stop the witchhunt

Four union activists take their own union to tribunal:

Lousy news from the trade union front, people: the New Labour-loving horrors who run the public sector union Unison have stepped up their campaign to purge their Labour affiliated union of all grassroots socialists and leftwing activists. We on the left are not pleased.

The union has just banned four of its best grassroots activists - Glenn Kelly (Bromley Unison branch secretary), Suzanne Muna (Unison's Tenant Services Authority branch secretary), Onay Kasab (Greenwich Unison branch secretary) and Brian Debus (Hackney Unison chair) - from union office for three (Kelly and Kasab), four (Muna) and five (Debus) years. 

And their crime? - well, that depends on who you ask, and how highly that person thinks of Labour. I'm one of the many who believe that Kelly, Kasab, Muna and Debus are being strongarmed out of Unison because they are Socialist party members (and NOT racists - you'll read more on that offensive and ridiculous charge below). They are passionate critics of New Labour, passionately opposed to this government's privatising of public services, and - and this is doubtless the kicker, as far as Unison's New Labour lubbers are concerned - galvanising grassroots enthusiasm for Unison to break its formal funding ties with Labour.

The Socialist Party has long held that Unison ought to cut the Labour party loose - and that's a line that is making a lot of sense to more union members than, I imagine, Unison cares to see. The government's war in Iraq, various doomed love-ins with big business, privatising of public services, and failure to repeal this country's draconian anti trade union laws have stirred a poisonous - and possibly permanent - loathing for this Labour government in the average union member.

The likes of Kelly, Muna, Kasab and Debus (and SWP members Yunus Bakhsh and Tony Staunton, who Unison has already expelled) do not strike one as maniacal, ranting, far-left duffers - they're widely written and spoken of as the real grassroots deal, who were on the money all along (hundreds of people regularly turn up to rallies organised in their defence: messages of support for activists from the likes of Rory Bremner and Mark Thomas are quoted on the Stop the Witchhunt site).