AS we debate in this year’s TUC Congress — the workers’ parliament — our trade union movement is at a watershed moment.

With the election of a new Labour government just two months ago, after 14 years of Conservative-led governments that have attacked our living standards, broken our public services and further deindustrialised our economy, we face huge opportunities.

These opportunities are further enhanced by the commitment of the incoming government to introduce a number of positive individual rights for workers and also collective rights for workers and their unions, including repeal of the 2023 and 2016 anti-union laws, introducing electronic and workplace balloting rights, and a limited statutory framework for sectoral collective bargaining.

However, as shown by the recent far-right violence on our streets, and the cost-of-living crisis that began in 2022, we also face huge threats. Forty-five years of neoliberal economic policies, implemented by successive governments from both sides of the house, have torn our society apart.

Racist rhetoric against migrants, coming from mainstream politicians and the media, has provided a convenient scapegoat for failed economic policies, while creating a culture of fear and intolerance — the “hostile environment” — that acts to legitimise the views of hardened far-right fascists. Failure to turn this situation around in the first year or two of this Labour government could have disastrous consequences for the future of our country.

The neoliberal economic model that has dominated British policy-making has included the dismantling of collective bargaining which, coupled with attacks on trade unions and the implementation of anti-union laws, has led to a race to the bottom on wages and terms and conditions and has resulted in catastrophic falling living standards.

It has seen the fragmentation and part or full privatisation of public services which, coupled with the suppression of their funding, has led to the current crisis of service delivery and under-resourcing across the public sector and the privatised public services such as transport, utilities and the postal service.

Crucially, it has also included mass deindustrialisation and the stripping out of Britain’s manufacturing capability, which has resulted in a lack of skilled, quality jobs in the economy, a significant trade deficit and an inability to protect the nation against external shocks.

The lack of investment in manufacturing and the skewing of the economy away from the productive sector was the main underlying driver of the cost-of-living crisis, creating a massive supply-side weakness which meant that the shocks which hit the world economy in 2022 were felt deeper and longer in Britain as a result.

The result is a population which feels left behind, with declining access to public services, poor job prospects, and whose overall standard of living is worse than that of their parents.

It is tempting to say that neoliberalism has failed as an economic strategy, and yet there are some for whom it has worked very well. According to the IFS, the share of income going to the top 1 per cent in Britain more than doubled between 1980 and 2020. It is simply a case of whose interests the system works in.

Clearly, working people need an alternative economic strategy, based around the following principles:

• Investment in manufacturing and infrastructure that provides well-paid, skilled, quality jobs in key industries;
• Accessible civil and public services based in all communities of Britain, making the fullest use of new technology to facilitate delivery in those localities, funded by a progressive taxation system;
• The creation of a national investment bank to provide funding for such major projects, coupled with control and regulation of private capital and its uncontrolled export; and
• Sectoral collective bargaining with agreements on key minimum standards on pay and conditions of employment for all workers in the economy.

Achieving such an approach will necessarily involve rebuilding the power of trade unions to bring working people together to collectively raise their voices. The initial proposals on restoring workers’ rights from the Labour government are to be welcomed as a first step. But they must be followed up with proposals to repeal all anti-union legislation.

The Labour government has already come under significant pressure since they came into office to maintain the status quo, to operate within outdated fiscal rules set by the conservatives on the basis of the neoliberal approach that has done so much damage over the past 45 years.

In this context, it is incumbent on the trade union movement to provide the counterweight to this pressure, to be robust in our demands and to realise the opportunities before us.

Gawain Little is general secretary of the General Federation of Trade Unions.