THE Scottish Trade Union Congress meets on Monday in Dundee. Its agenda identifies one key challenge as the rise of the populist right, a challenge that targets the essential principle of the working-class movement: solidarity.

A motion supported by many unions and trades councils calls for mobilisation: solidarity across and within communities. This requires, to quote, “grassroots engagement,” “building community opposition,” “a return to policies which improve living standards, redistribute income, wealth and power.” And this, it points out, cannot be done by resolutions.

It demands local organisation, house by house, street by street, on key issues that require dialogue that can engage those influenced by Reform UK.

A key one is housing. Scotland faces a desperate housing shortage, worst in the poorest areas, with the number of households in temporary accommodation the highest since records began. New house building fell last year and, critically, it fell furthest where it is most needed: for what used to be called council housing.

Housing is the issue that is most directly used to incite conflict. The movement’s task is to show that it can only be resolved collectively by united communities. We have to re-establish, in the anniversary year of the Glasgow rent strikes of 1915, housing as a public utility, one controlled democratically, for use, not profit.

Health comes next in a country where the poorest fifth have seen age at death actually decline over the past decade.

GMB and Unison have strong resolutions calling for all aspects of social care, and especially that for the elderly, to be brought back into the public sector. Unite calls for the next Scottish government, as in Germany, to commit to 12.8 per cent of GDP to health.

The increasing outsourcing of care is also linked to another worrying development: the widening gap in the differential between male and female pay rates in Scotland, from 6.4 to 8.3 per cent.

On constitutional issues, there is surprisingly little. But there are strong resolutions on taking back public control of all aspects of communications, transport and energy, as well as the need for greater powers over industry in an economy which has one of the highest levels of external ownership in Europe.

The closure of the Grangemouth oil refinery currently looks likely, unless there is intervention, to be followed by the external acquisition of Scotland’s premier oil engineering firm, John Wood — a development which highlights the need to defend Labour’s original commitments to Just Transition.

But, above all, there is the issue of war and global conflict that faces us all. There is a range of motions condemning government failures to challenge genocide in Palestine, as well as the aggressive policing of demonstrations in Scotland as well as England.

No less important, Congress takes up the impact of war on our economy and welfare provision. A composite motion backed by the general council reasserts Scotland’s internationalism. It demands that defence spending be limited to 2.3 per cent of GDP and opposes the government’s decision to increase it to 2.5 per cent at the expense of international aid. We need welfare, not warfare.

The Congress will doubtless see emergency resolutions concerning the recent Supreme Court judgement on sex and gender, an issue on which there are strong and principled opinions in the movement. This newspaper has taken its own stand but recognises the validity of the debate and the importance of mutual respect.

Today, the working-class movement needs unity as never before. Organising for class solidarity means actively bringing together all those on whose labour determines humanity’s future — because those who seek to exploit know all the merits of division.