National conference 2022

The first face-to-face conference in 3 years was largely a positive one. Huge awareness was raised for the plight of refugees by our whole conference photo in refugees welcome t shirts – thanks to Alex Kenny for organising this. £5000 extra was raised and sent to Care4Calais to help with their fabulous work.

Daniel Kebede was an excellent President and his address to the Conference, centring on poverty and class, was superb.

Conference debated forty nine motions, passing all but two of them, the motions on War in Ukraine and breaking the TUC agreement with Unison and GMB on recruitment being the two that fell.

There were a number of new topics to the floor of Conference, most notably on Tackling Pornography (a brilliant speech from Amy Fletcher) and Mothers in Prison, and there will be some independent initiatives around these, and other key motions, over the next year.

At times it felt as though we were racing through motions too quickly – maybe this is a hang over from zoom conferences. Two examples were the debates on Motion 10 (Pay) and Motion 47 (VEVE and Organising), both of which will be integral to the success of the Union in the next period and were passed in less than twenty minutes – these motions did need more serious exposition, although credit is due to Phil Clarke for laying out the stakes on the pay ballot.

It is all very well deciding lots of policy at Conference, our task, and responsibility, is to take these to members in schools, to build support for our position and, where possible, translate them into activities that can make a difference. It has ever been thus.

Rule Changes: The way in which the debate on rule changes was presented made it difficult to present the case for the ones aimed at increasing representation and democracy in the Union. Simon Murch did a very good job on arguing for reducing the size of the Executive, but we never got the chance to put the case for increasing women’s representation in delegations. It just does not seem right that in a Union that is 75% female, our Conference is only 55% female – that needs to change and no doubt this topic will be returned to next year.