AT the end of last month, Andrea Egan, the Time for Real Change candidate, took up her position as the new Unison general secretary.
Unison is the largest union in Britain with some 1.3 million members, mainly working in the public sector.
The union was formed by the merger of three public sector unions in 1993. Since then, it has always been a moderate, though not right-wing, union in terms of its leadership.
Egan easily won the election by some 20,000 votes against the incumbent and Keir Starmer supporter, Christina McAnea (above), on December 17, 2025. Unseating a sitting general secretary is fairly unusual, but all the more so by somebody who was not already a national officer of that union. Egan was the president of Unison for one year between 2022 and 2023. This is a lay position.
In fact, Egan has been a branch secretary for the Unison local government branch in Bolton for many years, being a social worker by profession. The last time a grassroots union member became a general secretary of a major union was when Mark Serwotka won the leadership of the PCS union in 2000.
Without exception, and including Mark Brown on December 21, 2025 in the Sunday National, all the right-wing and left-wing media greeted her election as a significant setback for Starmer and Labour’s right wing.
This is because Unison is the Labour Party’s biggest union affiliate and has two seats on Labour’s governing body, its National Executive Committee. Indeed, some commentators put Egan’s victory on a scale of comparing it to Jeremy Corbyn’s election as Labour leader in 2015.
Not only was McAnea very supportive of Starmer despite her membership of the Communist Party in the early 1980s but Egan has put Labour on notice that there will be no more blank cheques – whether financial or otherwise – from Unison as it seeks to defend and advance its members’ interests.
Egan was expelled from Labour in 2022 for circulating left-wing articles on social media.
But now that this dust has settled, it’s time to look at how easy or difficult it will be for Egan to be that thorn in Starmer’s side that she wishes Unison to be.
One of the most obvious problems was the membership turnout in the election, being just 6.8%. This was down from previous Unison general secretary elections: 14.6% in 2015 and 10.4% in 2020.
This puts into context the 2.8% increase in the size of the electorate from 2020 and the left vote increasing by 5% since 2020. Egan will need members to be mobilised behind her programme for change if this is to become a manifest reality.Then there’s the issue of the Unison officialdom.
On January 9 this year, Chris Jenkinson was appointed as assistant general secretary, the postholder effectively being the chief operating officer. He was formerly the regional secretary for Unison East Midlands for six years and a supporter of the outgoing McAnea leadership.
Some argued that the appointment process should have been delayed, given that the nomination period for standing for general secretary ran from August 20 to September 26 last year, and the voting in the election began on October 28. The recruitment and selection for Jenkinson’s job began in October as well.
Presently, the right wing has a majority of 12 on the Unison National Executive. The Time for Real Change, the broad left grouping, did have a majority on the National Executive between 2021 and 2023, but subsequently lost this.
Whether the National Executive elections next April will go Egan’s way with a return of a majority for the Time For Real Change grouping remains to be seen. In the meantime, she will need to work to fissure the unity of the other groupings that supported McAnea.
Unison’s committee that conducts its relationship with Labour, called Labour Link, is dominated by McAnea supporters, so Egan’s “no blank cheques” position will be severely tested here.
FURTHER afield, five of Unison’s seven sectoral service groups, and 11 of Unison’s 12 regional councils supported McAnea’s nomination. However, at the union branch, Egan did much better, with 206 nominations to McAnea’s 270.
Egan will need to use this basis and that of the 58,579 members who voted for her to break through any likely opposition from the Unison officialdom.
Previous recent left-wingers like Unison presidents Paul Holmes and Steve North alleged they experienced the use of the machinery of the Unison officialdom against them.
All this, of course, will make it even harder for Egan to get Unison to form an alliance with the other left-wing unions like the Labour-affiliated FBU and UNITE and non-affiliated NEU and PCS to oppose Starmer and marginalise the influence of the far more Starmer-supporting unions like the GMB and USDAW.
All that said, there is at least some hope for change in Britain’s biggest union now that it has a radical left-wing leader.
Professor Gregor Gall is a research associate at the University of Glasgow
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