IWGB Charity Workers Branch Statement: Anti-Union Haldane Unfit for Government Role

Reports this week confirm that Andy Haldane is advising Andy Burnham as he builds his potential cabinet, with speculation mounting that he could be handed a formal role. Anyone appointed to help shape the direction of this country should be someone who champions, respects and defends the rights and voices of working people. Andy Haldane is not that person.

As Chief Executive of the Royal Society of Arts (RSA), Haldane presided over a sustained campaign against his own staff's right to organise. Under his leadership, management rejected workers’ requests for voluntary recognition not once, but three times. Staff were forced to apply for statutory recognition, which they won with backing from an overwhelming 85% of the workers involved.

Efforts to silence workers at the RSA went even further. In October 2023, an employment tribunal found that the RSA had broken trade union law by unfairly dismissing Ruth Hannan, a union member and the Head of Public Policy at the RSA, for speaking out about the organisation's treatment of its staff.

Hannan was not the only long-serving team member the charity lost under Haldane. Staff turnover at the RSA reached a shocking 83% during his tenure. After the RSA refused to negotiate a pay rise for low paid workers in a cost of living crisis, despite sitting on tens of millions of pounds in reserves, workers went on strike for the first time in the charity's 270 year history. Public figures including Yanis Varoufakis, George Monbiot and Chris Packham withdrew from RSA events in solidarity with striking staff.

It felt clear to staff that, under Haldane's leadership, dissent of any kind was something to be managed and suppressed, not engaged with or taken on board. When the RSA hosted Israel’s President Isaac Herzog for an Israeli business fundraiser, staff who walked out of the building in protest were singled out for 1-1s, and reported feeling intimidated by him. On another occasion the RSA phoned the Met Police on its own employees as they protested peacefully outside the building.

Industrial relations improved significantly at the RSA after Haldane’s ‘retirement’ and departure from the organisation in 2025.

As Chief Economist at the Bank of England, Haldane argued that declining union membership and ‘divide and rule’ tactics had left workers less able to bargain for fair pay. As CEO of the RSA, he employed precisely those tactics against his own staff. This is not a man who misunderstood the value of unions. It is a man who, when it became personally inconvenient, abandoned the principles he built his public reputation on.

Britain does not need more people in positions of influence who believe they already have all the answers. It does not need advisers whose instinct is to dismiss or marginalise those who disagree with them. At a time when millions feel excluded from political decision-making, the country needs leaders who can listen, build trust and bring people together.

Andy Haldane's record points in the opposite direction. It reflects a style of leadership that concentrates power, disregards collective voices and deepens division rather than overcoming it.

As Andy Burnham puts together a team to run this country, he must ask himself whether Haldane is someone who belongs anywhere near power in a government that claims to stand for working people.