Woke up early not in a cold sweat but with a troubled conscience. Realised it was 7 March and that I had not done my promised blog on the first ever elections for my new trade union, the University and College Union. So now too late for me to influence any of the electorate who reads this blog. But still time to cast my own vote. Because the deadline is noon and it will only take me 15 minutes on my scooter to deliver my forms to Electoral Reform Services in Hornsey.
So have now read the literature and cast my votes. It took rather more than five minutes. There are 100 candidates for 33 posts, and the manifestos and biographies of the candidates cover 164 pages of A4. Which means I had to read getting on for 80,000 words!
First decision I had to make was for the job of General Secretary. There are three candidates. Took me no time at all to decide where to put my number one. The General Secretary of my old union, the Association of University Teachers, Sally Hunt. I have known her for many years because on her first day of work for the AUT as London organiser she had to come and help me dealing with a very delicate inter-union problem at City University, where I was then President of the AUT branch.
She showed an unusual capacity to understand the complexities of this situation in the five minutes it took us to get to the meeting room. She showed an even more unusual capacity to understand how my curious mind works. So we have been firm friends ever since.
I was about to put my number two against Roger Kline, the leading candidate from NATFHE, with whom AUT merged to form UCU last year. I had met Kline at a hustings at University College recently and liked him and what he had to say. But then I remembered that the number two vote can be important in an election based on the single transferable vote. I think Hunt is the best candidate, as do many people in both unions, but if most of the membership votes tribally, Kline will win, because NATFHE has more members. So I decide to vote tactically for the third dark horse candidate. It also amused me because he bears the same name as my brother, Peter Jones, though he is no relation.
Deciding how to vote for each candidate was, in fact, an interesting exercise. It made me realise just how many criteria I use in coming to such decisions. One or two decisions I made on personal grounds, like my number one vote for Alan Carr from the Open University, a former AUT national president whom I have known for many years. He is a friend of mine, but then that is partly because he shares many of the same values as me, in relation to what is most important in running a good trade union and fighting for academic standards.
I tried to make sure I was voting for an equal number of candidates from the old universities and the former polytechnics. I used positive discrimination for ethnics and women, who are still thin on the ground in the top echelons. I favoured candidates whose biographies showed they had done casework: this involves fighting on behalf of members who are under threat because they have become ill, have had personal problems or have become the victims of bullying or personality clashes. I took into account not only what people said they stood for, but the tone in which they made their assertions.
This democracy business takes a long time. But it is time well spent. And though you could write a computer program which would feed all these criteria into the computer and give you a precise print-out telling you where to put your vote, I can’t help thinking that the imperfect human mind working in a more mysterious way gets a better result than one you would get by such quantification.
Though I can’t prove it.