UNIONS must remember that “it’s only by standing together that we win things,” bakers’ union president Ian Hodson warned today.

He signalled that Britain’s oldest union will increase its £15 an hour minimum wage demand to an £17.20 “wage of dignity” for all workers as he hit out at Britain’s defence spending and the rise of Reform UK.

Speaking at the Bakers, Food & Allied Workers Union’s annual conference in Yarnfield, Staffordshire, Mr Hodson said: “How is it we’ve become an island that is more worried about the way somebody identifies than a dictator who has taken over America?

“How have we allowed ourselves to believe that by demonising the poorest, it somehow makes us wealthier? We used to understand that it’s only by standing together that we win things.”

Mr Hodson also condemned the government’s cuts to the winter fuel allowance, refusal to scrap the two-child benefit cap and its “absolutely appalling” disability benefit cut plans.