At their best, Trade Unions act in the best interests of their members, the Union represent these workers to management and to elected politicians airing the workers grievances and putting their cases. A good Trade Union strives to gain for their members the best and safest working conditions that can be achieved in their particular industry and that the members are recompensed fairly for the jobs they do. If the place where you work is as safe as possible, has adequate heat, light and ventilation and where your wages are correctly calculated and you do not work excessive hours, then you can to a large extent thank the generations of Union men and women who have campaigned for such things.

It was these Union members, some long departed from this world, who stood up not just for the rights of their contemporaries to have better conditions and fairer pay, but also for you in their future. We benefit, sometimes without knowing or being aware of it, from the hard work and determination of groups of workers who gathered together in order to be better able to confront the bosses that were exploiting them. When you walk into your modern and relatively safe workplace knowing that you will be paid on time and in full, then you stand on the shoulders of those known and unknown individuals who combined together, at risk of gaol or transportation, to demand better working conditions and pay.

But not all Trade Union activity has been for the best. Those of us who remember the 1970’s recall a time when the British economy is wracked by strikes and other industrial action commanded by overmighty Union leaders. We were subjected to power cuts because the miners were not digging up coal because of a wage dispute. In 1974 industry had to go on a three day week where industrial electricity users were limited to three consecutive days of electricity in order for there to be enough coal generated electricity to go around. I recognise that at the time the Trade Unions were largely trying to get their members wages to keep place with the appalling levels of inflation that Britain suffered from at the time, but their actions did not endear Trade Unions to the public and in 1979 the public voted for Margaret Thatcher who then set about dismantling many of the freedoms that Trade Unions had had and placed restrictions on Trade Union activities. This has resulted in the current situation where Trade Union membership in the private sector, even in industries where workers are being exploited, is piteously low when compared to the situation in for example 1975.

In the public sector the picture is radically different. In this sector the Unions have a simulacrum of what life was like in the 1970’s as they have many more members, more influence, more sympathetic management to deal with and Unions that have more money than those whose members work in the private sector. The problem is that with this power, financial, industrial and political in the hands of union leaders, there is the possibility of corrupt or seemingly corrupt or dishonest practises becoming established. A powerful Trade Union, especially if its members are concentrated in an essential service such as the Fire Brigades for example, can bring an awful lot of political and industrial influence to the table when it comes activities such as negotiation between employers and the union. After all nobody wants to have their house burn down because firefighters are on strike and the fire service cover is being provided by overstretched and less than adequately trained service personnel. The lack of viable alternatives to the services provided by the members of the Fire Brigades Union gives both the Union and the firefighters a massive advantage when bargaining with employers.

Unfortunately this power, both political and financial, that the Fire Brigades Union (FBU) has may have created, at the top of this union, a coterie of union officers who have created for themselves almost unassailable political and organisational positions. The union leadership have, because they’ve managed, mostly successfully, to battle to defend their members, put themselves in positions where they are subjected to little in the way of accountability to members. They can do what they like and maybe spend what they like.

The issue of spending by the leadership of the Fire Brigades Union has been an issue for some dissident members of the FBU for some time. The remoteness from members and the lack of accountability of the leadership has led to the formation of a group within the FBU that aims to change that and this group is called the Campaign for a Democratic FBU (CDFBU).

Those behind and who are members of the CDFBU have attempted to gain access to the FBU’s accounts which is something they are legally entitled to do as they’ve had concerns that the FBU’s money, money that it gets from members, is not being properly spent. Unfortunately the FBU have been less than helpful to those FBU members who want to look at the accounts of the Union that they fund. The FBU management have put a number of blocks in the way of union members who want to inspect the union’s accounts including high fees for access and stonewalling using data protection as an excuse.

The CDFBU had to take legal action and bring their concerns about the FBU’s finances to the Government’s Trade Union Certification Office, which is part of the Trade Ministry the BIS. Mrs Sarah Bedwell, the Certification Officer has ordered the FBU to open up the books of the FBU so that members of the Union including the CDFBU, can look at the accounts.

In a statement the CDFBU said:

LEADERS OF THE Fire Brigades Union (FBU) have LOST their legal bid to suppress details of how they have personally spent the union’s funds. In a written judgement, handed down today (11 March 2022), the official regulator for trade unions – known as the ‘certification officer’ – ruled that senior officials had no reasonable expectation of privacy on questions of how they had spent the union’s money, and ordered them to open the books.

The verdict comes after a sustained attempt over 10 months by the FBU leadership to prevent a member of the union (who is also a member of the Campaign for a Democratic FBU steering committee) from exercising his legal right to inspect the union’s accounting records.

After his request met with repeated obstruction and delay, the member submitted a complaint to the certification officer, who has the power to investigate complaints by union members and, if necessary, impose penalties on unions and order them to comply with their statutory obligations. The complaint was considered on 22 February.

As I said before when the leadership of a trade union has too much power and there is a lack of accountability to members then all manner of untoward things can happen. A union controlled by a small clique with little in the way of effective challenge from either members or other union officers could for example embark on a political path that is not one that is shared by the membership or spend money on dubious causes or items.

If what the CDFBU is alleging has gone on within the FBU is in any way correct then there is probably going to be a big scandal that comes from these allegations. Here are some of the allegations made by the CDFBU which come from the CDFBU’s press release:

The request was made in the light of growing concerns over a lack of accountability and transparency in the area of internal FBU finance.

A number of controversial spending decisions by the union leadership – some of which even reached the pages of Private Eye magazine – have come to light over the past couple of years, including:

• the payment of large sums of “hush money” to a string of departing FBU employees – some of whom had made allegations of mistreatment
• colossal donations to politicians and political parties without any consultation with members or local committees
• the purchase of expensive fitness equipment solely for the personal use of a senior official

It looks to me like a massive mess within the FBU is about to be properly exposed. It certainly seems to me as if there might be senior FBU staff and officials who are treating the union’s funds like a personal piggybank. It’s never good for any organisation to have employees personal expenditure being shoved onto the company’s books let alone a voluntary one like a Trade Union that relies on members contributions to keep going. Whilst it’s right and proper that TU officials get recompense for out of pocket expenses that they’ve incurred, I fail to see any way that the buying of an exercise bike for a senior union officer costing approximately £2000 is a justifiable expense. An enormous amount of money has also allegedly been spent on paying people to not speak about what has gone on inside the upper echelons of the FBU which brings to fore the question of: ‘What are the leadership hiding’?

The amount of money, £200k, that has been spent by the union on the then Corbyn led Labour Party is eye-watering. This figure appears not to include £25k that was donated to the far left MP Rebecca Long-Daily. I must admit that is a lot of money to give to an MP who is in the relatively safe seat of Salford and Eccles and may already have a good chance of winning (the seat has been Labour since its creation in 2010 and both predecessor seats were solid Labour as well). Surely that money might have been better spent on supporting a candidate in a much more difficult to win seat?

There’s allegedly been a lot of political spending going on by the FBU but it’s normal for Trade Unions to sponsor Labour candidates or Labour MP’s, after all Labour did start out as the ‘Labour Representation Committee. What’s odd and none too wholesome about the FBU’s gift of money to the Labour Party and Labour MP’s is that there is alleged to be little if any consultation with the membership or the branches about this sort of spending. It might well be the case that the members wanted Corbyn’s Labour supported and desired money to go to Rebecca Long-Daily or maybe wanted the political funds spent elsewhere? The problem is we do not know because the membership appears to have had little say in any decisions of this nature.

The FBU scandal is one that has been brewing for some time. As this story unfolds out I suspect that what will happen is more will be uncovered and revealed about the goings on in the FBU and I doubt that what will come out will show the union being managed well.

I feel for the ordinary members who are seeing their union departing from what they should be doing which is looking after the interests of members who do after all work in a pretty dangerous job. These ordinary firemen and women deserve to have a trade union that does stuff like strive for better pay, working conditions and increased safety for their members and not one that splashes members cash on fancy exercise bikes for senior union officers or unilaterally throw money at Corbyn’s Labour Party and left-wing MP’s.

The FBU looks very much like a union that has gone bad. A union where the leadership act like kings and the membership are the political equivalent of serfs paying for it all. It sounds to me as if the FBU needs an urgent injection of democracy in order to replace a seemingly complacent union management with those who will fight for the rights of firefighters and for effective nationwide fire service coverage. It seems as if the top donkeys need to go and the lions from below, from the branches of the union right down to the individual members, need to find better individuals to take their place.