While the election for UCU General Secretary (GS) will not formally begin until January 2024, the campaigning is already underway. It has been publicly noted that the Campaign for UCU Democracy (UCUD) has not endorsed a candidate. This letter explains why UCUD is endorsing Jo Grady for re-election, as the only suitably qualified candidate. Some of our members campaigned against Grady in 2019, while others supported her. We do not agree with everything that she has done as GS and are critical of both the style and tone of her public leadership at times. Yet we also believe that she has always acted in the best interests of the membership, has developed UCU into a more effective and organised trade union, and has delivered on a number of key priorities. As such, we are recommending that members vote for Jo Grady, and for Jo Grady alone. We do not recommend giving second, third or fourth preference votes to any of the other candidates for GS. 

The Campaign for UCU Democracy (UCUD) was formed not as a faction, but as a means of bringing together members who share common concerns about fundamental problems that are having a serious, damaging, effect on UCU’s ability to function as an effective trade union. These concerns have been elaborated elsewhere, but in essence we are of the view that key decisions about core union business – primarily industrial action – are being taken by a hardcore of activists who rely upon democratic structures to deliberately dilute, marginalise and drown out the voice of ordinary members.

Participating in UCU’s democratic decision-making is often a tedious and time-consuming affair, that revolves around attending a series of meetings to be able to make your voice heard on key issues. What is sometimes described as a model of “deliberative democracy” is nothing of the kind; UCU meetings are often hurried, superficial, fractious, toxically factional and are usually dominated by the Socialist Workers Party, other minor Trotskyist sects, and their allies and enablers. 

If the barriers to democratic participation in the union were lowered, if we enabled more members to have their voices heard, we believe that UCU would be a healthier, stronger trade union as a result. But unless this becomes a priority, then our fear is that the union faces an uncertain future. A democratic model that privileges the voices of one set of members – the activists – over and above everyone else will result in only one thing: a union leadership that persists in calling ever more extreme forms of industrial action supported by rapidly diminishing numbers of members. 

We need to move to a situation where one day of strike action is observed by 80-100% of our membership, rather than where we are currently headed – 100 days of strike action observed by 1% of the membership. How we get there will depend on the outcome of the election for General Secretary that will begin in January 2024. 

There are four candidates in the race: Vicky Blake, Jo Grady, Ewan McGaughey, and Saira Weiner. Of these, we do not think that either Ewan McGaughey or Saira Weiner are credible candidates to lead the union. Weiner is the UCU Left candidate, and a member of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). The SWP has done more damage to UCU than any other grouping or faction, and if she were to succeed in her campaign then it would place the union in the hands of an utterly poisonous and destructive political party. 

McGaughey lacks credibility for an entirely different reason. He was primarily responsible for the attempt to reverse the cuts to USS pensions through legal action. Many UCU members, including some of the signatories of this letter, contributed to the costs of this action, and were taken in by the seemingly reasonable and pragmatic approach that it represented. What many of us failed to grasp, lacking the requisite legal knowledge, is how utterly misjudged this entire endeavour was. In finding against the case, the Court of Appeal judge, Lady Justice Asplin concluded that she was “surprised that Dr McGaughey and Prof. Davies chose to bring this action in the form they did and to pursue it despite the fact that the judge flagged up what he saw as the difficulties at the initial stage when he considered it on paper” (see here for the Court of Appeal decision). UCU’s own legal team had, of course, warned against bringing this challenge, instructing branches on 16/11/2022 not to contribute funds towards the cost of the case. The fact that McGaughey and his allies persisted in attempting to force the union to support this high-risk challenge and discredit the union’s national officers is enough, in our view, to discount him as a serious candidate for leadership. 

The question of alliances is a material one, because one of those who helped McGaughey in his attempts to force UCU to shoulder the burden of costs was the third candidate, Vicky Blake. And despite her attempts to position herself as both independent and moderate, she is closely allied to Weiner and UCU Left as well – to the degree that her candidacy was originally announced by UCU Left, alongside an appeal for UCU Left supporters to also support Blake. 

If, as we believe, the union’s central problem is its democratic structures, and their perpetuation of minority rule by the activist vanguard, then Blake is the standard-bearer for this approach. A central plank of her putative manifesto is that she is standing because she wishes to uphold the decisions taken by Congress, Sector Conference, Branch Delegates Meetings, Branch Meetings and any other forum where a small minority of members get together to take decisions on behalf of the rest of us. Such is her obsession with the activist model of decision-making that she will not challenge it, even on issues of deep personal principle. For Blake, decisions taken by Congress or its committees, even when they demonstrably lack the support of the broader membership, are sacrosanct and must always be upheld. It is our opposition to this fundamentalist reading of the UCU rule book that has led us to recommend that members do not vote for Blake, even as a second preference. 

It is this issue – the status of decisions taken at Congress, and their implementation in the real world – that has driven much of the opprobrium directed at the current General Secretary, and candidate, Jo Grady. The charge is that Grady has sometimes been slow, or unwilling to put into practice decisions taken through union structures; or, at other times, taken decisions unilaterally without consulting the relevant body. We believe that these accusations are, in essence, either baseless or rooted in an unrealistic expectation of how the union is able to act. 

As we persistently argue, our union’s decision-making structures are opaque and often contradictory, and decision-making is poorly-regulated and struggles to reflect the views of UCU’s 120,000 members. Under these circumstances, the General Secretary and her staff are often asked to put into practice decisions that are impractical, sometimes illegal, with little regard to the resource implications of those decisions. Setting clear priorities, and planning how to turn motions into concrete actions is extremely challenging, and unfortunately the union’s NEC is of little use, failing to reach resolution on key questions more often than not. 

Faced with this complexity, Grady has often turned to the broader membership to help her steer a course. Where there have been challenges, competing points of view, she has put the question to individual members, canvassing their views and using them to nudge other decision-makers in the right direction. We believe that this approach is always the best, and that any leader should try to ensure that the union’s actions can command the support of a broad base of the membership – without it, we are fatally weakened. It is because of Grady’s willingness to act in the best interests of the entire membership, and to reach out beyond the activist core, that we have decided to endorse her.

Our concern is that if Blake is elected, UCU will struggle to function as an organisation that can either meaningfully engage with a future Labour government, or hold the employers to account. As a result, we are urging every member of UCU to vote for Jo Grady for General Secretary, and to persuade others to do the same. 

Yours sincerely, 

The undersigned.

Name	Title / UCU role	Department / School	Workplace
Michael Abberton	University of Cambridge Branch President	CUPA	University of Cambridge
Jak Peake	Senior Lecturer, UCU HE Black Members’ Rep, NEC	Literature, Film, and Theatre Studies	University of Essex
Nat Willmott	Senior System Admin/Ex-UCU branch secretary	Student Information Systems	University of Reading
Sally Pellow	Past member of NEC representing the South; Past President and Past Secretary, University of Reading UCU	Student Information Systems	University of Reading
Douglas Chalmers	Former President UCU Scotland, and UCU UK	Media and Journalism	Glasgow Caledonian University
Dyfrig Jones	NEC member / Branch President	School of Arts, Culture and Language	Bangor University
John Kelly	Emeritus Professor of Industrial Relations and Birkbeck UCU Past President	School of Business	Birkbeck
Philippa Browning	Professor/NEC/branch Exec,caseworker	Physics and Astronomy	University of Manchester
Adam Ozanne	Honorary Senior Lecturer. Former elected member of NEC, branch President and Secretary.	Economics Department	University of Manchester
Andrew Feeney	Senior Lecturer Linguistics; UCU Branch Secretary; Member NEC; Vice Chair HEC	Humanities	Northumbria University
Terry Murphy	Teesside University & Northern Region Chair/former NEC	Social Sciences	Teesside University