THE General Federation of Trade Unions (GFTU) conference today called for greater trade union support for the trades council movement.

Conference heard from CWU activist Dave Chapple of Bridgewater and Paula Dunne from Oxford on the vital work trades councils do in linking trade union struggles to the local community.

Through the history of the movement, trades councils had been how unions “built working-class solidarity … [by  bringing] together all the trade unions in a locality,” Mr Chapple said.

Trades councils should not be “bureaucratic organisations with five ageing male leftwingers sat in a room talking about motions … we’re about building solidarity in the community,” he argued, referencing the long history of trades councils with the first formed in Liverpool in 1848, a year of Europe-wide revolutions and the publication of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s Communist Manifesto.

It was trades councils that stopped the Jolly George being loaded with munitions to help crush the young Soviet republic after the Russian Revolution, and during the 1926 general strike trades councils set up councils of action in towns and cities from Aberdeen to Bristol which actually ran the municipalities.

Ms Dunne stressed the role of trades councils in building community resistance to the rise of the far right.

They called for delegates to encourage their trade union structures to affiliate to local trades councils.

GFTU general secretary Gawain Little said the federation’s establishment of a specific trades councils education fund so trades council activists can access its many education courses.