revolution” NEC members to appoint a committee chair who did vote for the Ukraine motion. We are also not reassured by the fact that Blake appears to have secured tacit endorsement from the UCU Left faction and that her candidacy was first announced in that grouping’s newsletter. We also do not support, and we will call out, any narrative of ‘betrayal’ of members by ‘the leadership’, whether full-time officials or decision-makers on NEC, no matter how softly peddled that narrative is. In Commons we see such narratives as corrosive to the very fundamentals of a union.
Ewan McGaughey
Members of UCU Commons financially supported Ewan McGaughey’s failed court case against USS directors. Like many others in the union, members of Commons welcome the use of legal action in our campaigns and disputes and understand this as an important arena in which we need to continually assert and defend our rights as workers, and where judgements can profoundly alter our working conditions for better or worse. Legal cases certainly do not need to succeed to be important, and the basic premise of this case did seem at first impression to be important. However, not only did McGaughey attempt to force the national union to financially support this court case including at Congress, where the motions demanding funds had to come with a warning from the Chair that they were non-binding, all while complaining in public about the decision not to do so. McGaughey did all this while surely knowing about the enormous legal and financial risks that a body like UCU would have taken on if it had filed in support or significantly financed the case, particularly while the union was engaged in serious negotiations about the restoration of full benefits, which, by the way, succeeded. This is inherently irresponsible and fundamentally dishonest behaviour, as were McGaughey’s repeated fundraising emails, direct to branches and over the explicit objections of the national union, for yet more money to appeal an unfavourable verdict. How much money from local member’s subscriptions, collected to fight redundancies and support members taking action, ended up instead being paid into this case and these appeals? The contention that USS trustees changed course because of the mere timing of appeals led by McGaughey is comically absurd. Unfortunately, the USS Case is not McGaughey’s only campaign plank, and readers of his answers to our questions must be forgiven their bafflement over his advocacy of ‘never calling a ballot that we do not win’, which doesn’t make logical sense and is not really something a General Secretary can promise, as well as his contention that ‘better IT systems’ will enact a participatory revolution which will transform UCU’s democratic structures. We advocate leaving the ranked voting box beside “Ewan McGaughey” blank.
Saira Weiner
Saira Weiner did not answer our questions and instead pointed readers to her campaign website. We think this decision speaks volumes. We also object to quite a wide range of Weiner’s proposals, to countless votes she has taken at Congress and elsewhere, including on the Ukraine motion at the 2023 Congress, and indeed we object to her decades-long membership in the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), a Trotskyist party-turned-pyramid-scheme devoted to endless entryism and to the co-opting of important social issues; a party which sees our union as a mere vehicle to be used to unproductively radicalize education workers in pursuit of revolution, no matter the cost to those people’s everyday working conditions in the meantime. Said revolution will of course be led by SWP members. In public candidate emails to all members, Weiner has also promised to ignore the current trade union laws, to attempt to bring the union out on strike for reasons unrelated to pay and conditions, and she appears to have no plan to improve conditions in Further or Adult Education. Weiner has written that being a union member under her leadership would never be ‘business as usual’, which sounds pointlessly exhausting. We say an emphatic ‘no thank you’ to these positions as union policies and we hope that members voting in these elections say the same. Weiner’s voting history and proposals should disqualify her from any consideration for the role of General Secretary, or indeed any national role in UCU for that matter. We advocate leaving a blank next to her name on the ballot.
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David Hunter for Vice President
David Hunter’s answers to our questions presented to us a clear-eyed and practical candidate in tune with the cardinal issues at stake in FE, as well as a good working knowledge of campaigns and the state of play in HE. Some of our members have experience working with Hunter on the Anti-Casualisation Committee, where he has impressed, and his vision of union democracy and member participation and voice aligns well with ours. Commoners got the sense that Hunter made no promises he couldn’t keep, and that his experiences with day-to-day member engagement will prove invaluable in the Vice President role. Readers who wish to learn more about David, his election campaign, and his vision for FE can check out his website.
Peter Evans
Peter Evans did not answer our questions, so we advocate leaving a blank next to his name on the ballot.
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The NEC
Each of the candidates below took time to answer our questions and to expand on their priorities and positions if elected to our union’s governing committee. In each case their values broadly align with ours, and either we are not standing a candidate against them, or additional seats in their region will be filled in this election. We encourage readers to go check out their answers for a fuller sense of each as candidates, and we are happy to endorse the following three people for election to the NEC. We advocate putting a ‘1’ next to Commons candidate Robin Clarke in London, and then giving high preference Alison Hawkings and Nico Rosetti. We advocate a high voting preference for Mark Taylor-Batty in NEC elections in the North East seat: as a very able USS negotiator, Mark has proven himself exactly the kind of member we all should want on the NEC, and we hope he is elected.
Mark Taylor-Batty for NEC (North East)
Alison Hawkings for NEC (London)
Nico Rosetti for NEC (London)
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