SO A NEW dawn beckons. Matt Wrack is out after 20 years at the helm of the Fire Brigades Union (FBU), and Steve Wright is the new general secretary.
Until around 18 months ago, it seemed highly unlikely that Wrack would be deposed. He had, for most of his period in office, enjoyed broad support from both the union machine and wider membership.
But, in the end, his defeat was almost inevitable. At its most senior levels, the union had become bogged down in constant infighting and strife – much of it attributable to Wrack’s personal leadership style – and there was endless negative publicity. The decision of the government’s trade union watchdog to launch a major investigation into the ‘hush money’ scandal – which centred on secret payments to FBU employees who had made complaints of workplace mistreatment and which reached the pages of Private Eye and was discussed by MPs in parliament – was, for many, the final straw.
Wrack’s support collapsed ‘gradually, then suddenly’, as the saying goes. The executive council turned heavily against him, as did a wide layer of previously-supportive officials across regions and brigades. It was obvious that these officials had concluded that Wrack’s time was up – and, in a nationwide ballot, members agreed.
With the writing so obviously on the wall – and especially after winning only 178 branch nominations to Wright’s 415 – it is difficult to fathom why Wrack, now in his sixties and having served four terms of office, didn’t choose to step down and depart on his own terms rather than fight on and be forced out. From the outside, it appeared that he had succumbed to the hubris that so often afflicts those who have grown used to being in power and cannot imagine anyone else filling their shoes. That he couldn’t even bring himself to pay tribute to Steve Wright in his departure statement, or wish him and the union well for the future, was perhaps a sign of this. It certainly looked churlish.
Wrack’s period as leader was not without its successes. There were victories on pensions, some impressive work on contaminants and a successful defence of national collective bargaining. But, as those who knew him longest will attest, when it came to internal democracy, accountability and transparency, Wrack ended up becoming everything he once opposed. Once the great campaigner for all of these things – indeed, he was elected in the first place largely because of his commitment to them – they were all eroded on his watch.
Minutes of executive council meetings effectively kept under lock and key; elected national officers departing mid-term and without explanation; the rule book thrown at dissenters; top lawyers enlisted to help block scrutiny by members of the union’s financial records; annual conference treated as a sideshow (and not even recalled during the 2022-23 national pay dispute); attempts to have national officers appointed rather than elected (and then refusing to run the elections when annual conference disagreed); the sale of the union’s head office without any consultation with annual conference; the introduction of a de facto two-tier internal disciplinary system (the result of an attempt by Wrack to wriggle out of facing a disciplinary hearing); the launching of controversial legal actions without obtaining the approval of (or even informing) the executive council; large sums of members’ money spent on helping senior officials fight personal legal claims in which the union was not a named party and had no material interest – these are all examples of how bad things got under Wrack. There are, in fact, plenty more examples (as four years’ worth of our blogs demonstrate).
Resorting time and again to pure Stalinist methods, Wrack ended up treating the union as his own personal fiefdom – and evidently thought he could keep getting away with it. But he couldn’t. The opposition to him began to get organised. Even Andy Dark, Wrack’s deputy for virtually the whole of his time in charge and once his keenest ally in the union, publicly campaigned for Steve Wright in the election.
To many members, Wright himself remains a largely unknown quantity. He doesn’t yet have a significant media profile (though his limited media interventions have, so far, been perfectly competent). He ran an ultra-cautious election campaign which, while certainly professional and slick, told us not much more than that he wasn’t Matt Wrack. While that ‘safety first’ strategy ultimately paid dividends at the ballot box, it means that much of the union still knows little about him or what he really stands for. He needs to spend his early days in charge filling in those gaps.
He also needs to set out his stall with greater clarity on the crucial issues facing the union’s membership and wider fire and rescue service: pay and conditions, pensions, operational cutbacks, underinvestment, service standards, broadening the role, and so on.
Securing the FBU’s future as an independent union against the backdrop of a disturbing fall in membership numbers – a slide of 20,000 in the past 20 years – must also be a priority for Wright. A good place to start would be the 2015 policy statement agreed by annual conference setting out a strategy for expanding the membership base. Absurdly, this policy statement has spent the past decade gathering dust on a shelf while membership numbers continue to plunge. It needs to be revived urgently.
Given the various scandals that have plagued the FBU in recent times – and particularly in light of the watchdog’s investigation into the ‘hush money’ affair – Wright would do well to take a leaf out of the book of Sharon Graham, the general secretary of Unite, a union which also found itself dogged by claims of financial impropriety. After taking over in 2021, Graham immediately set about bringing openness and transparency, launching two inquiries into allegations of ‘serious financial wrongdoing’ under the previous regime and winning praise from many union members for doing so. Sunlight is always the best disinfectant. Wright should make it clear that never again will the FBU seek to conceal allegations of bullying within its ranks through the secret use of non-disclosure agreements facilitated by members’ money. That practice – condemned by the TUC and usually associated with the worst type of rogue employer – must end today.
Wright will also need to get a grip on the FBU’s communications department. Too often, this department was used as the personal propaganda tool of Matt Wrack. This is perhaps not surprising given that the union’s head of comms is someone who, before he took the job, was a key political ally of Wrack, serving alongside him on the steering committee of far-left pressure group Momentum. Lines were crossed in the general secretary election, with some output amounting to thinly-disguised campaigning for Wrack. Even the press release announcing the result of the election gave more space to the defeated Wrack than it did to the victor Wright. That just looked bizarre.
For our part, we at Campaign For a Democratic FBU welcome Wright’s victory, and we are glad that a dark and squalid period in the union’s history is perhaps coming to an end. But we are not going away. We will hold Wright’s feet to the fire just as we did Wrack. We will continue our fight for greater democracy, accountability and transparency in the Fire Brigades Union. If Wright does right by the union’s members, we will support him. If he doesn’t, we will say so.