Unions must rediscover their power to change this country

Editorial / 10 September 2026 Burnham must be bold in budget 10 September 2026 Editorial / 9 September 2026 Incensed reaction from Israel apologists shows new British sanctions really matter 9 September 2026 Editorial / 8 September 2026 Mosley’s heirs must be confronted 8 September 2026 Editorial / 7 September 2026 Healey’s prescriptions for growth are familiar — and wrong 7 September 2026 Editorial / 6 September 2026 Farage is dripping in sleaze – but the rise of the right won’t defeat itself 6 September 2026 Editorial / 4 September 2026 Burnham, the bond markets and the choice facing Labour 4 September 2026 Editorial / 3 September 2026 Polanski raises stakes in by-election 3 September 2026 MORE than one trade union leader has called the TUC Congress starting this weekend the most important in decades.

It meets early in a new Labour administration yet to deliver its first Budget, whose agenda and priorities a united trade union movement can still hope to shape.

Some gathering in Brighton will have high hopes. Andy Burnham is the first prime minister to have entered office denouncing the whole direction of British politics since the 1980s, the sell-off of publicly owned assets and industries, the parasitical creep of private provision across public services, the deindustrialisation that wrecked communities and has left Britain a “collection of banks with a country attached” in the words of RMT leader Eddie Dempsey.

The bankruptcy of that economic model was proved by the 2008 crash, but its sclerotic grip on our politics has continued, an entrenched ruling class throwing everything it had at smashing the Corbyn movement from 2015 and ensuring the Brexit vote of 2016 to “take back control” changed nothing fundamental about who owns, and therefore who runs, Britain.

Now we have a Prime Minister who says that’s about to change. One who has started by dropping the anti-democratic attack on jury trials, cutting bus fares and electricity bills.

One who in the last week has taken the strongest action of a British government yet (which is not saying much) against Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine and who slaps down Tory demands for faster increases in military spending in the Commons by insisting that “national security cannot come at the cost of social security.”

Others will be far more sceptical. Words are cheap. Keir Starmer promised “change,” but had no intention of changing anything. Boris Johnson rode to power promising more state intervention in the economy. Even George Osborne pledged a new industrial revolution, a “march of the makers.”

Under them all our industrial base shrank, the encroachment of profiteering private interests on the public realm increased, the City and the bond markets stayed in charge.

Labour MPs evicted Starmer because they feared for their seats, but they remain the same MPs elected in 2024, a majority of them new and vetted by a sleazy coterie around the disgraced Peter Mandelson — hand-picked for their servility to power and money.

Burnham talks big, but he has left Rachel Reeves’s crippling fiscal rules in place, held onto a viciously anti-immigrant Home Secretary in Shabana Mahmood, drags his feet on no-brainers like renationalising water and allowed Donald Trump to keep using British territory as a launchpad to bomb the Middle East.

Both sides have a case, but the task facing trade unionists is not to interpret government policy but to change it. A century before this Labour government took office the Workers Weekly, a forerunner of this newspaper, said of the first ever Labour administration “there is going to be a mighty struggle between the working-class movement and the organised employing class for determining control of the government.”

Huge questions face the unions, and core motions focus on some of the biggest: using procurement, state ownership and state aid to reindustrialise Britain; taking control of the AI revolution so it serves the public and not a small circle of US psychopaths; protecting workers and communities from crazy weather on a warming planet; stopping the Trump-led drive to war.

All are linked to the fight against the far right, which will only be won on the basis of uniting the class against its real enemies in the boardrooms and on the superyachts.

Taking the correct positions is important, but will amount to nothing if unions cannot combine for that “mighty struggle” for control of this government — including mass, public-facing campaigning for a new economic settlement, industrial action for better pay and conditions and relentless pressure on it to keep promises from insourcing to Palestine.

Editorial / 1 September 2026 Why unions must take the fight to Andy Burnham 1 September 2026 Features / 30 July 2026 ‘Burnham has a good PR machine – but where does it go from here?’ 30 July 2026 In a wide-ranging interview, JEREMY CORBYN talks to Ben Chacko about the difficulties the new Prime Minister faces and why he sees no future in Labour

Editorial / 9 July 2026 Burnham offers no change on war and peace 9 July 2026 History / 1 January 2026 Two centenaries to focus us on building socialism in 2026 1 January 2026 BEN CHACKO says in different ways, the centenary of the General Strike and that of Fidel Castro’s birth point to priority tasks for the British left in the coming year