policy
Unite Brighton & South Coast passes no-confidence motion in ‘shameful’ Graham
Betrayals on ‘anti-racism, Palestine, harassment and dignity at work cited by furious members
Unite SE6246 Brighton and South East Coast branch has passed a motion of no-confidence, with no votes against and only two abstentions, in the union’s general secretary Sharon Graham. The motion cites Graham’s actions on anti-racism, Palestine, harassment and dignity at work – and the branch members’ ‘dismay’ at them.
In full, the motion reads:
Emergency Motion – Sharon Graham’s Leadership of Unite
This branch views with dismay recent actions by Sharon Graham and instructs her to abide by union policy on anti-racism, Palestine, harassment and dignity at work. We note:
- The ongoing disability discrimination case brought by former senior officer in Ireland, Brendan Ogle, against Unite. It is estimated that legal fees alone will exceed £1m, money paid for out of members’ subscriptions.
- The collective grievance from the National Officers’ Group at the high handed behaviour of Graham. They allege that workers are being banned from their workplace and/or suspended for raising a grievance. They state that:
Threats of legal action for raising a grievance cannot be ignored or endorsed…. For any worker to exhibit the courage to voice their concerns about their opinions of inappropriate behaviour against them or others is a right not to be denied. If it is to be crushed or swept away simply because the employer is more powerful and we do nothing about such unfairness in the workplace then who are we standing up for?
- The banning from Unite premises of Jeremy Corbyn – The Big Lie about the weaponisation of ‘anti-Semitism’ in the Labour Party.
- A new feature-length documentary ‘ON RESISTANCE STREET’, has also been banned. It is an examination of the role which music has played historically in the fight against fascism and racism. The excuse for this is an Executive Committee decision in September 2023. According to Sarah Carpenter:
Unite should not use its premises or resources to show or promote any external films or other content that does not relate to our industrial agenda to support the pay, terms and conditions of our members and/or support existing Unite policies. In this context the Union should be especially careful to avoid appearing to endorse any material which causes unnecessary offence to members.
The reason that Corbyn – The Big Lie was banned was not to offend Zionists. It would appear that this film has been banned in order not to upset fascists or racists.
- There are a host of other allegations that have been made that have never been responded to including:
- banning Unite officials and national banners from pro-Gaza protests
- placing an official under investigation who refused to cancel a Palestine solidarity fringe event at Labour’s 2023 annual conference
- told her chief of staff to threaten Peter Kavanagh, Regional Secretary of London & Eastern Region with the loss of a pension bonus if he did not soften his support for Palestinians.
Historically the trade union movement has taken pride in political education. Industrial action went hand in hand with political action. Without the latter workers are left at the mercy of a capitalist system that has no hesitation in using the state to reduce their rights.
Graham’s tenure as Unite boss has also been marked by a string of other allegations, which have never been denied.
The refusal of Graham to mobilise against the genocide in Gaza or take part in the national demonstrations is shameful. We demand that Graham adhere to union policy on Palestine.
This Branch has no confidence in Sharon Graham and calls for her to resign or be removed.
Proposed Tony Greenstein
Seconded Sheila Hall
In an email to Unite’s acting regional secretary for the south-east, copied to the notifying him of the motion, branch secretary Tony Greenstein wrote:
I won’t say I have pleasure in attaching a resolution of no confidence in the General Secretary but nonetheless it is my duty…
…We wish this resolution to be placed before the Regional Executive and all other relevant committees in the region including the Area Activists group. We also want it discussed by the union executive.
Because of the seriousness in passing such a motion, I will add a few comments…
…The final straw for some of us was Graham banning the showing of an anti-fascist/anti-racist film on Unite premises and the explanation for this by the former Regional Secretary for the South-East, Sarah Carpenter that:
‘ the Union should be especially careful to avoid appearing to endorse any material which causes unnecessary offence to members.’
This can only be taken to mean that Sharon Graham doesn’t want to offend racists and fascists ‘unnecessarily’. Such a position runs counter to everything this union has hitherto stood for. Sharon Graham is an utter disgrace.
Jeremy Corbyn – The Big Lie was also banned because it might give offence – in this case to the Zionists who are now supporting the ongoing genocide in Gaza.
Graham has not only done nothing to oppose what Israel is doing in Gaza but she has actively tried to prevent others doing anything. She has ditched policy on Palestine undemocratically and unilaterally, with the compliance of a feeble and deferential Executive.
Her recent statement targeting anti-war groups and activists and giving explicit support for the production and transportation of weapons to Gaza that have so far killed 14,000 children, and thousands of women and civilians is unconscionable.
Any General Secretary worth their salt would be taking steps to ensure that no weapons whose destination was Israel were manufactured and failing that would call upon dockers and other transport workers not to handle them, as she did with Russian oil recently.
When I think of the support that General Secretaries of the T&GWU, which was one of the founders of Unite, gave to the peace movement and anti-racism – people like Frank Cousins and Ron Todd – then Sharon Graham’s behaviour is shameful.
Jack Jones, another former General Secretary, went to fight against the fascists in Spain in 1936. Sharon Graham has banned an anti-fascist film for fear of upsetting fascists. For such an action alone she deserves to go and the Union Executive should have the courage to face her down rather than accepting her dictats.
I won’t mention the other matters such as her behaviour towards the staff and Brendan Ogle.
Suffice to say that if Sharon Graham thinks that anti-racism and anti-fascism has nothing to do with her ‘industrial agenda’ then this demonstrates that she understands nothing about how racism is used to divide the working class.
Sharon Graham’s tenure as Unite boss has also been marked by a string of other allegations – which neither she nor the union has denied – including destruction of evidence against her husband in threat, misogyny and bullying complaints brought by union employees. She is embroiled in a defamation lawsuit and a discrimination tribunal case brought by Irish union legend Brendan Ogle for the union’s treatment of him and comments made about him by Graham and her close ally Tony Woodhouse.
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The Gilded Cage: Technology, Development, and State Capitalism in China – review
In The Gilded Cage: Technology, Development, and State Capitalism in China, Ya-Wen Lei explores how China has reshaped its economy and society in recent decades, from the era of Chen Yun to the leadership of Xi Jinping. Lei’s meticulous analysis illuminates how China’s blend of marketisation and authoritarianism has engendered a unique techno-developmental capitalism, writes George Hong Jiang.
Twenty years ago, people inside and outside China were wondering whether the country would eventually capitulate to dominant capitalist and democratic models. American politicians such as Bill Clinton were enthusiastically looking forward to the future integration of China into globalisation. When this happened, millions of ordinary people would get rich and become the middle class through fast-growing international trade and domestic labour-intensive industries. However, this judgment quickly proved ill-made. China has simultaneously emulated the US in high-tech industries but also become an unparalleled authoritarian state which polices its citizens through intellectual technology and high-tech instruments. How has it achieved this, and what are the effects of this? Lei tries to untangle these questions in her book, The Gilded Cage: Technology, Development, and State Capitalism in China.
The author was inspired by the “birdcage economy” of Chen Yun when choosing the title of the book.[…] Statist control is the cage, and private economies, like captive birds, are only allowed to fly within the cage.
The author was inspired by the “birdcage economy” of Chen Yun when choosing the title of the book (5). Building the planned economy in the early 1950s and supporting economic reforms in the 1980s, Chen Yun was one of the most important architects of economic systems in communist China. While he was a proponent of giving more space to private economies, Chen Yun staunchly believed in the efficacy of governmental regulations. Statist control is the cage, and private economies, like captive birds, are only allowed to fly within the cage. Chen Yun was particularly cautious about liberalist reforms, such as deregulation of finance and fiscal decentralisation, and distinctly opposed to privatisation. After he died in 1995, Deng Xiaoping and his disciples, including Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, carried out deregulation bravely until the late 2000s. But the ideal of Chen Yun’s “birdcage economy” is never abandoned by communists who fear losing control over the society.
The 2008 financial crisis started China’s big turn of macroeconomic policies. In order to stimulate the deflated economy, the government reacted fast and invested enormous capital into a few key strategic industries, including bio-manufacturing industry and aircraft and electronic manufacturing. Ling & Naughton (2016) believe that this action signalled the watershed of China’s economic orientation. The government’s budget poured into these industries, and bureaucratic units responsible for supervision and regulation turned to interventionist policies. The trend was further strengthened after Xi Jinping, who believes that the combination of the free market economy and Leninist political principles is the best blueprint for China, ascended to the presidency in 2012.
New leadership since the 2010s wants to emulate western high-end development rather than provide low-end, cheap and labour-intensive products for the West.
The ambition to develop high-tech industries runs in tandem with the unique political system of China. Economic growth has helped sustain political legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) since the 1980s. Since socialism was smeared by the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) and its disastrous economic consequences, economic growth has been identified as the most important source of political legitimacy. Economic performance has become the indicator of bureaucratic promotion, which has fused China’s politics and economies together. This political organisational mechanism makes it easier for leaders to push through any desired change and it is on this that China’s turn to techno-development (Chapter Three) is precisely based. New leadership since the 2010s wants to emulate western high-end development rather than provide low-end, cheap and labour-intensive products for the West.
Still, a key question must be answered: why are Chinese bureaucrats who care primarily about social stability and political monopoly willing to replace human labour with robots, which tends to reduce employment in the short run? In Chapter Five, the author traces the process of robotisation in firms which previously rely on cheap labour, including Foxconn. While the benefits of robotisation might be obvious to entrepreneurs aspiring to reduce costs by any means, potential instability could cause trouble for communist bureaucrats. The answer lies in the possibility that technological upgrades will lead to an enlarging economy capable of digesting more workers than it kicks out. However, it results in a dilemma: if the growth rate slows down, the appetite for mechanisation and robotisation could stir social tensions.
Seeing the chance to surpass the West in the development of high-tech industries, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is more than willing to strengthen control over public spheres and civil society and increase investment in the sector to achieve this.
Seeing the chance to surpass the West in the development of high-tech industries, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is more than willing to strengthen control over public spheres and civil society and increase investment in the sector to achieve this. As the author puts it, “the Chinese state is an unwavering believer in intellectual technology and instrumental power and employs both to enhance governance and the economy” (9). It is highly possible that with the help of an authoritarian regime and its will to develop technological capability, the dismal future that Max Weber once predicted – ie, the “iron cage of bureaucracy” in which depersonalised and ossified instrumental rationality will dominate every sphere in the society – will come sooner in China than in the West.
Economic growth is mainly driven by high-tech industries that private and state-owned capital foster, both of which must be under the control of the government, with the unified aim of rejuvenating the Chinese nation.
Karl Marx argued that productive power, including technological conditions, determines relations of production. This idea is being justified in China. A mix between marketised economies and authoritarian rule, which is penetrated by high-tech instruments, facilitate the rise of techno-developmental capitalism, as the author proposes in Chapter Nine. On the one hand, large tech companies in China have hatched one of the biggest markets in the world. On the other hand, tech professionals’ increasing demand for institutional (if not political) reforms (Chapter Eight) renders bureaucrats gradually more concerned about their social influence. For instance, Jack Ma, the boss of Alibaba, attacked the state-owned financial system and instantly got punished by the authority. China is developing a new variant of capitalism: economic growth is mainly driven by high-tech industries that private and state-owned capital foster, both of which must be under the control of the government, with the unified aim of rejuvenating the Chinese nation.
Techno-developmental capitalism is not the result of contingency, but path-dependent outcome, the direct result of China’s polities.
The author includes an excellent range of relevant materials into the book, spanning academic literature and personal interviews with private entrepreneurs and IT practitioners. Lei also bravely applies the term “instrumental rationality” in relation to China’s socioeconomic reality. In so doing she identifies the Janus-faced nature of China’s technological development, whereby the society enjoys higher productivity but becomes more rigid and occluded due to the omnipotent techno-bureaucracy. Nonetheless, the book could have been improved if Lei could take China’s political-economic structure into account when explaining the motivation to develop high-tech industries. While Lei focuses on the era after the 2000s, the rise of techno-developmental capitalism is deeply rooted in the persistent logic of the CCP since the late 1970s. In other words, techno-developmental capitalism is not the result of contingency, but a path-dependent outcome, the direct result of China’s polity. In spite of this lack of fully examined historical dimensions, Lei presents a good guidebook for China’s holistic development, not just within the last two decades but also in the decades to come.
Note: This post gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Image credit: B.Zhou on Shutterstock.
The State of Climate Action in 2024
The day before COP28 began in the UAE last November, a damning report was released by the Centre For Climate Reporting, confirming what many had already suspected: COP28 President Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber had taken multiple meetings with various oil-producing countries throughout the year, likely swaying his priorities for the conference ahead. While Al Jaber’s legitimacy had already been in question…
‘Cold, horrible’ Starmer fails to impress even ‘select’ audience after fleeing Gaza protest
‘Equality’ policy launch flops after even hand-picked audience finds him jingoistic and unpleasant
‘Cold and horrible’ – and spineless – Starmer at his ‘jingoistic’ policy launch
Keir Starmer delivered his latest policy con to a hand-picked audience and no press on Monday – after cancelling his main launch because of a planned pro-Palestinian protest, outside the original Tottenham venue, against his support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza – and it flopped.
According to Sky’s Serena Barker-Singh, even though Labour had winnowed down the audience to a ‘select’ few and excluded all the media, the ‘favoured’ attendees found Starmer ‘cold and horrible’ and his presentation ‘jingoistic’, with ‘union jacks everywhere’.
Starmer becomes less popular the more people see of him and it seems his advisers recognise that – but even hiding him from all but a few true believers doesn’t work, because they find themselves disliking him too.
And with Starmer’s record of breaking every promise, his ‘policy’ to supposedly improve equality is as meaningless as the fetid air it takes to speak it.
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Politics, Inequality and the Australian Welfare State After Liberalisation – Part I: Contesting Neoliberal Social Policy
Neoliberalism changed many things in Australia. Unions are weaker. Inequality is higher. But exactly what changed is often surprising. The state did not shrink. Social spending did not decrease, nor did it become less redistributive. Household wealth has increased rapidly, but largely due to changes in social policy rather than rising productivity.
The relationship between liberalisation and the welfare state is both more central and more complicated than we often imagine. In Politics, Inequality and the Australian Welfare State After Liberalisation I sought to move beyond a lament for declining egalitarianism, and to instead learn from the political strategies that have mitigated and even reduced inequality in hard times.
The book examines case studies from three forms of liberalisation – targeting benefits, marketizing services and financialising the life course. Through each I highlight different models of reform that are broadly consistent with liberalisation (means-testing benefits, facilitating private service providers or using asset-debt relations), yet have different political and distributional consequences.
Asymmetric budget rules
To unpack these differences, I use theories of state finance (which Gareth Bryant and I explore elsewhere) that explain the size and structure of the state’s economic role. Liberalisation both seeks to constrain and redefine state finance. Key to Australia’s expertise is a strong focus on the size of the state, as measured by the tax to GDP ratio (and social spending to GDP).
From the 1980s Labor has been committed to the so called ‘trilogy’, promising not to raise taxes, social spending or debt as a proportion of the economy. That commitment breaks a decades long post-War trend across high income countries for the welfare state and taxes to grow faster than incomes. This strong fiscal constraint rules out most traditional social democratic strategies for advancing equality.
Alongside fiscal constraint, liberalisation also remakes the state to resemble the market. Competition policy reorganises state finance. Each service is fiscally separated, allowing corporatisation and privatisation, and competition within social provision. Enforced competition underpins both marketisation and financialisation.
But the construction of the state in market terms doesn’t produce the ‘level playing field’ it promises. Market rules allow private providers to access uniquely ‘private’ advantages, but are applied to government in ways that prevent the state doing likewise. Corporations can borrow to invest more easily than states (even though they are riskier). State promises to pay for citizens’ pensions or healthcare are reimagined as liabilities, but the future taxes to fund them don’t count as assets.
These budgetary asymmetries reflect the challenges of applying accounting rules designed for the private sector (which focus on profitability and solvency) to the public sector (that doesn’t return profits and can’t go bankrupt). Those challenges are combined with a good dose of politics and self-interest to use budget rules to constrain state action.
Asymmetric budget rules help to break the older social democratic politics of the post-War era. They make it harder to use politics to simply take some parts of life out of the market – to decommodify welfare through public finance. Instead, they push governments towards quasi-market solutions.
The dual welfare state
Traditionally social policy has expanded by asserting different criteria for social spending than for market activity. However, many of the strategies that advanced equality did the opposite – they attempted to treat taxation and spending in the same way to show how market advocates were not so much winding back the state as they were creating a ‘hidden’ or ‘dual’ welfare state. Market advocates had worked out how to structure public spending as tax cuts and structure tax increases in spending cuts.
The history of the dual welfare state pre-dates liberalisation. Mid-century public budget rules were constructed to aid macro economic management by tracing how much demand the state was adding or subtracting from the economy. Thus, budgets focused on cash flows in real time. Macro economically, a tax cut is pretty much the same as a spending increase. Politically, though, the fiscal constraints of liberalisation made them worlds apart. A tax cut fit Labor’s trilogy rules, a spending increase broke them.
The hidden welfare state works by disguising fiscal support for the better off as tax cuts – such as the tax concessions once enjoyed for having a stay-at-home wife and still enjoyed on capital gains – and constructing bigger fiscal claims on low-income folks as tighter means-tests. It is not just that tax concessions work like spending, but are not budgeted like spending, or means-tests have almost identical effects to marginal income tax rates, it’s that the politics reverses. Citizens resist spending on the rich and tax claims on the poor, but tolerate tax concessions and means-testing.
Where more egalitarian social policy did advance, it often did so by revealing these asymmetries and finding ways to reframe state finance. Australia decreased child poverty more rapidly than almost any other high-income country in the 1980s and 90s, but if you count tax concessions as expenditure, the total amount spent barely moved. Feminists successfully resisted the tight targeting of new family spending – although they failed to make it entirely universal. Almost all the new money needed for Medibank (the first version of Medicare) came from closing tax concessions for private health.
The strategies used to expand social spending applied market logics to manage the limits of state finance more consistently. The two accounting techniques that support these strategies – tax expenditure statements and effective marginal tax rates – apply orthodox economic and tax principles, rather than asserting an alternative ‘social’ logic. A similar extension of economic principles pushed in the other direction, not to clarify the boundaries of the state, but to facilitate the state taking on ‘market’ roles.
Hybrid policy tools
Where the hidden welfare state presents the state as more egalitarian than it really is, the financialisation of the state often suggests it is more privatised than it is. Budgetary changes designed to facilitate the corporatisation of state functions created unexpected opportunities for the state to act like a private firm. Of course, the state did shift functions from public to private, but it also extended its reach to invest, insure, lend and underwrite in hybrid forms that combine public and private logics, marketizing social life while also socialising risk.
We often forget just how marketized Medicare is. Its power comes not through traditional nationalisation, but as a public competitor to existing private (hospital, health insurance, health services) markets. Because Australia lacks a strong tradition of virtually any form of socialised care, marketisation enabled the state to enter the market as a competitor, rather than undermining an existing public monopoly. Medicare’s structure promised to lower medical inflation (and thus costs to government) through competition, while avoiding constitutional barriers to overt nationalisation.
Similarly, student loans are clearly market-like compared to ordinary tax and spend policies, but they are not market contracts. The debts are issued and collected by the state, and their conditions reflect social principles around ability to pay. Likewise, the newly established Housing Affordability Future Fund is invested entirely in market products, but because it is a public fund, its proceeds follow social principles.
These hybrid policies are not a public finance. They remain marketized, and thus more limited instruments of egalitarian social policy. But nor are they private finance, even though the expansion of hybrid models seems to defy the fiscal constraints of liberalisation. Our tools for understanding hybridity are underdeveloped, making it hard to evaluate policy alternatives and challenge inequalities. In many cases, what appear as technical changes (like how super funds operate), are the most consequential for determining just how public or private a hybrid model is.
Contests around dual and hybrid welfare continue to dominate welfare politics. The most promising campaigns to expand state finance continue to emphasis tax concessions. Linking the concessions in our housing and superannuation systems to addressing the increasingly generational inequalities they produce has the potential to mobilise a powerful new politics. Likewise, despite its extreme fiscal caution on social issues (not submarines) Labor’s HAFF appears to have simply created money out of nothing. There is no new tax or conventional fiscal claim at all, yet there is new spending.
Understanding the policy tools at stake in liberalised welfare is only half the story. Converting tax concessions into spending, highlighting the disincentives of means-testing and mobilising the state as an insurer or lender all aid egalitarian strategies, helping to navigate the fiscal constraints applied by liberalisation. But none of these changes advanced through clever design alone. All were hard fought through contentious politics. Importantly connecting policy design to political mobilisation involved a very similar hybrid logic, where liberalisation’s attempt to turn everything into a market was met by a feminist counter-movement to contest the social as the economic – which I explore in Part 2 of this post.
The post Politics, Inequality and the Australian Welfare State After Liberalisation – Part I: Contesting Neoliberal Social Policy appeared first on Progress in Political Economy (PPE).
Graham to be called to testify in Ireland in Ogle’s discrimination claim against Unite
Irish union legend’s case against union for abuse and discrimination after his cancer treatment expected to last eight days but adjourned until February
Unite general secretary Sharon Graham is expected to be called to testify in Dublin in Irish union legend Brendan Ogle’s discrimination claim against the union.
Ogle, who is also suing Graham, her ally Tony Woodhouse and the union for defamation, has alleged that he was abused by the union after his return from treatment for serious cancer – and after he made ‘protected disclosures’ to the union about its failures to adhere to covid protocols during the pandemic. Graham and her representatives have been accused of ‘disgusting’ behaviour toward Ogle – and anger in Ireland at the situation became so great that an entire sector branch threatened to disaffiliate entirely from Unite, the well-known ‘Right2Water’ campaign said it will no longer work with Unite, Unite’s Community section in Ireland condemned the ‘injustice inflicted’ on him and members picketed general secretary Sharon Graham’s long-delayed visit to Dublin.
Graham is using one of the world’s most profitable law firms to defend the defamation suit – and also, Tuesday’s hearing revealed, in the tribunal case. Her tenure as Unite boss has been marked by a string of other allegations – which neither she nor the union has denied – including alleged destruction of evidence against her husband in misogyny and bullying complaints. She is currently being sued, along with an ally and the union, by Irish union legend Brendan Ogle for defamation.
She has been exposed using proxies to order the cancellation of showings of the film ‘Oh Jeremy Corbyn/The Big Lie’, which exposes the political abuse of antisemitism accusations against left-wingers in the Labour party, and discussion of Asa Winstanley’s forensic book Weaponising Antisemitism: How the Israel Lobby Brought Down Jeremy Corbyn. Proxies were similarly despatched to try, unsuccessfully, to cancel a Unite ‘fringe’ event at Labour’s conference earlier this month in support of Palestinians.
Ogle’s barrister told the Workplace Relations Commission adjudicator that she expected the union would be required to ‘produce’ Sharon Graham to testify, along with a string of current and former senior Unite officials and employees. The case was adjourned to allow both sides further time to prepare for what is expected to be an eight-day hearing and will recommence in February.
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