It’s easy to forget, amid the media theatre and legal wrangling, what a trade union is for. Not a debating society for careerists. Not a patronage network for the party-political centre. A trade union exists to organise workers around their common interests and that’s a job for its members, not just its officials.
The row over Matt Wrack’s appointment as General Secretary of the NASUWT has become a gift to every reactionary columnist in the country. A “frightening 1970s socialist”, we’re told. Not a teacher. Not the right kind of bureaucrat. But when did general secretaries become personalities in need of curating? Wrack’s job is to run the union’s machinery and enact the decisions of its membership, not to perform the role of respectable technocrat in the eyes of the Education Secretary.
Too many unions today are top-heavy: national executives act like corporate boards; general secretaries cultivate a following; and the actual members are reduced to occasional voters. But the rank and file should be the sovereign force in any trade union. Local branches—not newspaper columnists or party grandstanders—ought to be setting the tempo. It is branch delegates who must decide the line on strikes, mergers, and leadership, not whisper networks or hostile hacks.
That doesn’t mean the apparatus doesn’t matter. Paid officials are vital. So is a competent general secretary. But these roles exist to support member-led democracy, not to substitute for it. The general secretary is, at root, a senior administrator. The fact that Wrack was a firefighter rather than a teacher is irrelevant unless you think in the previous Tory government that Gavin Williamson and Nadhim Zahawi were well-qualified for education.
The real scandal isn’t that Wrack is “too political” it’s that union democracy has been eroded to the point that appointments can be parachuted in, contested only after legal pressure. If the membership backs Wrack in an open vote, that’s their prerogative. But process matters. Elections must be fair, open, and under the control of the membership, not shaped by backroom fixes, and certainly not by the Tory/right wing press.
We should reject both the corporate model of trade unionism and the managerial liberalism that sneers at socialists for being socialists. A fighting union doesn’t necessarily need a celebrity leader, it needs militant democracy at every level. If Wrack is committed to that, then his background shouldn’t matter. What should matter is whether he’s ready to take his lead from the members and not speak over them.
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