Broken Rules, Silent Leaders: The Institutional Rot Inside UNISON
When UNISON allowed a biological male to stand for a seat reserved for disabled women, it broke trade union law and its own constitution. When seven nurses were harassed in their changing room, it looked the other way. Britain’s largest union has not merely lost its way; it has actively turned on the female members who fund it.
An institution is never truly tested by the glossy rhetoric of its annual conference, nor by the high-sounding platitudes of its press releases. It is tested by its rulebook. We understand instinctively that when a person breaks a solemn promise, that failure becomes the measure of their character. Yet we extend a strange, forgiving leniency to our institutions, whether they are governments, churches, or trade unions. We allow them to wrap themselves in the language of moral righteousness while ignoring the binding contracts they wrote when nobody was striking a pose.
UNISON, a union built on the dues of more than 1.3 million members, three-quarters of whom are women, wrote its constitution with unusual precision. Its drafters knew exactly what they were doing. They mandated that a branch Women’s Officer must be a woman. They stipulated that two of the union’s three top lay officers must be women. They carved out reserved, sex-based seats on the National Executive Council, including one specifically set aside for a disabled woman, to ensure that those with distinct, lived vulnerabilities held power that could not be quietly engineered away. Gender identity was placed elsewhere in the rulebook, under an entirely separate clause. The union’s founders understood the difference between biological sex and subjective identity, and they codified that boundary into law.
Somewhere between the rulebook and the ballot paper, the leadership chose to forget…
In February 2025, UNISON permitted Ellie Waple, a trans woman who is biologically male, to stand as a candidate for that reserved disabled woman’s seat. Two months later, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that “woman” and “sex” in the Equality Act mean biological sex. UNISON allowed the election to proceed regardless that May, with Waple on the ballot. Waple did not win, but the breach of principle was already complete. This month, Stephen Hardy, the Certification Officer and the statutory regulator for trade unions, issued a damning verdict: UNISON had broken both its own rulebook and the trade union law that requires organisations to enforce their own constitutions.
Waple has argued that the broader threat to women comes from concentrated wealth rather than trans people, and dismissed the Supreme Court ruling as undemocratic. That argument deserves a hearing, and members can weigh its merits for themselves. What it does not do is explain why a rule explicitly created to safeguard disabled women should be set aside for anyone. Yet UNISON’s official response to the regulator’s judgment spoke volumes. The union promised not to appeal, expressed deep concern for the impact on trans, non-binary, and gender-diverse members, and offered total silence regarding the disabled women whose democratic representation had been compromised.
That silence was deliberate. Nobody drafts a public statement without noticing who has been left out of it.
Trade union broke law by letting trans woman stand for female-only role
UNISON’s failure with the Darlington nurses follows the same script. Seven nurses at Darlington Memorial Hospital asked for nothing more than the right to change their clothes without a biological male present in their changing room. Their union did not back them. They were reported instead to the Nursing and Midwifery Council, a body with the power to strip them of their livelihoods. When an employment tribunal ruled in January that County Durham and Darlington NHS Foundation Trust had subjected the nurses to unlawful harassment, UNISON was nowhere to be seen. Before the judgment, its then president, Steve North, attacked the health secretary for pandering to bigotry, for the offence of agreeing to meet the nurses.
After the judgment, UNISON issued a note stating the ruling was long and its own policies remained unchanged.
When a trade union views the basic statutory rights of working class women as an inconvenience to be managed rather than a principle to be defended, it has abandoned its founding purpose.
The Leadership’s Ideology
This failure is ideological. At UNISON’s national conference this June, Andrea Egan openly rejected the highest court in the land, telling delegates that the Supreme Court ruling was wrong and that the union would continue to fight against what she termed unworkable legislation. She cited her personal background as the proud auntie of a trans nephew to justify her stance. A general secretary’s family life is her own private business. But using personal conviction to redirect the collective power of a 1.3-million-strong membership against the union’s own rulebook, and against the statutory rights of the women who fund it, is an abuse of the trust the union was built on.
Egan has since launched a formal campaign against the EHRC guidance, openly lobbying MPs and declaring that UNISON will fight to change the law on legal gender recognition. Her claimed mandate rests on just 600 members writing to the union, yet she presents this as justification for challenging a legal settlement reached unanimously by the Supreme Court. The Court stripped trans people of no existing rights: gender reassignment remains a protected characteristic under the Equality Act. What it restored was something women had been denied for years, legal clarity that sex means biological sex. A union that mobilises to rewrite the law once women’s rights are finally clarified, while failing to defend female members when those rights are breached, has ceased to behave like a trade union and started behaving like an ideological campaign group.
This drift did not begin with the current leadership. Four years ago, at the National Delegate Conference in Brighton, delegates were asked to prioritise a motion framing concerns about single-sex spaces as far-right bigotry. The same pattern repeats, this month, across the whole movement. Stephen Flaherty’s solicitor has written to Paul Nowak, the TUC’s general secretary, asking him to lead a review of sex-based rules across every affiliated union rather than leave the matter to be fought seat by seat, complaint by complaint. The TUC’s reply amounted to a shrug: unions are sovereign bodies, responsible for their own rules, and the ruling would be given careful consideration. Meanwhile the Royal College of Nursing faces its own tribunal, brought by nurse Sandie Peggie, who alleges the union abandoned her after she stood up for single-sex changing facilities. Across the board, the leadership of the trade union movement has aligned itself against the very workforce it exists to represent.
During her campaign for election Andrea Egan was asked how she would react if a similar case came to Unison, Egan told Politics Home: “I haven’t followed that case.
“But what were the real issues within that? I have trans friends, trans women friends; my nephew is a trans man. I wouldn’t have an issue. I’d want to understand. Because the argument can then develop to anybody saying… ‘Well, I don’t want you there because you’ve got blonde hair’ or ‘I don’t want them there because they’ve got blue eyes’,” Egan says.
“We have members come to the union with all kinds of issues, and some of them are unreasonable, but you’ve got to unpick them.”
Asked if she would not be comfortable with the union representing someone like Peggie, Egan told the magazine: “I wouldn’t”.
There is a profound, uncomfortable truth here for anyone who considers themselves on the left. The British labour movement isn’t losing ground because employers have won the argument over wages, housing or workplace safety. Its own leading institutions have simply stopped making that argument at all. Solidarity, collective bargaining, and material conditions have been traded away for the vocabulary of institutional branding and moral posturing. A movement founded to redistribute power downward to the working class now spends its energy policing the language of its own members.
You cannot protect what you cannot define. Reem Alsalem, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls, warned the UN Human Rights Council that erasing the category of biological sex in favour of subjective identity leaves women’s specific vulnerabilities completely unprotected. When mothers are rebranded as birthing parents and women as menstruators, the institutions designed to shield them lose their capacity to act.
Trade unions exist for one single purpose: to give working people collective leverage against power. That leverage was built over generations on a solemn guarantee that the union stands with the member against the employer, without fear, favor, or ideological purity tests. A union that refuses to defend its female members, that ignores its own constitution to accommodate fashionable doctrine, and that treats the law of the land as a mere inconvenience has not simply lost its way.
It has decided its own members are the enemy, surrendered to ideological capture, and abandoned the very reason for its existence…
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