The election of Unite’s Executive Committee is underway and the ballot closes on 27 April. Elaine Graham-Leigh examines the positions of the two competing slates

In the same way that local council election results are influenced by public opinion on the government, union executive council elections are always to some extent referenda on their general secretaries. In the case of Unite’s 2026 EC election, running until 27 April, this is particularly marked, with one slate, Back to the Workplace, standing on the slogan ‘I support Sharon Graham. Change must continue.’ The opposing slate, Members United, is not so open, but for those in the know, their statement that ‘we will make sure the Executive Council comes together to solve problems and put members first’ promises a move away from the split and fractious EC since Sharon Graham’s election as General Secretary in 2021.

The balance of forces between the two slates is hard to judge ahead of the election result, although the fact that Members United’s slate includes some who were previously Graham supporters may be a straw in the wind. Given the likely low turnout, whether the result will reflect the views of the majority of Unite’s membership is also unclear. What is more certain is that there will remain much work to do to shift Unite to be the fighting union we need.

Sharon Graham was elected as General Secretary on the promise of ‘no more blank cheques’ for Labour and a return to bread-and-butter trade-union work rather than politics. She has indeed been hostile to Labour, as shown most recently by the 40% cut in the membership fees paid by Unite to Labour in March 2026. While speeches about how ‘workers are scratching their heads asking whose side are Labour on, who do they really represent, because it certainly isn’t workers’ may have a certain ring to them, it’s important to understand the basis for Graham’s attitude to the government. Despite the fact that she stood for General Secretary as a left-wing candidate, her stance on political work by the union means that she is effectively opposing Labour from the right, not from the left.

This has been particularly clear when it comes to militarism. In February 2026, Starmer gave a speech to the Munich Security Conference in which he talked up the threat of European war with Russia and called for greater spending on defence. Graham’s reaction was not to condemn this drive to war but to complain that the government were not moving fast enough on defence spending and should ‘act swiftly and decisively’ to ensure jobs for Unite members. It’s a similar position on the climate crisis. Unite’s campaign on North Sea oil and gas, headlined ‘there can be no jobless transition,’ seems to give a reasonable nod to ideas of just transition. Since the detail talks about defending oil and gas jobs and changing policies which are causing the decline of the oil and gas industry, it seems however to be less about transition and more about using the idea of a threat to Unite members’ jobs to justify taking the political position which is the least threat to the status quo.

Under Graham’s leadership, Unite’s withdrawal from political campaigning has been marked and deliberate. Unite officials have been prevented from speaking on Palestine demonstrations and were even told not to attend with Unite banners and in early 2025 it suspended its affiliation to Stop the War. Pressure from rank-and-file Unite members has managed to shift the union’s position on Palestine, such that the 2025 policy conference passed a statement supporting sanctions against Israel and agreeing that Unite members refusing to handle Israeli goods would be supported by the union. This hasn’t however resolved the wider issue of Unite’s involvement in the movement. The Unite balloons have still been conspicuous by their absence on Palestine demonstrations and even on the Together Alliance anti-fascist march in March 2026, where the Unite mobilisation was weak compared to Unite blocks on similar demos in the past.

The Back to the Workplace argument would be that Unite absenting itself from political struggle has been worth it for Unite members. What we lose in the wider movement we make up for in industrial militancy, with ‘half a billion [pounds?] won as a result of successful disputes’ and hundreds of millions more from settlements. This may be so, although it’s a general enough statement that it can’t be fact-checked with much certainty, but the role that the Unite leadership under Sharon Graham has played in industrial disputes hasn’t always been a good one.

There has been no campaign to win or strategy against plant closures and thousands of redundancies at the Vauxhall plant in Luton, at Port Talbot or Grangemouth. The conviction that anything that looks left-wing political must be avoided at all costs has also meant that solidarity actions around the Birmingham bin strike, like the mega pickets, were left to forces outside the union to organise. Unite was prepared to make propaganda moves like expelling Angela Raynor from the union over the strike, but was much less keen on moves which would have genuinely spread the action and increased the pressure on the council and the government. It’s now been revealed that they have been in talks with Reform to discuss how to end the strike if Reform takes control of the council in May’s local elections. As it turns out, a union policy which eschews politics for industrial disputes ends up weakening both. The union which fights hard and successfully on the industrial front but which doesn’t take a political role in the movement is a myth.

Neither slate for the EC election ends up making more than token nods towards the political trade-union work from which Unite has stepped away under Sharon Graham and to which it needs to return. Some Members United candidates do mention Gaza in their individual statements, but the general slate statement restricts itself to truisms like ‘Unite members urgently need a strong, united union that has our back — and wins for us’: undeniable, but hardly a way for rank-and-file members to differentiate one slate from the other.

One mystery is the absence of the right in the union. The right-wing candidate in the 2021 General Secretary election, Gerard Coyne, came last, but still with 28% of the vote, so there is the question of where have those right-wing, engaged members gone? It could be of course that they have joined the vast majority who ignore internal union elections, but that’s not the only possibility. There are some claims that Members United represents a coalition between United Left and the right, but there doesn’t seem to be much evidence for this. What is more likely is that Sharon Graham’s policies have given the right what they wanted: a union which withdrew from political action. Unite’s disastrous approach under Sharon Graham means that voting for the Members United slate is the only sensible choice in this EC election. Beyond this election though, Members United will have to promote genuine left-wing politics over vacuous calls for unity if it is to rebuild a genuine, fighting left that can take back Unite.