Jay Coward, Delegate to Equity conference
Performing arts union Equity’s 2025 conference, in Derry on 10-12 May, shone a spotlight on important campaign wins. There was new blood – and it was boiling. An overwhelming number of first-time delegates and speakers, myself included, are now among the members asking: what are our next steps?
Campaign pressure snatched victory from the jaws of defeat in reopening the Oldham Coliseum theatre. It has also won a reprieve at Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club, a prolific queer venue threatened by yet another ‘quick buck’ conversion into unaffordable private flats.
Major discussions included Labour’s attempts to confirm AI firms’ right to exploit artists’ output for free. Under pressure, the government has since restated it will protect artists – but that is still not what its proposals promise. Public funding and union recruitment across entertainment sectors was another key issue, alongside trans rights, anti-racism, and solidarity with unions and ordinary people in the warzones of Palestine and Ukraine.
Cuts are threatened at serial employers like ‘River City’ and ‘Doctors’. Fightback is crucial – as one delegate put it: “Ending Doctors is the same as closing a car factory” in entertainment jobs. Their broader representation of different walks of working-class life with less stereotyping is also important, as many speakers noted: “Save our indigenous stories!”
Fightback
There was no real controversy on the issues debated. But while Equity’s left leadership is right to celebrate victories as inspirations for more fightbacks, there was little on offer in terms of plans to build them. Conference is a big opportunity to prepare the wider membership for industrial campaigns in serial drama, for example, or policy campaigns like my own branch’s motion on restoring full trade union rights. Like so many motions, this passed unanimously – but without opportunity for proper discussion to arm delegates with the ideas.
The Starmer government’s delayed and diluted bill on repealing some anti-union laws makes our fight that much harder. One staff member in a fringe meeting on equalities as an industrial issue even used the anti-union laws to oppose my point that social demands are easier to win in the context of more strike action taking place.
We cannot be too content with successfully defending ourselves in the existing framework – which is not an absolute barrier to strike action – but need to take the fight to the super-rich and their government.
That means an alternative vision for our industry – as laid out in Equity’s rarely mentioned ‘Performance for All’ manifesto – and a plan to link industrial struggle together.
It also needs a political voice for the workers’ movement, a new mass party, which I proposed in various contributions at conference.
