“Women aren't only members of our union. You are it,” declared UNISON general secretary Andrea Egan at February's national women's conference. Yet she went on to single out activists, stewards, branch secretaries and staff. What about the ordinary members - the vast majority of whom are women? Throughout her 17-minute speech, Egan repeatedly referenced women's rights, safety, dignity and the importance of standing up for working-class women. She described UNISON as “Britain's largest movement of working-class women” - while pledging to defend trans rights and insisting there was no contradiction between workers' rights. Yet in her recent statement on the NHS's revised single-sex accommodation policy, she didn't mention women ONCE. In fact, she appears more concerned with defending the right of men who identify as women to use women's spaces. What about the ordinary working-class women paying their union subs every month, expecting someone to defend their rights at work? Egan also invoked the history of working-class solidarity, recalling the women who stood alongside Liverpool dockers during their bitter industrial dispute in 1995. My grandad was a Liverpool docker in the post-war decades. He believed in standing up for working people - and women too. I wonder what he'd make of the trade union movement today. I suspect he'd be furious. Full speech below👇

Follow up story on @RRRunnersUK - the running club set up to challenge parkrun’s policy of allowing male runners to self ID into the women’s categories and steal the placings & records. I was looking more closely at a separate development regarding a ‘rival’ running group - which has promised to give ‘transphobes a fright on Halloween’ which there wasn’t space for in the end. 🎃 👿 I’ll report on that separately later in the week. It’s a corker! Link below 👇 @RRRunnersUK