Ben Selby, the union’s newly elected assistant general secretary, and his friend and colleague Shaun Yates talk to Francis Beckett
When the teachers’ trade union education centre in Lincolnshire, Stoke Rochford Hall, caught fire in January 2005, two of the first firefighters on the scene were 34-year-old Shaun Yates and Ben Selby, just 20. They put on their breathing apparatus and made their way to the third floor.
“Then we saw the glass and the door frames glowing orange, and we could see the fire was fully involved,” says Shaun. As they sprayed water on it, “the ceiling started to disintegrate”.
They took a split-second decision to withdraw, getting out just in time before the ceiling joists fell in, and ran down the stairs before the stairs, too, were engulfed. They found their way out with the help of a colleague who shouted out directions.
For Ben Selby, “it showed me the risks of the job I’d chosen.” He and his older colleague became close friends. Shaun was best man at Ben’s wedding, and the two families (Ben is now married to a teacher, with an eight-year-old daughter and a three-year-old son) still find time for a get together every few months.
Today Shaun, now 52, is temporary station manager at Boston fire station. Ben, 38, is the newly elected assistant general secretary of the FBU.
Just a year after the Stoke Rochford fire, while Shaun was away on a course, Ben went to a horrific crash on the A52 close to the Lincolnshire-Leicestershire border. A minibus full of migrant workers collided with three lorries, and seven people died. “I saw 200 yards of devastation. It’s still quite hard to talk about,” he tells me, and I don’t press him, but I ask Shaun and he says: “Looking at a dead body isn’t as hard as looking at body parts.”
Ben was 18 when he joined the fire service as a retained firefighter in Grantham. “I wanted to do something exciting, to support the community, to work with people, do something different every day.” He left Grantham for the regional office having served the town as a retained firefighter on both the blue and green watches.
Pretty soon into his service career he was getting involved with the union, and he is still a member of the Labour party, though deeply disillusioned with Keir Starmer’s leadership. He has a Twitter account where he frequently comes to the defence of much-abused migrants.
Like many trade union activists, all that comes out of his family background.
My politics come from the experience of having close family members who were migrants
His father’s mother was forced to flee her native Indonesia during the civil war that followed the Second World War, leaving the leper colony her parents had helped create – they were “working class people doing what they could for lepers in Indonesia,” he says. By boat they travelled to mainland Europe before reaching Britain. His grandmother was an important figure in his life right up to her death last year, aged 96.
“My politics come from the experience of having close family members who were migrants,” he says. “It took them a long time to get here, and their experience of setting up somewhere strange is not too different from what we see today when we look to those seeking sanctuary from war, persecution, the climate crisis and looking to improve the lives of their loved ones.”
The lessons were reinforced by his mother’s Yorkshire mining family, and by his father’s death, a few years ago, of lung cancer caused by asbestosis, probably at least in part a legacy of his work as a heating engineer.
Before getting too deeply into union work, he consulted his friend Shaun. “I told him he’d be great at it but warned it could be very thankless,” says Shaun. “But I knew he’d do a great job.”
As a union official, Ben found himself fighting plans to impose co-responding, where some firefighters had pay docked over the issue.
“It was important to the whole union, and looking back I am proud of my participation, although small, in it.”
Later on, he was heavily involved in the successful campaign against a cuts package in Lincolnshire, which prevented the closure of fire stations.
Ben has been a Lincolnshire firefighter for 20 years. Between 2012 and 2019 he had spells as brigade chair and secretary in Lincolnshire, the regional secretary for the East Midlands region, before joining the union’s executive in January 2019 and becoming vice president in 2021.
Now he has a big new job: assistant general secretary. What will he be like? Shaun Yates probably knows better than anyone.
“He’ll be excellent. He’s got an old head on young shoulders. He’s meticulous and dedicated. That’s what he’s like,” says Shaun.
