How the unions sold out Britain’s workers

On a plinth outside the Trades Union Congress headquarters in Bloomsbury stands a modernist sculpture by Bernard Meadows. Called “The Spirit of Brotherhood”, it was commissioned back in the Fifties, yet remains a gleaming bronze symbol of fraternal solidarity. Showing a heroic figure reaching down, arm outstretched, to lift a fallen comrade, the statue speaks powerfully to the supreme self-confidence of the labour movement in its postwar glow, gathering the nation’s trade unions and, together, campaigning for the dignity of work.

Today, alas, things feel very different. Where “the Left” once connoted strike-prone shop stewards and horny-handed socialist rabble-rousers, today the new bogeymen for the City, the business lobbies, and the political Right tend to be soft Left MPs, picked from the serried ranks of Russell Group Labour Students societies and the progressive middle classes. And if the TUC is currently looking to downsize from its Bloomsbury pile, hardly surprising when the labour movement is now so diminished, the unity so vividly inscribed in Meadows’ sculpture also feels very far away, and it’s unclear whether even Andy Burnham and his protruding Northern vowels can do much to bring it back.

The most obvious example of union fracturing is in its schools. The NEU, Britain’s largest teachers’ union, is currently in a bitter dispute with three of the country’s largest general unions: Unite, Unison and the GMB. In essence, the disagreement centres around who gets to organise teaching assistants. That, you might think, is a rather arcane, technical dispute. Yet it has ignited fury within the Labour-affiliated mega-union, and could, according to a source familiar with the matter, even result in the teachers’ suspension from the TUC.

How to explain these oddly high stakes? Because, I’d argue, they reflect broader divisions at the heart of the union fraternity — on how to combat new threats to the Left and Right, and how to deal with the realities and disappointments of the Labour government now in office.

The old Labour Party’s Clause Four once promised to “secure for the workers, by hand  and by brain  the full fruits of their industry”. That was because there was an acceptance that cognitive, intellectual labour was a core part of the production process, a commodity to be exploited by capital just like any other. Sections of the Left still maintain a similarly expansive definition of class identity. Mick Lynch, the former transport workers leader, recently  claimed  that “if you don’t own the means of production, you are working class. If you have to get up when the alarm clock goes off and do a job and you depend on your earnings rather than your assets then you are working class.”

But this Marxian approach, attempting to unite all wage-earners within a diverse proletarian cause, is broad enough to deprive the term of any useful meaning or specificity. A definition that includes doctors, academics, bank managers and creative consultants within the same category as minimum-waged warehouse workers strips the former of those nuanced and overlapping privileges, accrued through what the French sociologist Bourdieu called habitus: the social mores, soft skills, personal tastes, lifestyles, education and values of people who share the same background.

These differences aren’t merely superficial — least of all in Britain — but indeed result in wildly opposed political visions. Polling last week revealed  that trade unionists were more likely to support Reform than the Labour Party. The Unite leader Sharon Graham, who has openly toyed with the idea of disaffiliating from Labour, said that the numbers were “damning but not surprising”, that “Labour has abandoned the working class”, and that, therefore, “the working class have abandoned Labour”.

But that isn’t quite right. Instead of a homogenous blob moving en masse away from their traditional partisan loyalties, we find that the working class is no longer an intelligible or coherent political bloc at all. The masses have been replaced by a networked mess of competing cultural-political factions, separated by educational, generational and linguistic chasms. Certainly, those headline polling figures conceal predictable fissures. Among trade unionists with a university education, for instance, Labour was still the more popular party, gathering 34% to Reform’s 19%. Among non-graduates, however, the percentages were roughly reversed, with Reform gaining 36% to Labour’s 22%. While the Greens performed well among younger trade unionists, winning among 18-24 year-olds, their support nosedives for older members.

Beyond the numbers, meanwhile, these tensions are clear enough on the doorstep somewhere like Makerfield. In this Reform-friendly, white working-class seat, whether Burnham can still make the old language of work, place and solidarity sound vaguely plausible is being billed as an existential test for broad-church Labourism. It is, one activist tells me…