THE trade union and labour movement has failed “to provide socialist answers to people’s everyday concerns,” Aslef president Andy Hudd told his union’s annual conference today.

Addressing delegates in Birmingham, he said that the Labour Party had abandoned its socialist principles and the economics of the working class since Tony Blair came to power in 1997.

But he added that the trade union movement has also “lost touch with the issues affecting working people” as he called for “left-wing populism.”

Mr Hudd said: “Our movement labels people with concerns over immigration as bigots and racists.

“We have also got to recognise that we have failed as a trade union and labour movement to provide socialist answers to people’s everyday concerns; we have lost touch with the issues affecting working people. 

“We should be doing what we do best — highlighting the fact that it is the economic system that is keeping them poor and in insecure work and it is the same system that creates unaffordable housing, homelessness and high energy bills, not immigrants or trade unions, and we must show them an alternative. 

“What we need is left-wing populism — socialist solutions to working-class problems and a vision of a better, fairer world.”

Mr Hudd described Reform UK as a “right-wing populist” party and said its success was “mainly because they provide answers to the concerns of ordinary people in a time of great uncertainty. 

“The problem, of course, is that those answers are not the ones that this society needs, they are not the ones working people need and they are not the ones that we would choose,” he said.

The Aslef president welcomed the Railways Bill currently going through Parliament as “a step towards full public ownership.”

He said that Great British Railways (GBR), the publicly owned “directing mind” for the country’s rail network that the Bill proposes to create, should include the rolling stock companies, as “we believe that our trains should bought, run and owned by the people, not by profiteers charging a fortune in leasing fees.”

Mr Hudd also warned that the English Devolution Bill still has “scope for the use of private companies in devolved regions.”

He called for all rail journeys to be made on a publicly owned network and all open-access companies to be brought in house.