Britain’s largest union elects a socialist. Now what?

Andrea Egan’s Victory and the Test That Follows

Andrea Egan won. That matters. Unison is Britain's largest trade union, with 1.4 million members across the public sector. It has elected a socialist general secretary for the first time in its history. The incumbent, Christina McAnea, a close Starmer ally, lost decisively: 59.82% to 40.18%. A senior Labour source told the Huffington Post it was an 'absolute fucking disaster.' Another party insider: 'The biggest trade union in the country has gone to the hard left for the first time ever.'

They're right to worry. Egan was expelled from the Labour Party in 2022 for sharing articles from Socialist Appeal. She has denied membership of the Revolutionary Communist Party, but the association stuck. She has pledged to take only a social worker's wage, donating the difference between that and the £181,000 general secretary package back to the union's strike fund. She promises a 'comprehensive review' of UNISON's relationship with Labour that includes the possibility of disaffiliation. She has called what is happening in Gaza genocide and moved a motion at the 2025 Labour conference demanding a full arms embargo on Israel.

This is real. But so are the structural obstacles that will determine whether Egan's victory produces transformation or becomes another chapter in the familiar story of left leaders absorbed by bureaucratic machinery.

The 7% Problem

Start with the turnout. Egan won 58,579 votes. That sounds substantial until you remember UNISON has 1,404,684 members. Her victory came on a 7% turnout: the lowest in the union's history, down from 10.5% in 2020 and 9.8% in 2015. Her share of the total membership is 4.2%.

This is not a technical detail. It shapes everything that follows. Egan has a mandate from the activist layer that voted. The bureaucracy can argue, and will argue, that her radical programme does not have the backing of the 'silent majority.' A 4.2% mandate provides little protection against an entrenched apparatus that controls resources, staff deployment, and the machinery of implementation.

Ernest Mandel understood this dynamic precisely. The trade union bureaucracy thrives on membership passivity. A union that only engages 7% of its members in a leadership election is a union where the rank and file is functionally decoupled from top decision-making. The bureaucratic layer, with its own material interests in institutional stability, fills that vacuum.

Cohabitation with the Enemy

The structural problem goes deeper. In June 2025, six months before Egan's victory, the left coalition Time For Real Change lost control of UNISON's National Executive Council. The right-wing 'Members Together' grouping, alongside 'independents' who vote with the right, now holds the NEC majority. Egan has the general secretary's office. Her opponents control the governing body.

This 'cohabitation' creates a structural trap. The NEC approves budgets. The NEC authorises major spending shifts. The NEC controls the Labour Link committee. Disaffiliating from Labour would require a rulebook-level change at National Delegate Conference; Rule J governing the Political Fund requires a two-thirds majority of delegates. Egan cannot unilaterally disaffiliate even if she wanted to.

The obstruction has already begun. During the election period itself, the outgoing administration advertised a new Assistant General Secretary position: a 'Chief Operating Officer' role with a closing date of 19 December 2025, just 48 hours after the election results were announced. Egan's supporters read this as an attempt to install a loyalist in day-to-day operations before she takes office. The staff machine backed McAnea. Senior officials, sector heads, regional secretaries: this layer of 1,200 permanent employees does not disappear because a socialist won an election.

The Gap Between Rules and Reality

There is often a gap between formal rules and lived experience. On paper, UNISON's industrial action decisions are made by elected lay committees, not staff. The general secretary has no unilateral power to call national action against the NEC's will. For local and employer-specific disputes, regional secretaries and officers draft reports and recommendations, but formal authorisation for official industrial action is a lay decision, normally taken by NEC-delegated committees.

In practice, officials' reports can slow or derail disputes without ever formally vetoing them. Regional secretaries play a gatekeeping role because their reports carry heavy weight with the lay committees that authorise action. A dispute where officials recommend rejection rarely survives the committee stage. The argument here is about that practical power, not a denial of the lay structures' formal authority.

This distinction matters for understanding Egan's constraints. She cannot simply call national strikes over NEC opposition. Her leverage is moral authority, staff deployment within her gift, encouraging local disputes, and conference motions. She can encourage a proliferation of local action that corners the NEC politically, but constitutional fiat is not available to her.

The Paul Holmes Wound

Time For Real Change did not lose the NEC by accident. The Paul Holmes affair handed the right a weapon they exploited ruthlessly.

Holmes was elected UNISON President by the left NEC in June 2021, while still suspended by his employer. In November 2019, while the right still controlled the NEC, fifteen Kirklees UNISON branch representatives and staff, mostly women and self-identified left-wingers, had made complaints of bullying, threatening behaviour, and harassment against him. TFRC's leadership, including Socialist Party members and other left activists, was heavily criticised for backing Holmes while minimising or dismissing these complaints. In December 2021, UNISON lifted its internal suspension without taking disciplinary action.

Holmes was summarily dismissed by Kirklees Council on 2 February 2022 for gross misconduct and stripped of all union positions later that year. His Employment Tribunal claim for unfair dismissal was heard in June 2023 and unanimously rejected. The tribunal found the reason for dismissal was conduct, specifically bullying, intimidating, and manipulative behaviour toward colleagues, rather than trade union victimisation. But the political damage was done. TFRC's handling of the 'Kirklees 15' complaints allowed the right to campaign on 'union integrity' and paint the left as anti-democratic and protective of bullies. Socialist Party analysis acknowledges this contributed significantly to the 2025 NEC defeat.

The issue is less the affiliation of individual leaders than the tendency of broad left formations to close ranks around senior figures facing credible allegations, thereby gifting the right a powerful 'integrity' narrative. Left formations that fail to handle internal accountability seriously do not just betray the complainants. They arm their political opponents with ammunition that can take years to exhaust.

The Self-Organised Groups: Untapped Terrain

UNISON has a majority female membership and significant Black and LGBT+ representation, organised through self-organised groups with their own national conferences and committees. These are dense activist networks: precisely the infrastructure a left leadership needs to bypass bureaucratic obstruction.

Historically, national self-organised group committees have tended to be integrated into the Labour-aligned centre rather than acting as a distinct radical pole. In the 2025 general secretary election, the national LGBT+ committee endorsed Egan, while other national SOG leaderships are reported by activists to have supported McAnea. Egan's record on trans rights and her championing of the 'disabled workers' passport' and 'trans-ally training' during her 2022 presidency were cited as key factors for LGBT+ support.

The LGBT+ endorsement underlines that, with sustained political work, self-organised groups can become channels for a more combative rank-and-file current rather than passive terrain. If TFRC wants to rebuild NEC strength before June 2027, knitting SOG structures into the broader left project, rather than treating them as separate identity silos, would be a strategic priority.

What Actually Works: Pay Fair for Patient Care

Against this bleak structural picture, one element of Egan's record offers genuine hope. The 'Organising to Win' programme she championed as president delivered measurable results.

In 2024, UNISON recruited 200,000 new members, achieving net growth of 40,000 after accounting for retirements and departures. The union also recruited 4,000 new workplace activists, a 10% increase in activist strength. The 'Pay Fair for Patient Care' campaign won over £100 million, possibly closer to £200 million, in backdated pay increases for healthcare assistants in NHS trusts. In the East Midlands alone, the 'Put Our Banding Right' campaign recruited 3,058 healthcare support workers through re-grading victories. These are not paper victories. They are material gains won through workplace-rooted organising.

The model matters more than the numbers. Pay Fair worked because it recruited healthcare assistants on the basis of specific wage injustice: being under-graded or denied proper banding under Agenda for Change provisions. It developed new activists and reps in wards through 'organising conversations' rather than servicing from officials. It built collective grievances with industrial leverage. It amplified local victories nationally.

This is the template. Egan knows how to build rank-and-file infrastructure when she has institutional support. The question is whether TFRC can replicate this model across sectors, independently of the general secretary's office, as permanent infrastructure rather than one-off campaigns.

The Decisive Question: What Is TFRC?

Time For Real Change is a left grouping in UNISON that won the NEC majority in 2021. It is not a formal coalition of revolutionary organisations. The Socialist Party operates separately, sometimes supporting TFRC candidates, sometimes running its own candidates in competition, and frequently criticising TFRC for insufficient radicalism on questions like Labour councils implementing cuts. SWP members like Karen Reissmann have participated through TFRC slates. The boundaries are fluid, the coordination informal.

Karen Reissmann herself illustrates the complexity. A psychiatric nurse and long-standing UNISON health activist in the Manchester Community and Mental Health branch, she was dismissed in 2007 for whistleblowing on NHS privatisation and suspended from union office in 2018 for opposing the national NHS pay deal. She has served on the NEC through TFRC, but her political home is the SWP. The organised revolutionary left’s presence in UNISON is mediated through these personal relationships rather than formal structures.

But the organisational composition of the UNISON left matters less than its strategic character. TFRC currently operates primarily as an electoral coalition. It mobilises for NEC and general secretary elections. It holds meetings. It issues slates. What it does not do, and what no tendency on the UNISON left has yet built, is permanent cross-branch infrastructure: steward networks, educational programmes, independent publications, strike funds separate from the official machinery.

Compare this to the Teamsters for a Democratic Union in the United States. TDU spent decades building workplace infrastructure before Sean O’Brien’s 2022 victory. When O’Brien won, he inherited an organised rank-and-file network that could pressure his administration from below. When that pressure has been lacking, as on the Amazon campaign, the limitations have been visible.

The UNISON left has no equivalent infrastructure. Egan’s victory came through an electoral coalition that will now demobilise until the next election. The pattern is consistent. Left victory at the top without independent rank-and-file infrastructure produces left management of bureaucratic structures, not transformation of them.

The Serwotka Precedent

Mark Serwotka won the PCS general secretaryship in 2000 as a left candidate. He has held the position for nearly twenty-five years. PCS has conducted significant industrial action under his leadership, including coordinated strikes with other civil service unions.

Yet PCS remains a union where member engagement is low, where the activist layer is thin, and where the general secretary's office operates largely independently of rank-and-file pressure. Serwotka has been a competent left administrator of a union structure he inherited. He has not transformed it.

Sharon Graham's Unite trajectory tells a similar story. Graham won in 2021 on a platform of workplace organising over political manoeuvrings. Her administration has delivered significant victories: the Port Talbot dispute, major pay settlements, aggressive employer confrontations. Yet Unite's internal structures remain largely unchanged. Member participation is still low. Branch infrastructure is still weak. The union's capacity depends on Graham's office, not on permanent rank-and-file organisation.

If this is the best case, if left leadership produces competent militancy without structural transformation, is it worth celebrating? The answer is yes, with caveats. Material gains for workers matter. Strikes that win matter. But unless the underlying infrastructure changes, the gains depend on individual leaders and can be reversed when those leaders leave or are defeated.

The Test

Egan takes office soon, on 22 January 2026. The current NEC term expires at the conclusion of the National Delegate Conference on 18 June 2027. That is eighteen months to reverse the 2025 NEC defeat, rebuild TFRC's credibility after the Holmes affair, consolidate Organising to Win's infrastructure, and deliver visible material gains that demonstrate the difference left leadership makes.

The government will not cooperate. Starmer's Treasury has funded only 2.8% pay increases; anything above requires 'efficiency savings' from employers. Pay review bodies provide cover for below-inflation settlements. The political will for confrontation with Britain's largest union exists, even if the rhetorical style differs from Thatcherism.

Egan's test cases are clear. NHS pay: can she deliver industrial action that shifts the Treasury position? Local government: can restoration of cuts to terms and conditions be won? Labour Link: will the 'comprehensive review' produce genuine disaffiliation debate, or cosmetic renegotiation? Palestine: will UNISON's resources be deployed for material solidarity, or just conference motions?

The answer depends on what TFRC does now. Not what Egan does. What the activists who put her there do next.

Some activists contest descriptions of TFRC's internal balance or the weight of particular tendencies; the focus here is on how the coalition has operated in practice during the Holmes affair and the NEC battles, not on formal membership lists. But whatever TFRC's composition, the strategic imperative is the same. Build the infrastructure. Fund it yourselves. Track the promises. Publish the betrayals. Fight for structural reform, not just policy change. Or watch another left victory absorbed by the machinery it was supposed to transform.

The choice is theirs.

P.S. Initally, we mistakenly published the first draft of this document rather than final draft. Our apologies go to those who worked on that draft, and our thanks go to readers who pointed out our errors.