SCOTLAND’S trade unions face big challenges. Elections just round the corner provide a snapshot of the crisis of working-class political representation in Scotland.

The incumbent SNP government is bereft of ideas after 20 years with few achievements to point to. It seems content with another five years of managed decline, relying on votes based on a vague promise of independence without any clarity on how it plans to deliver it.

Scottish Labour are no better. Anas Sarwar’s recent attempt to ape Zohran Mamdani’s social media style is an embarrassment from a leader imposed to snuff out the radicalism of his predecessor Richard Leonard and the hope of real change his party then offered. Recent efforts to distance himself from Keir Starmer’s squalid British government are too little and too late to dispel the impression that this Labour opposition is even more a status quo party than the one in power at Holyrood.

Capitalising on all of this, the popular anger at declining living standards and attacks on democratic rights, is Reform UK who, despite lacking any real base in Scotland up to now, threatens to break through and become the official opposition in the Scottish Parliament.

Scotland’s trade unions have always led from the front in fighting the far right and today this is among our foremost tasks. Reform UK wins in the Scottish Parliament and councils wouldn’t just have a cancerous effect on Scottish politics, they would also precipitate major attacks on wages, jobs and employment rights as we have seen in England.

Recent experience has shown that the far right can’t be challenged by condemnation alone. Our movement must have a positive vision of what society should be and take that into working-class communities brutalised and left behind by deindustrialisation and cuts. We must be prepared to have difficult conversations and work hard to convince and win working people to that vision.

That positive vision of society should be founded on a green industrial plan aimed at rebuilding productive industry in Scotland and reinvestment in public services that have been starved for years.

The industrial strategy demanded by the Scottish TUC focusing on public investment, public ownership of key sectors and future-proofing manufacturing sites is key.The losses of Grangemouth and Mossmorran illustrate the disastrous impact of the laissez-faire policy to date — while the GMB’s observation that a net-zero strategy that “prioritises the closure of workplaces over the building of them” betrays workers needs taking on board by everyone who wants to secure popular support for a green industrial revolution and see off the climate-change deniers of the far right.

Scotland is rich in natural and clean energy resources with a skilled workforce. An ambitious plan developed by the Scottish government and trade unions could rebuild manufacturing and a renewable industry creating tens of thousands of quality jobs and apprenticeships raising up unemployed young people and lifting left-behind communities out of poverty.

This must go hand in hand with our fight for a peaceful world. Our movement must redouble our fight for peace in the Middle East and against the drive to militarism and rearmament. An ambitious transition strategy could reassure workers in the arms industry, too, that defence diversification need not mean the disappearance of well-paid work utilising their specific skills.

The movement in Scotland must play its part in the all-Britain campaign to unshackle ourselves by repealing all anti-trade union laws immediately.

Ambition must be the order of the day. Mass campaigning around increasing and mobilising our membership as well as breaking into unorganised industries and workplaces must be a priority in the months and years ahead, building on recent achievements in the hospitality industry and elsewhere. 

Only through growth can our unions re-establish their once central place in working-class communities, and their power to reshape Scotland and Britain in those communities’ interest.