LABOUR’S “deeply unpopular” attacks on working-class communities are the reason the party is losing support to Reform UK, the leader of Britain’s largest union for civil servants said yesterday.

Public and Commercial Services (PCS) union general secretary Fran Heathcote also hit out at the government’s reliance on a “false divide” between front-line and ancillary staff to justify proposed job cuts.

She welcomed Labour’s engagement in an address to the union’s annual conference in Brighton, but added that “if the government continues to attack working-class communities, it will lose the support of working-class people, and it will deserve to.”