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Sir Keir Starmer could lose one of his most powerful political allies next week as the contest for leadership of Britain’s biggest trade union comes to a head.
Christina McAnea, general secretary of Unison — which has more than 1mn members — is running for re-election against leftwing challenger Andrea Egan, who is already president of the union.
Egan was expelled from the Labour party three years ago and has vowed to take a more openly confrontational approach towards the government if she wins. She has promised a “comprehensive review of our relationship with Labour to ensure we get value for money”.
With turnout often as low as 10 per cent in Unison’s internal elections, the result on Wednesday is hard to predict. But one official at a rival union said Unison’s contest was a gauge of sentiment across the union movement, as many members disenchanted with Labour’s leadership look for alternatives.
Under McAnea, Unison has thrown its weight behind Starmer on several pivotal occasions. In 2021, Unison and the GMB gave him crucial support when he narrowly won a vote to change the rules for future party leadership contests to make it harder for a “hard left” MP to stand.
Egan describes herself as a “social worker and straight talking working-class trade unionist”. She has been a union steward for 30 years and is secretary of Unison’s Bolton local government branch as well as having been president of the national union for the last three years.
She has accused the union of having “a subservient approach to the Labour government, allowing the factional priorities of the Labour leadership to take precedence over the interests of Unison members”.
Labour said it had terminated her membership because she shared two articles from Socialist Appeal, a Marxist group within the party, on social media. Labour had proscribed Socialist Appeal a year earlier, saying it was not compatible with its rules or aims or values.
Although Egan has not joined another party, she recently told The House magazine that Your Party, the new leftwing movement co-founded by former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, is an initiative that “gives people hope again”.
Some union officials believe that Egan would take Unison in a similar direction to Unite the Union under general secretary Sharon Graham, who has been a thorn in the side of Starmer’s leadership. Graham has criticised Labour for diluting its employment rights bill, for trying to cut benefits, for letting oil refineries close and for not tackling the cost of living crisis.
A closer alignment between Unison and Unite could lead them to take a more confrontational stance on public sector pay talks — already set to be fraught given government spending plans that imply very tight pay settlements.
Unison has hundreds of thousands of members in the NHS and is also one of the main unions representing local government employees and social care workers.
Egan has vowed to eschew the £181,000 salary enjoyed by McAnea, instead promising to “take the wage of a social worker” with the rest of the money going to a charity for Unison members and an industrial action fund.
In recent months McAnea has sought to distance herself from Starmer, calling for a wealth tax and declaring herself “horrified” by the prime minister’s “Island of Strangers” speech criticising immigration.
At Labour’s conference she moved a motion describing Israel’s actions in Gaza as a “genocide” and calling on the government to fully suspend its arms trade with Israel.
She has described her position towards Starmer as a “critical friend” trying to push the leadership into more socialist positions.
But McAnea claims that the employment rights bill currently progressing through Parliament is evidence that union co-operation with Labour has yielded positive results for workers.