Unite Still Lists Derek Thomson After Women Complained

Derek Thomson, Unite’s Scottish regional secretary, has been on a precautionary suspension since August 2025 over complaints of inappropriate behaviour from at least one woman. Unite has published no finding, and its Scotland contact page still names him in the job.

Susan Fitzgerald, the union’s Irish secretary, was sent in to cover him. She has since spoken as the public Scottish secretary on picket lines and in official statements, including a 31 March 2026 release on 115 jobs at Alexander Dennis.

Complaints From Women Put Thomson on Leave

Insiders described the leave as precautionary when the precautionary suspension was first set out on 29 August 2025. Union sources said two days later that the complaints were historic, that they concerned inappropriate behaviour towards a woman, and that issues raised years earlier had come back.

Thomson has been Scottish secretary since 2023. He had been a regular voice on the Grangemouth refinery fight from late 2024. Unite is Scotland’s biggest union, with about 150,000 members, and keeps its Scottish base at John Smith House, 145-165 West Regent Street, Glasgow.

The union said such claims were taken seriously and handled in the proper way. An unnamed source said there would be a full investigation and that Thomson was innocent until proven otherwise. Thomson did not answer a request for comment. Unite’s lawyers said the union could not discuss confidential internal processes about employees, and could not discuss any police involvement.

Insiders said police were involved. Scottish territorial reps were told early, and Sarah Carpenter, Graham’s chief of staff, then rang members of the elected executive after a press enquiry landed. That has not been tested in public. No charge sheet has been posted. No clearing letter has been posted either.

WHAT WE KNOW

• The leave: Unite placed Thomson on a precautionary suspension in late August 2025 after complaints of inappropriate behaviour from at least one woman.
• The cover: Fitzgerald, already Irish secretary, was assigned to stand in, and later appeared in Scottish disputes under a Scottish secretary title.
• The legal line: Unite’s lawyers refused to discuss the employee process and refused to discuss police involvement; Thomson did not respond.

WHAT IS UNCONFIRMED

• Police status: Insiders said officers were involved; that has not been confirmed by the union or by any force statement in the open record.
• The finding: Unite has not published whether the complaints were upheld, dropped, or still sitting in a closed file.
• His present role: The contact page names Thomson; public Scottish statements in 2025 and 2026 were given by Fitzgerald.

The gap between those two lists is the whole public record. Anyone looking for a verdict is still waiting.

Prove It or Else Came Before the Job

Thomson was an organiser in the machine Graham used to run before she won the general secretary’s office in 2021. Insiders said a member of her team was warned about him before that organiser’s post became the Scottish secretary’s job. The reply, they said, was “Prove it or else”.

That line is an insider claim, not a document on the table. What followed is not in dispute. Graham’s camp put him into the Scottish chair in 2023. He then became one of the faces of Unite’s industrial argument in Scotland, above all at Grangemouth.

The same inner circle had already taken a beating over Graham’s husband, Jack Clarke. Staff in the old organising and leverage research unit complained about bullying and misogyny. Clarke later ran the Bargaining and Disputes Support Unit. Three of five women in that unit left, with sources saying they had complained of bullying and abuse, which Clarke denied through the union’s lawyers.

On 18 December 2024 those lawyers, acting for Unite and for Graham and Clarke personally, admitted that Clarke had been covertly recorded around 2018 and that the recordings were gone from his personnel file.

Mr Clarke understands that the recordings are no longer on his personnel file and so believes them to have been destroyed accordingly. For Ms Graham’s part, she did not order their destruction. Indeed, she did not even become the General Secretary of Unite until August 2021, several years after the events in question.

Unite’s lawyers, letter of 18 December 2024

They cast the wipe as data-law housekeeping after a disciplinary case that produced a 12-month warning for “extreme language and rudeness in relation to senior figures of the union.” They said that language was aimed at the then leadership, not at junior staff. Destroying a file that later litigation might need sits against the ordinary duty to preserve relevant documents once a claim is in view. The tapes are still gone.

Who Speaks for Unite Scotland Now?

Fitzgerald’s stand-in was meant to be temporary. It became the public face of the region. Unite Scotland put her on the Turners tanker drivers’ picket at Grangemouth on 12 December 2025, and on a Diligenta picket in Glasgow around the same period. On 25 October 2025 she spoke as Unite secretary at the Scotland Demands Better rally outside Holyrood, attacking far-right scapegoating and calling for a tax on concentrated wealth.

On 31 March 2026 she spoke as Unite Scottish secretary after Alexander Dennis said it would axe 115 skilled jobs at Falkirk and Larbert. She called the decision callous and said Scotland was being hollowed out of green manufacturing. Graham issued a parallel quote on the same release. Thomson’s name was not on it.

NAMED ON PAPER, HEARD IN PUBLIC

The contact page is not a rumour. Unite’s own Scotland site still lists Derek Thomson as secretary, with offices in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Aberdeen, Dundee, Ayr and Inverness. Members who type the region into a search bar get his name. Members who watch a picket get hers.

FITZGERALD’S SCOTTISH SHIFTS

• Holyrood rally: On 25 October 2025 she spoke as Unite secretary at Scotland Demands Better, tying pay, housing and public services to a wealth-tax demand.
• Grangemouth picket: On 12 December 2025 Unite Scotland posted her at Turners’ tanker drivers’ line, where the strike ran through December over a real-terms cut.
• Alexander Dennis: On 31 March 2026 she answered the Falkirk and Larbert cuts as Scottish secretary, on the same day Graham also spoke.

Treating an Irish officer as a spare Scottish secretary may look efficient from Holborn. It reads differently in a region that had just lost its own named lead in the middle of refinery, bus and council fights. After the first weekend of headlines the file went quiet. There was no restoration campaign and no published verdict, so members had to work out who held the chair by who turned up.

Lawyers Admitted the Tapes Were Gone

Thomson’s leave sits on a longer staff-side argument about how Graham’s circle handles complaints. Clarke had been on a final warning after the 2018 investigation. He was then moved, after she took office, to run the new Bargaining and Disputes Support Unit. Staff in that unit, organised by the GMB, struck over bullying. Nine of ten staff at the Holborn headquarters later voted for industrial action over bullying and victimisation, according to figures circulated at the time.

Leaked meeting transcripts from 2018, more than 100 pages, were published in August 2026 and described aggressive conduct in the old research unit. Unite said those claims were old, that covert recordings had not proved the accusations, and that other people present had not backed them. The only recorded sanction remained the 2018 warning for extreme language aimed at senior figures.

THE INNER CIRCLE FILE

1. 2018: Clarke is covertly recorded. A disciplinary case follows. He receives a 12-month warning for extreme language and rudeness toward senior figures.
2. August 2021: Graham becomes general secretary. Lawyers later stress she did not hold that office when the 2018 recordings were made.
3. 2023: Thomson, then an organiser from her old team, is confirmed as Scottish secretary after the insider warning that was met, they say, with “Prove it or else”.
4. 18 December 2024: Lawyers admit the Clarke recordings were transcribed for the old case and are no longer on his personnel file.
5. 29 August 2025: Thomson is placed on precautionary leave after complaints from women. Fitzgerald is sent in. The union will not discuss police involvement.

The pattern is not a court finding against Thomson. It is a record of how the same leadership group answered staff complaints, evidence, and then a second set of allegations against a close ally in Scotland. One file was destroyed and explained as data protection. The other file has never been explained at all.

One Ballot in Ten Locked Graham In

On 12 August 2026, the week those Clarke transcripts were being published, Graham won a second term. She took 68,694 votes against Simon Dubbins’s 31,130. Unite sent 970,945 ballot papers and got 100,089 back, about 10 percent. Of those returned, 265 were invalid, leaving 99,824 valid votes. That is about 69 percent of the valid vote for the incumbent.

THE 2026 UNITE BALLOT

• Winner: Sharon Graham, 68,694 votes, about 69 percent of valid ballots.
• Runner-up: Simon Dubbins, 31,130 votes.
• Returned papers: 100,089 of 970,945 sent, about 10 percent, with 265 invalid.

Graham called it a decisive victory and a mandate to continue change. She said the next term would stay on jobs, pay and conditions, and that it would be members over ministers. The Scottish secretary who had stood beside her at Grangemouth was not part of that victory lap. His name was still on the contact page. His voice was not on the result.

Low turnout does not void a win. It does mean a second term can close with most members never touching the ballot, and with the live Scottish complaint still sitting in the same confidential box the lawyers would not open in 2025.

MPs Still Hold His Grangemouth Numbers

The last long public record of Thomson at work is not a union circular. It is Hansard. On 19 March 2025 he sat before the Scottish Affairs Committee with officers from the GMB and Prospect and walked MPs through the first industrial test of a just transition at Grangemouth.

You will hear the term just transition, which was coined by the trade union movement, but we have seen the first test of a just transition at Grangemouth and unfortunately we have failed massively. 400 direct jobs there are going. PricewaterhouseCoopers’s report into that closure shows that 2,822 jobs will go as a direct result of that Grangemouth, and £403 million will be lost to the local Grangemouth economy.

Derek Thomson, Scottish Affairs Committee, 19 March 2025

He had already written to the committee as Scottish secretary on 27 March 2025, challenging Petroineos’s loss-making story and pushing a switch to sustainable aviation fuel. Patricia Ferguson MP, the chair, then wrote on 16 April and 16 May 2025 asking for Unite’s plan to create 35,000 new energy transition jobs by 2030, a figure Thomson had put in front of them. Those letters were published on 3 September 2025, days after his leave began, still addressed to him by title.

That is the industrial half of the file MPs still hold: 400 direct jobs, 2,822 in the wider count, £403 million in the local economy, and a 35,000-job plan they asked to see. The other half is the complaint that removed the man who gave those numbers. The committee transcript of the first failed test of just transition remains the last full account of his case in his own words.

Unite’s Scotland page still carries Thomson’s name. Fitzgerald still does the public work. No outcome has been posted since August 2025.

Disclaimer: This article is news reporting and analysis of a workplace process and related public statements. It is informational only and is not a finding that any complaint has been proved. It is not legal advice, employment advice, or a substitute for a disciplinary or criminal determination, and it should not be read as a verdict on Derek Thomson, Sharon Graham, Jack Clarke, or any complainant. Readers with a live complaint, a defence, or a workplace dispute should take advice from a solicitor or a qualified union representative before acting. Names, titles, figures and process descriptions reflect the documents and statements cited here and may change if Unite, the police, or a tribunal publishes a later decision.