Britain’s trade unions are not easily understood from the outside. But this is a moment of real empowerment for them. In the past year, they have quietly become significant players in the shaping of national policy. They’ve drawn closer to government, launched coordinated industrial action, and adapted rapidly to a new political landscape. Whether this amounts to a renaissance or simply a recalibration remains to be seen. But something is shifting.
This movement comes at a time of profound political and economic dislocation. In the May 2025 local elections, Reform UK — led by Nigel Farage — won 677 seats, drawing support from former Conservative voters and the disenchanted. On the Left, Labour MP Zarah Sultana defected to form a new independent alliance with Jeremy Corbyn, prompting former Unite leader Len McCluskey to suggest that Labour could soon be abandoned by its affiliated unions altogether.
The political realignment is real, but ideology alone does not explain it. Economic instability plays a central role. With debt rising, bond yields volatile, and international markets exerting pressure on public spending, the Government has been forced into increasingly narrow policy positions. At the same time, longstanding class alignments are breaking down. Cultural divisions are growing. Electoral reform is gaining traction. The two-party system, for so long the backbone of British political life, is no longer taken for granted.
At the root of this turbulence lies a more foundational question: who, exactly, is the working class in Britain today?
The old definitions — manual labour, factory jobs, union cards — no longer reflect the shape of the workforce. Today’s working class is better understood as a coalition of the economically insecure across a range of industries. It includes Amazon warehouse workers, Deliveroo couriers, NHS nurses, call centre staff, teaching assistants, junior architects, and civil servants. What unites them is not a sector, but a condition: irregular hours, low bargaining power, high housing costs, rising utility bills and stagnant wages. The novelist George Gissing once wrote that, “Poverty will make the best people bad, if it gets hard enough. Why there’s so much of it in the world, I’m sure I can’t see.” It is a line that resonates again in 2025.
“At the root of this turbulence lies a more foundational question: who, exactly, is the working class in Britain today?”
In a warehouse in Northampton, a 42-year-old single mother will be working night shifts packing e-commerce parcels for £11.62 an hour. Across town, a former forklift driver who now delivers takeaway orders by bike will look at his daily earnings in the app: £34.16 for five hours of cycling, minus expenses. A newly qualified nurse will start on around £15.33 to £18.66 an hour, depending on location and expenses. However, chronic understaffing leads to unsafe nurse-to-patient ratios wherever you work, whatever your experience.
But, again, this new working class is not a unified group. It is fragmented — by region, by race, by immigration status and by culture. Unionisation rates vary sharply across sectors. Many workers lack any representation at all. Yet there remains a shared sense that the economic ladder has been pulled away.
Are British trade unions structurally equipped to navigate this political upheaval? Most unions remain built for a 20th-century model: large workplaces, permanent contracts, predictable hours. Yet that model now applies to only a fraction of the workforce.
Some unions are adapting. The National Education Union (NEU) has expanded its organising into the private education sector. The Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain (IWGB) and United Voices of the World (UVW) are mobilising gig economy workers. The British Medical Association (BMA) has revised its ballot structures to increase turnout. But in many cases, cultural barriers remain. Union leadership often skews older, whiter, and more male than the workers it seeks to represent. For many younger workers, particularly in marginalised communities, unions feel distant — if not alien altogether. The challenge for unions now is whether they can recognise — and organise — the scattered, precarious workers of today’s economy as their own.
In this context, the unions’ return to political relevance comes with both promise and controversy. One case in particular illustrates the tension: Eddie Dempsey, general secretary of the RMT, has recently emerged as an unexpected voice on foreign policy. This spring, the union passed a resolution calling for an end to British military aid to Ukraine — just days after Russian drones struck civilian areas in Kyiv. The resolution described UK arms transfers as “counterproductive to creating the conditions for a peaceful solution”.
The reaction was immediate. Dempsey’s position attracted criticism from Westminster, and his name began to appear in foreign briefings and even on Kremlin-linked newswires. Yet the explanation may lie less in opportunism than in an older ideological instinct. On parts of the British Left, particularly within trade union traditions, there remains a deep scepticism of Nato, military interventionism, and the foreign policy consensus of Western democracies.
The question now is whether that instinct remains viable — or whether it risks alienating not just public opinion, but union members themselves. Especially at a time when Ukrainian civilians are under sustained nightly attacks from Russia. Other major unions, including Unite, Unison and GMB, have declined to endorse the RMT’s position. Even groups such as Stop the War have remained largely quiet on the subject of Ukraine. Dempsey is, I feel sure, not operating at Moscow’s behest. But his position highlights a wider challenge: how to distinguish principle from misjudgement in a geopolitical environment that has changed dramatically since the Cold War.
Nowhere is the weight of history felt more acutely than in the Government’s recent decision to establish a statutory inquiry into Orgreave. More than four decades after the violent 1984 clash between police and striking miners, the state has finally acknowledged the need to examine what campaigners have long described as a “deliberate frame-up”.
On that June day in South Yorkshire, 95 miners were arrested while picketing outside the Orgreave coking plant. Police in riot gear, with dogs and truncheons, charged through crowds. Injuries mounted; no officers were prosecuted. The cases against the miners collapsed in court amid allegations of fabricated evidence and coordinated misconduct.
For the families and former miners — many of whom have waited half a lifetime — the announcement of the inquiry is bittersweet.
The Orgreave inquiry is not merely retrospective. It’s a recognition that industrial conflict has never been a neutral field. The state once treated organised labour as a threat to be suppressed. That legacy lives on — not in riot vans, but in zero-hour contracts, deskilling, and the erosion of bargaining power. To understand who speaks for the working class now requires understanding who was once silenced — and how.
In contrast to these more ideologically charged developments, other unions have achieved quieter but significant gains. This July, after prolonged industrial action, Royal Mail and the CWU reached a three-year agreement that includes a 4.2% raise in the first year, followed by inflation-linked pay in 2026 and a 2% rise in 2027. After months of disruption, the deal represents a form of détente — perhaps even the beginning of a new phase in public sector bargaining by tying pay, job protection, and governance to broader structural commitments.
Other disputes remain ongoing. In June, civil servants at the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government walked out indefinitely, protesting plans to close six regional offices and enforce return-to-office mandates. These policies, viewed by staff as punitive rather than flexible, have fuelled frustration, particularly given that pay remains capped at 3.75%.
Medical professionals are also unsettled. The British Medical Association has launched another ballot, seeking a 5% rise to compensate for long-term pay erosion. The official review has yet to be published, but the direction of travel is clear: patience is wearing thin. Today’s registered doctors’ strike led by junior and consultant doctors is demanding around 29% pay restoration. The Government’s offer of 5.4% was rejected as too low.
In a more unexpected development, teachers in the private sector are also moving towards industrial action. The National Education Union has initiated 23 ballots this year — an unprecedented figure. Strikes have already begun at Roedean and other private schools, where staff cite pension cuts, heavy workloads, and static pay as reasons for action. The notion of private school teachers joining the picket line, once unthinkable, now seems a sign of broader institutional discontent.
Over in Westminster, Labour is preparing to introduce its flagship Employment Rights Bill, though this has been significantly watered down compared to its original ambitions. It still retains momentum but in a tempered, cosier, business-friendly form. The proposed reforms are wide-ranging: recognition thresholds lowered to 2%, the introduction of a Fair Work Agency, new protections for pregnant workers and harassment victims, and an end to fire-and-rehire practices. Phased implementation is scheduled through 2027, but the symbolic shift is already evident in how power, work, and fairness are being discussed by government. It all suggests that a cultural realignment is underway.
And yet the unions still face challenges: in particular, Reform UK, which has begun to make inroads with some union members. Reform wants to make unions irrelevant, and it plans on doing this by speaking more directly to the working class than even the unions do. The party even supports nationalising the steel industry and putting half of utilities under public control — the other half reserved for UK pension funds. This crossover between Left-wing economic discontent and Right-wing cultural rhetoric is unsettling for many in the union movement. Unite and the CWU have voiced concern. The NEU has gone further, calling Reform “far-Right and racist” and launching campaigns to counter its growing presence in post-industrial areas.
None of this detracts from the fact that we are witnessing not just a resurgence in industrial action, but a period of industrial transformation. Unions are testing new tactics. Labour is balancing reformist ambition with fiscal caution. And the broader movement is recalibrating — caught between traditional loyalties and new realities.
This is a moment of reckoning for Britain’s trade unions. The question is whether they can redefine themselves in the 21st century — and whether they still have the capacity to speak for the working class, whoever and wherever they are.
