01 March 2023

UNISON is proud and pleased to sponsor this showing of The Beekeeper of Aleppo which is being staged in the Liverpool Playhouse between 1 – 11 March 2023. This performance is very timely given the recent events in Knowsley. It forms part of our wider work to replace division and hate within workplaces and the communities we serve with a more hopeful outlook for the future. We are pleased to work in partnership with the Liverpool Playhouse, particularly in 2023 in what has been selected as the UNISON year of the Black worker, in the City which has one of Britain’s oldest Black communities.
 
UNISON represents public service workers and are keen to involve all our members fully in organising, negotiating and campaigning for a better deal for workers, better public services and safer, stronger communities. Our members are in the front line when tensions arise because of our jobs. The services we provide involved key jobs which are short of workers and migrants coming to Britain have helped keep these services going. In is natural we oppose racism and bigotry, both because its plain wrong, but also because that would divide our members and embodies the unfairness we oppose on behalf of all members.  
 
In this context, we are seeking to promote this book and play, which involves a story, based on real experiences of the author, to bring empathy to an issue which is made highly emotive by too many with a public profile. We want to equip our activists to explain face to face in one to one conversations the human side of what is increasingly dubbed “the small boats crisis”. The play is about two people displaced by the horrors of war and their struggle to find sanctuary when they finally arrive in Britain. The novel is a highly acclaimed must-read book, the story humanises the dispossessed who are all too often scapegoated and demonised, not least by this Government.

Joanne Moorcroft, UNISON Regional Convenor