Irish union legend who supported rival in general secretary election tells tribunal he was sidelined on return from cancer battle and never had a positive day at work since he returned – and that he was told that union’s general secretary ‘recognises loyalty’ from those who supported her in election

Irish union legend Brendan Ogle, his wife Mandy la Combre (in beret) and supporters leaving the Workplace Relations Committee today

Today saw an explosive – and often fiery – day in Irish union legend Brendan Ogle’s case against Unite at the Workplace Relations Commission (WRC) in Dublin.

Ogle, who supported Graham’s rival Howard Beckett for general secretary, and is claiming that the union discriminated against him by sidelining him from his role as senior officer after his return from a battle against life-threatening neck cancer, told the WRC adjudicator that he was ‘reeling’ when he returned and found that his job – which he had been promised would be held for him to return to if he beat the disease – had disappeared and that Unite was trying to move him into a makeweight job that required only three days work a month.

And in the day’s most explosive testimony, he told the court that he had been called to a meeting with Tom Fitzgerald, another senior Irish Unite figure, only to be told that there was no place for him in the union’s future and that:

he’d been told by Sharon Graham to draw up a strategic plan for the Republic of Ireland and I was not to be in it.

Ogle added that the union’s then-assistant general secretary Gail Cartmail had told him that Graham is:

very loyal to [Irish] regional officers who had supported her but many hadn’t… Sharon operates on the basis of loyalty.

This comment raised the obvious question of what Ms Graham does with those who did not support her and how this bears on the treatment Ogle said he was subjected to by the union management.

Unite’s barrister Mark Harty – whose wife Karyn is part of the team from Dentons, one of the world’s most expensive law firms, hired by Graham to represent Unite in this tribunal and in Ogle’s defamation lawsuit against her, Unite and her ally Tony Woodhouse – insisted that Fitzgerald, who still works for the union, would testify he had not said what Ogle reported. However, the authenticity of Ogle’s submission of a photo of a whiteboard layout said to have been sketched by Fitzgerald to show how the union would organise after his departure does not appear to be contested by Unite.

Ogle spoke harrowingly of his fight against cancer and its effects on him and went on to say that after his return – expecting to come back to a job held open for him on the promise of Graham’s predecessor Len McCluskey – that he had not had a single positive day at work. He also described how he applied for a regional secretary job as a means of resolving the issue, only to find on his arrival for interview in London that the interview panel was being chaired by Woodhouse, one of the figures who he says defamed him during a talk at Unite’s biennial Irish conference.

Barrister Harty’s aggressive approach and frequent interruptions of Ogle’s attempts to answer led to numerous confrontations with Ogle’s legal team and a fiery sidebar meeting in a separate room marked by shouting and a walk-out by Ogle’s lawyer saying she would not be talked to in that way. Harty had tried to question Ogle about claims that do not form part of the current case and, when challenged about relevance, had insisted that these questions were ‘central’ to Unite’s case. The dispute led to the sidebar meeting – and on the return of the lawyers and adjudicator, he told Ogle,

Mr Ogle, we’re just going to move on

before asking questions on another topic.

Harty also at one point – appearing to think this was some kind of trump card – demanded to know why Ogle had not told his wife Mandy la Combre to remove social media posts criticising Unite’s treatment of him. The exchange prompted one observer later to observe,

He was basically asking him, ‘Why didn’t you control your wife?’

Harty also appeared to imply that Unite was doing Ogle a favour by moving him to a less senior role in Dundalk after an occupational health report said Ogle was fit to return to his ‘senior officer’ role, because Ogle’s doctor had warned stress might be bad for his health. Ogle responded that the occupational health report was specific to him working in Dublin. Ogle lives in Dublin, but travelling to work in Dundalk involves a daily 100-mile round-trip.

Ogle also told the court that Unite Ireland’s lawyer had told him that the Dundalk role of ‘education and legal’ involved only a day or two’s work – and added that the education part of the role needed only a day’s work because union education in Ireland is not funded by employers in the way it is in the UK, leaving him effectively sent fifty miles away for just three days’ work a month. Unite’s barrister tried to have this evidence ruled out as hearsay.

Ogle told the tribunal that he had consistently refused to sign any agreement sidelining him to Dundalk, but that the union ‘had acted as if I had signed it’.

The day also featured a heated argument about whether Graham will be subpoena’d to testify in the case, with Ogle’s lawyers insisting that she must be legally required to attend if Unite’s legal team does not call her as a witness. Harty insisted furiously and bizarrely that she is not relevant to the case and may not be ‘amenable’ to subpoena, as if such a legal summons is a matter of whether one feels like being summoned.

Sharon Graham has been heavily criticised among union members and activists in the union – and by more than one Irish politician – for Unite’s treatment of Ogle, one of and perhaps the highest-profile and effective union figures in Ireland. The situation caused such outrage that union members picketed Graham’s long-delayed visit to Dublin, Unite’s Community section condemned it as ‘disgusting’ and a whole sector branch threatened to disaffiliate.

Ogle’s testimony and cross-examination continue tomorrow.

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An empty bucket, a Zappos shoebox, potting soil, a collapsed dog crate, a dog bed, a broken lamp wrapped in duct tape, some synthetic firewood—the flotsam and jetsam of the half-forgotten years. These leftovers from past lives accumulate in suburban garages as the people who once wanted them get older and older. Useless and unnoticed, they yet cling on doggedly until time does its work, their owners depart for good, and new people move in and take them to the dump.

But this particular jumble of detritus has been rescued from oblivion and given a new home in the eternal archives of US history. For it included another item: a damaged box containing classified documents relating to America’s failed war in Afghanistan. That box, like Pandora’s, contained a whole world of trouble. From it has emerged the reality that the Democrats have been trying to evade—the vulnerability created by Joe Biden’s senescence.  

In the report of the special counsel Robert Hur into Biden’s retention of official documents at his homes, there is a photograph taken in the garage of his residence in Wilmington, Delaware, by an FBI agent in December 2022. It shows a familiar chaos of discarded objects: the console of a treadmill, red drain rods and a blue ladder, dried white flowers drooping disconsolately from a basket—kept, presumably, because they once meant something. Among them is the open brown cardboard box, its left side tattered and dented, from which peep the blue and white tops of documents Biden used when he was vice-president and then forgot to return after he left office.

US Department of Justice

A photograph of Joe Biden’s Delaware garage reproduced in the special counsel’s report, December 21, 2022

Seen differently, it might all be a conceptual art installation, a mordant commentary on the way America’s longest war has already been consigned to the national garage as just another dust-gathering discard. Instead, it dramatizes a much more literal question of memory and forgetting. Hur used the opportunity of his report to characterize Biden as an “elderly man with a poor memory” and “diminished faculties.” In his disastrous press conference of January 8, responding to Hur’s report, Biden in turn made a verbal slip that seemed to contradict his insistence that “my memory is fine,” describing the Egyptian president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi as “the president of Mexico, el-Sisi.”

The irony here is that Hur uses the location of the box of Afghanistan-related papers in the garage in Wilmington as evidence of Biden’s likely innocence of any crime:

A reasonable juror could conclude that this is not where a person intentionally stores what he supposedly considers to be important classified documents, critical to his legacy. Rather, it looks more like a place a person stores classified documents he has forgotten about or is unaware of.

Hur, in the body of his report, is actually quite good on the subject of forgetfulness. He recognizes that Biden, after he left office as vice-president, had such long experience of reading official documents that they might not be especially memorable to him: “Mr. Biden, after all, had seen classified documents nearly every day for the previous eight years.” In relation to the contentious documents that Biden retained, including a memo he wrote to then-president Barack Obama opposing a “surge” of US troops in Afghanistan, Hur suggests that some members of a putative jury might “conclude that if Mr. Biden found the classified Afghanistan documents in the Virginia home, he forgot about them rather than willfully retaining them.” In other words, Biden’s forgetfulness was not pathological—it was merely the mundane operation of the human mind, which a jury would accept as normal and understandable.

This is surely right. It’s not just that the evidence related to the classified documents does not support any accusation that Biden deliberately withheld them from the archives. It’s also that it does not support the much more politically charged implication that the poor treatment of these documents is evidence of senility. Biden had these papers in his homes quite legitimately while he was vice-president. Some of them got shunted into the memory hole of an ordinary suburban garage. That he forgot about them is emphatically not evidence of “diminished faculties in advancing age.”

The plain fact is that memory is always somewhat hazy, at any age. Indeed, as the White House noted in its rebuttal to the report, Hur references other instances of imprecise recall. Biden’s counsel Patrick Moore had the job of sorting Biden’s archives and searching for potentially missing documents that Biden should have handed over. Moore found documents in a small closet in Biden’s office at the Penn Biden Center at the University of Pennsylvania. Hur reports that “When interviewed by FBI agents, Moore believed the small closet was initially locked and that a Penn Biden Center staff member provided a key to unlock it, but his memory was fuzzy on that point.” Equally, Hur reports of another of Biden’s lawyers, John McGrail, that his memory of certain events was inconsistent with contemporary written records but concedes sensibly that “McGrail’s memory of these events could well have faded over the course of more than six years.” Does this mean that Moore and McGrail had diminished faculties? Of course not—people forget things.

*

The politically explosive part of Hur’s report, however, relates to a much more concentrated period of time: what Biden identified in his press conference as a five-hour grilling by the special counsel’s team over two days on October 8 and 9, 2023. This was in the immediate aftermath of the shock of Hamas’s atrocious assault on civilians in Israel. As Biden put it in his press conference, “it was in the middle of handling an international crisis.” In its rebuttal, appended to Hur’s report, the White House says that “in the lead up to the interview, the President was conducting calls with heads of state, Cabinet members, members of Congress, and meeting repeatedly with his national security team.” If Biden’s mind was elsewhere during the interviews with Hur, most of the world would surely agree that that’s exactly where it should have been.  

Hur’s account of this meeting is nonetheless worrying:

In his interview with our office, Mr. Biden’s memory was worse. He did not remember when he was vice president, forgetting on the first day of the interview when his term ended (“if it was 2013—when did I stop being Vice President?”), and forgetting on the second day of the interview when his term began (“in 2009, am I still Vice President?”). He did not remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died. And his memory appeared hazy when describing the Afghanistan debate that was once so important to him. Among other things, he mistakenly said he “had a real difference” of opinion with General Karl Eikenberry, when, in fact, Eikenberry was an ally whom Mr. Biden cited approvingly in his Thanksgiving memo to President Obama.

These lapses of memory are significant and they do provide a troubling glimpse of how Biden may sometimes function in private meetings in the White House. But Hur also performs a sleight-of-hand. He turns the evidence from these two meetings in October into a much more sweeping insinuation about Biden’s mental capacities by linking it back to his unremarkable amnesia about the storage of the documents. He does this by projecting himself into the minds of putative jury members who would see Biden “as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”

How does he reach this surmise? He tells us explicitly: “At trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him” (my emphasis). What Hur does here is to fuse the events that would be the subject of such a trial—Biden’s failure to remember where some documents were stored, a failure Hur accepts as perfectly normal—with his own characterization of Biden’s demeanor at the two meetings in October. Thus the perfectly mundane imperfections of memory become part of an accusation of near-senility, the only evidence for which is in those two meetings on especially fraught days in October.

This is grossly unfair. Insofar as Hur has a legitimate concern with the operation of Biden’s memory, it relates to the actual subject of his investigation: the storage of the documents. He provides no evidence at all that there was anything remarkable about Biden’s forgetfulness in this regard. Instead of sticking to his brief, however, Hur then shapes a politically lethal phrase out of a judgment he is not qualified to make—the lawyer appointing himself both as a doctor making a cognitive assessment and as a dramatist inventing a scenario for how twelve members of an imaginary jury might perceive Biden’s imaginary appearance in a witness box. It would be naive to think that Hur was unaware of the potentially historic consequences of this leap from evidence to conjecture.

*

This unfairness creates in turn a natural reaction among Democrats. If Biden is being treated so badly, the decent thing is to defend him and to dismiss the whole story as a politically motivated farrago. This is a serious mistake. Hur’s commentary on Biden’s cognitive abilities may be irrelevant to the job he was supposed to be doing. But it is not, alas, irrelevant to a presidential election that could shape American history for decades to come. For even if Hur’s is a low blow, it is a punch that someone was always going to land. Biden’s age is a gaping vulnerability that the Democrats have pretended not to see.

The right seizes on and magnifies every gaffe that Biden makes, but the blunders are real and seem increasingly frequent. In the days before he mixed up Sisi and Andrés Manuel López Obrador, he also confused Helmut Kohl with Angela Merkel and François Mitterrand with Emmanuel Macron. Under the pressure of a vicious election campaign, these moments may well happen more often and attract more attention. Hur’s report feeds into a narrative that was already established—that Biden is losing it—and makes it unavoidable.

Four days before Biden’s disastrous press conference, Hage Geingob died in a hospital in Windhoek, the capital of Namibia. Geingob, who was eighty-two and the serving president of Namibia, was the only other octogenarian running a democracy. His death leaves Biden in a club of one. Biden really is exceptionally old for a working head of government. And there has been consistent polling evidence that this is one kind of exceptionalism that Americans don’t want to claim. As the New York Times’s chief political analyst Nate Cohn puts it, Biden’s age is “arguably the single most straightforward explanation” for why he is trailing Donald Trump. “It’s what voters are telling pollsters, whether in open-ended questioning about Mr. Biden or when specifically asked about his age, and they say it in overwhelming numbers.” Those numbers include a majority of Democrats.

It’s no good pointing out that Trump is almost as old and equally prone to verbal slips. It’s no good highlighting the undoubted truth that, while Biden’s language may sometimes be uncomfortably sloppy, Trump’s loose lips utter toxic lies and dangerous slurs. These things don’t change the facts that no one has ever run for a presidential term at the end of which he would be eighty-six, that Trump gets a free pass on almost everything, and that Biden, fairly or otherwise, is the lightning rod for deep generational discontents and widespread unhappiness at the persistence of an American gerontocracy. His age gives Biden an apolitical way to retire gracefully, standing by his considerable achievements in office while passing the problem of being too old to be president onto Trump.

Nikki Haley was probably not wrong when she suggested after Biden’s press conference that “the first party to retire its eighty-year-old candidate will win the White House.” But if Biden persists in running, there will in effect be only one candidate: Trump. He will be the Republican contender but he will also be, as the monster to be feared, the primary motivator for Democratic voters. The election will be a referendum not on the incumbent president but on his challenger. Since Biden is unable to shake off the perception that he is too old to be president, he cannot make his own case effectively. He will rely on the simple proposition that he is not Trump. In a deeply uncomfortable sense, Trump, having taken ownership of the Republicans, will own the Democrats too.

The post The Memory Hole appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

Occasionally I read something I think worth sharing in full on this blog. I did yesterday. It was on the blog of an old friend, Jonathon Porritt, who has spent a lifetime campaigning on environmental issues. With his permission, I share it in full here, having only edited some formatting:

First they came for Just Stop Oil; then they came for radical environmentalists; then they came for members of the National Trust, the RSPB, and WWF. But there was no one left to speak for them.

I know I shouldn’t be, but I’m astonished at the lack of concern/interest on the part of “mainstream environmentalists” as we slide inexorably into a police state. The right to peaceful protest is still a basic human right. But you sure as hell wouldn’t know that here in the UK.

On January 23rd, Michel Forst (the UN Special Rapporteur on Environmental Defenders under the Aarhus Convention) issued his interim report after his visit to the UK earlier in the month. It’s astonishing. In his own words:

• “As the UN Human Rights Committee has made clear, States have a duty to facilitate the right to protest, and private entities and broader society may be expected to accept some level of disruption as a result of the exercise of this right.”
• “Peaceful protesters are being prosecuted and convicted under the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022, for the criminal offence of “Public Nuisance”, which is punishable by up to 10 years imprisonment. I was also informed that the Public Order Act 2023 is being used to further criminalise peaceful protest.”
• “In some recent cases, presiding judges have forbidden environmental defenders from explaining to the jury their motivation for participating in a given protest or from mentioning climate change at all”.
• “I am deeply troubled at the use of civil injunctions to ban protests in certain areas, including on public roadways. Anyone who breaches this injunctions is liable for up to two years imprisonment and an unlimited fine.”
• “Prior to these legislative developments, it had been almost unheard of since the 1930s for members of the public to be imprisoned for peaceful protest in the UK. I am therefore seriously concerned by these regressive new laws”.

Michel Forst is telling it as he sees it. But I’m not sure most mainstream environmentalists actually understand what is currently going on out there.

1. Marcus Decker and Morgan Trowland got the longest sentences in UK modern history for protesting, given 2 years and 7 months, and 3 years respectively, after climbing the Queen Elizabeth II bridge over the Dartford Crossing with a Just Stop Oil banner.
2. Defendants on trial for public nuisance, after a peaceful protest, were forbidden from saying the words climate change, fuel poverty and the civil rights movement.
3. Steven Gingell was jailed for six months after pleading guilty to being in a peaceful protest march on a London Road. This sentence is thought to be the first jailing under the Public Order Act 2023, which has an offence of “interference with key national infrastructure”
4. Tim Hughes, a 73-year-old clergyman, was arrested in November 2022, and charged with Conspiracy to Cause a Public Nuisance. He was on remand in Wandsworth Prison for 6 weeks, then released on bail in January 2023, subject to wearing a tag. His trial is not scheduled until February 2025. Two years wearing a tag – without having been convicted of any offence!
5. Civil injunctions have been issued to hundreds of individuals. A breach could mean imprisonment and/or an unlimited fine.
6. Trudi Warner, a retired Social Worker, is being prosecuted for Contempt of Court for holding up a sign outside of a court defending the right of juries to decide a case on conscience.

(My huge thanks to Sandra Laville at the Guardian, and to Anita Mureithi at OpenDemocracy, for providing these updates.)

Trudi Warner’s case has been taken up by Defend our Juries (@defendourjuries). On the 4th December, 600 people in 52 locations protested outside Crown Courts to defend the right of juries to decide a verdict on the basis of their conscience. (Their next Day of Action is on February 21st). As the Guardian recently pointed out: “A jury’s power to acquit had been seen for decades as a “constitutional safeguard” – insurance that the criminal law should conform to the ordinary person’s idea of what is fair that notion is held in contempt, evidently, by ministers”.

So here’s my request – to help ward off despair. Or rather, two requests:

1. Can anybody send me chapter and verse, in the public domain, from any of the mainstream environmental organisations, condemning any of this in the same terms as Michel Forst?
2. Can anybody send me chapter and verse, in the public domain, of anyone in the Labour Shadow Cabinet, condemning any of this in the same terms as Michel Forst?

These are genuine requests for information – to dispel my worst fears about gutless mainstream NGOs and equally gutless Labour politicians.

January 15th was Martin Luther King day in the USA. Ben Philips, Director of Communications for UNAID, wrote an excellent blog to mark the day:

“When Dr King said the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice, he didn’t mean this process is automatic; as he noted, “social progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of people.” Justice, Dr King taught, is never given, it is only ever won. This always involves having the courage to confront power. Indeed, he noted, the greatest stumbling block to progress is not the implacable opponent, but those who claim to support change but are “more devoted to order than justice”. As he put it, “frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct-action movement that was “well-timed” in the view of those who have not suffered unduly. This “wait!” has almost always meant “never”.

Please think of those words every time you leap to condemn the tactics of young climate campaigners here in the UK, even as our police state closes down on them more and more repressively.

And if you need any confirmation of what’s going on here, please read George Monbiot’s brilliant article in the Guardian on Saturday 3rd February (“It’s a Plutocrat’s World – and all Dissenters are Swiftly Crushed”):

“Why, in the UK, can you now potentially receive a longer sentence for “public nuisance” – non-violent civil disobedience – than for rape or manslaughter? Peaceful environmental campaigners are being held on bail for up to 2 years, subjected to electronic tags, GPS tracking and curfews. Even before you’ve been tried, let alone found guilty, your life is shredded.”

And he tellingly adds exactly why these deep injustices are now becoming common place:

“Why is all this happening? Because the UK, the US and many other nations have become closed shops run by the Plutocrats’ Trade Union. Inequality demands oppression. The more concentrated wealth and power become, the more those who challenge the rich and powerful must be hounded and crushed”.

And isn’t that the truth of it?

Trump’s Chaos Agenda 

Donald Trump wants you to be disgusted. He wants you to be cynical. And he definitely doesn’t want you to watch this video. Why? Because that’s how he wins in 2024. Let me explain.

The Republicans’ election strategy is built on chaos. The more chaos they create, the more pessimistic Americans feel about the capacities of our democracy to govern the nation. So we give up on democracy and turn to a so-called strongman.

Trump has been pushing his party to deny the 2020 election result, shut down the government, pardon insurrectionists, impeach President Biden, investigate Hunter Biden, stop funding Ukraine, and obstruct the criminal prosecutions Trump is facing. He’s stoking hatred, using fascist language by labeling his opponents “vermin” and claiming immigration is destroying the nation.  

Trump wants voters to believe America is ungovernable, and that the only solution is an authoritarian like him taking over.

And he wants those who don’t support him to be so disgusted that they tune out — and not even bother to vote.

Trump’s chaos agenda is also drowning out news about how well we’re actually being governed under President Biden.

Rarely do we hear about how the economy continues to generate a record number of new jobs. 

Not to mention billions of dollars being invested to fix the nation’s infrastructure and combat climate change. Medicare on the way to lowering the cost of prescription drugs. Billions in student debt canceled, in spite of rulings from the right-wing Supreme Court. Corporate monopolies attacked. Workers’ rights to organize, defended.

Trump and his allies don’t want you to know about any of this. And sadly the media plays along by focusing mostly on chaos and dysfunction, with an inclination to blame both sides in the name of “balanced coverage.”

Folks, the political struggle of our time is no longer Left versus Right, Democrats versus Republicans. It’s now democracy versus fascism.

Be warned. And help spread the word about Trump’s chaos agenda by sharing this video.