The Free Speech Union (FSU) recently dealt with a shocking case involving one of our members — let’s call him TJ — who was being investigated by his employer for some perceived transgression in a work email. Nothing particularly shocking about that these days, you might think — except that TJ was being investigated because his own trade union had shopped him to management.
TJ’s troubles began when his union branch asked for feedback on the adoption of gender-neutral pronouns across all internal policies. He then made the mistake of providing some, the problem being that while his opinions were perfectly reasonable, they were also gender-critical. With that, union officials launched a disciplinary process against him, pausing only to excavate his social media accounts with the aim of uncovering more crimes, which they then reported to his employer.
Historically, of course, unions have championed the principle (sometimes to a fault) that “an injury to one is an injury to all”, standing in solidarity with workers against bosses. But at the FSU we’ve seen any number of cases that prove just how historical this is. Nowadays, workers under investigation for expressing entirely lawful views that dissent from middle-class orthodoxies are more likely to be left to fight alone by the union to which they pay dues in exchange for support. And that’s if they’re lucky. If they’re not — like TJ — the union will join in with, or even initiate, the opposition against them.
In 2024 a group of nurses in Darlington raised concerns with NHS management about a colleague who, despite presenting as female, wasn’t taking female hormones or transitioning medically and had openly talked of trying to get a girlfriend pregnant. When the nurses mentioned their discomfort at having to undress in changing rooms with someone they considered to be a man, HR instructed them to “be re-educated”, “broaden their mindset” and “be more inclusive”.
Eventually, the nurses launched a legal case alleging sexual harassment, and the Health Secretary Wes Streeting gave them a sympathetic hearing in Westminster, saying that something has “gone wrong in our society” and vowing to “deal with it”.
Matt North, the head of the nurses’ union Unison, then snapped into action — not to do anything so old-school as to back his members, but to attack them on X: “It is deeply concerning that Wes Streeting appears to be pandering to anti-trans bigotry,” he wrote. “I stand, as Unison President, with the Trans community.”
Or how about Tim Luckhurst, Principal of South College at Durham University? In 2021, Professor Luckhurst faced an inquiry by the university’s management for branding a staged student walkout from a speech by Spectator columnist Rod Liddle as “pathetic”. The response of his University and College Union (UCU) was to declare that “the University’s response does not go far enough”, to demand a “formal HR investigation” that would “consider the full range of appropriate disciplinary action” — and to insist that, in the meantime, he “should not be interacting with students in a pastoral role”.
More recently, a public sector worker was dismissed for gross misconduct after “supporting far-right activity” on Facebook, i.e. liking a video that expressed unease about unchecked illegal immigration and called for democratic engagement with local councillors. Perhaps naively, the worker (who wishes to remain anonymous) contacted their union for support and was, you’ve guessed it, refused support because of their “far-right associations”. Only with the FSU’s backing did they regain their job when we helped them draft a detailed appeal, which, among other things, noted that their concerns about mass immigration have been echoed by senior civil servants, academic researchers and, just a few weeks ago, Sir Keir Starmer.
How did trade unions, once such staunch defenders of their members against employers, become management’s allies in enforcing ideological conformity?
Perhaps most notoriously of all, there’s the also anonymous Batley Grammar School teacher forced into hiding after he received death threats for showing religious studies students a cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad. When he was suspended from his job, with the headteacher apologising “unequivocally” to the local community, the teaching unions remained silent. Mary Bousted, head of the largest one, the National Education Union, found time over the following weekend to retweet about Brexit’s effects on cheese exports – but had nothing at all to say about the situation in Batley.
So how did we get here? How did trade unions, once such staunch defenders of their members against employers, become management’s allies in enforcing ideological conformity?
The answer lies in the rise of what’s known in sociology circles as the professional managerial class (PMC) and its profound influence over the cultural and ideological priorities of modern unions.
This in turn is due to broader changes within the movement. Since its peak in 1979, when more than 13 million UK workers were unionised, membership has fallen by more than half. As a result, it’s HR departments that now call most of the shots in worker relations, stoutly championing the notions of “inclusivity” and “safetyism” — which prioritises protecting workers from “harm”, including the sort that’s seemingly caused by hearing views they disagree with.
Unions, defeated in the great industrial battles of the 1980s and scrambling for a role ever since, have apparently seen no option but to align themselves with such HR priorities. Luckily, these tend to reflect those of the well-educated, middle-class professionals now dominating their numbers. It’s no coincidence, therefore, that safetyism’s sway is particularly strong in the public sector, where union membership remains comparatively high. In education, for instance, 46.9 per cent of the workforce is unionised; for health and social work the figure is 38.2 per cent.
Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) may guarantee the right to freedom of expression. The UK courts may have consistently affirmed that this freedom extends to speech that “offends, shocks or disturbs” — and that restrictions on it in the workplace require exceptionally strong justification. But many unions, it seems, beg to differ.
Margaret Thatcher famously called striking miners “the enemy within”. Today, unions often cast their own dissenting members in the same light, with speech that differs from the orthodoxy seen not as a right to defend, but as a crime to punish.
As Catherine Liu puts it in her 90-page polemic, Virtue Hoarders: The Case Against the Professional Managerial Class, the PMC have become a class that “fights culture wars against the classes below while currying favour with the capitalists it once despised… Ideologically convinced of [their] own unassailable position as comprising the most advanced people the earth has ever seen… PMC elites try to tell the rest of us how to live.”
And, for that matter, how to speak. Hence the rise of workplace speech codes, which unions have enthusiastically both welcomed and adopted — again on the grounds of “harm prevention”, but with the handy side effect of projecting their proud PMC affiliation with progressive norms.
In this context, the Employment Rights Act 1999, which guarantees individual workers the right to be accompanied by a union representative in disciplinary hearings, may be less of a boon for employees than it was intended to be. This right is rooted in the assumption (not, on the face of it, an outrageous one) that unions are inherently worker-friendly. But what if the new middle-class unions aren’t — especially when it comes to the kind of workers who traditionally made up what was once called “the rank and file”? The kind whose views, while wholly lawful, probably aren’t expressed much at north London dinner-parties? No wonder that those who fall foul of contemporary middle-class pieties so often find themselves facing disciplinary procedures alone.
Or in some cases — as with poor old TJ — find themselves facing procedures from their own unions. A firefighter and full-time official in the Fire Brigades Union (FBU) for 11 years, Paul Embery spoke at a Leave Means Leave rally in 2019. Addressing the crowd in Parliament Square, he criticised the Labour movement’s abandonment of Euroscepticism and called on union leaders to align themselves with the democratic will of the people.
Two weeks later, the FBU launched an internal investigation, ultimately sacking Mr Embery as an Executive Council member and barring him from standing as a union official for two years for contradicting its anti-Brexit policy.
Eventually, in 2022, Mr Embery took the union to an employment tribunal and won a claim for unfair dismissal after what the tribunal described as a “witch-hunt” against him.
If you want a handy metaphor for the increasing chasm between today’s union leaders and their traditional working-class membership, try this. While the teachers’ unions were resolutely maintaining their radio silence over Batley, a branch of Unite representing binmen in Bury stepped forward, submitting an emergency motion for the National Conference of Trade Union Councils to support the suspended teacher.
As the branch’s secretary, Brian Bamford, explained: “This is a motion which has come in from binmen, from ordinary working-class people. As far as I can see, staying silent goes contrary to what we believe in at our branch, and especially in the trade congress. We are affiliated to the Orwell Society, and freedom of expression is very important.”
The image of binmen — “ordinary working-class people” — championing the free speech of a teacher abandoned by the middle-class professionals at the education unions encapsulates the shift at the heart of the movement. It’s a shift that raises (and possibly answers) the question of whether unions can still be considered legitimate representatives of all their members — and particularly of those they seem to regard as rather embarrassing remnants of less enlightened times.
