Mick Hartley

UCU chief Jo Grady is under attack:

Lecturers at some of Britain’s top universities including Durham and Glasgow have voted for Jo Grady, their union’s general secretary, to resign over the “ineffective” strikes that she led.

For more than three years, the Universities and College Union (UCU) has disrupted students’ lives, with lecturers taking part in industrial action such as refusing to mark exams this summer.

Last month, Durham University’s UCU branch overwhelmingly backed a motion of no confidence in its general secretary. It called for Grady to resign and the union to cover the wages of academics whose pay has been docked.

Similar motions have been passed at Glasgow, Keele and Leeds Beckett universities. Lecturers at York St John University voted that the leadership of UCU, “through industrial action in 2023”, had been “confusing, ineffective and undemocratic”.

The motions have plunged the UCU into open warfare. Grady’s backers say that she is being unfairly blamed for the failure to get a pay deal by misogynists.

One source described it as “a relentless stream of criticism by men” online in a union world currently, and historically, dominated by male general secretaries. The source added that Grady, 39, had been trolled online in a series of personal attacks. In February, for example, her Wikipedia page was changed to describe her as a “traitor, Judas, quisling” — she reposted the description describing it on her Twitter profile as “vile rubbish”.

Chris O’Donnell, a former NEC member and national negotiator, said: “Jo Grady is by any measure the most successful general secretary of recent times. What we are witnessing here is an aggressive and misogynistic attack by the Socialist Workers Party and the far left within the UCU.”

It's all a bit sad for the poor woman, who's time as head of the UCU has seen her relentlessly attacking gender-critical women and supporting the hard-left men who love to shout them down. She backed those who hounded Kathleen Stock from Sussex University, calling not for support for a woman being bullied, but rather for an investigation into "transphobia" at the university. Throughout her tenure she's gone out of her way to support "trans rights" and back the cancelling of gender critical speakers. All that cosying up to the gender men – and now they turn on her. It's just so unfair…