“But you’re a Lib Dem, I thought your party didn’t like unions.”

I’ve had that said to me more than once when I mentioned that I’m a member of both the Liberal Democrats and UNISON. I understand why people assume it: trade unions tend to get filed alongside Labour and the politics of the left. But it misses a long shared history between the unions, labour relations, and British liberalism.

The history is real, not a footnote. William Gladstone gave unions legal recognition and protected their funds in the Trade Union Act of 1871. Winston Churchill, as President of the Board of Trade, brought in the first enforceable minimum wages with the Trade Boards Act of 1909. And Henry Campbell-Bannerman’s Trade Disputes Act of 1906 stopped unions being sued for damages over strike action.

It wasn’t all to liberalism’s credit. The same Gladstone government that recognised the unions also criminalised peaceful picketing in 1871, and it took Disraeli’s Conservatives to undo that in 1875.

So why are we liberals so shy about saying that trade unionism is our kind of work? The case is strong. A union is just a group of free people who’ve decided they’re stronger together than alone, and the freedom to combine and bargain together is a liberal freedom before it’s anyone else’s.

We’ve never trusted power that answers to no one, whether it’s an overbearing state or an employer who can set the terms because the person across the table has nowhere else to go. Churchill saw it clearly in 1909, when he attacked the sweated trades for having “no parity of bargaining.” A union is one of the oldest fixes for that. And real freedom isn’t just being left alone; it’s having the means to live a decent life, and for most of us that’s won or lost at work.

None of this means copying Labour. Liberals, and the social democrats I count myself among, have always been wary of the union as a political machine: the block vote, the closed shop, the corporatism of the 1970s.

A liberal version would be friendly but kept at arm’s length, with no money changing hands for influence, and it would push hard for democracy inside the unions themselves; a union that won’t answer to its own members can’t lecture anyone else about accountability. Labour can’t make that offer, because it’s tied to the unions it speaks for. We can do both: back collective bargaining with no strings attached, and be the honest friend who defends the principle and still calls out the practice when it’s wrong.

We’ve done it before by building, not just fighting. The Liberal Yellow Book of 1928 called for works councils, profit-sharing, and a real stake for employees in the firms they worked for. Partnership and shared ownership have always been more our style than a permanent war between two sides.

The timing helps, too. After all the strikes on the railways, in the NHS, in schools, and across the civil service, Labour has passed the Employment Rights Act 2025, the biggest expansion of workers’ rights in a generation. It sets up new bargaining bodies for social care and school support staff, the direct heirs of those Edwardian trade boards. As someone who cares how this country treats its carers, I want us arguing for that to be ambitious, not minimal.

There’s more to say. Take the gig economy, where bogus self-employment loads all the risk onto the worker. The liberal answer is simple: a single, honest definition of what a worker is. Flexible working fits our instinct for autonomy almost perfectly. On all of it, we should be loud. Right now we’re barely audible.

The last Lib Dem leader to engage seriously with the movement was the late Charles Kennedy, who in September 2002 became the first to address the TUC Congress. Nearly 24 years of near-silence since then is beyond disappointing, and I’d like to help change that. I’ve made a start: I’ve already sat down with a TUC policy officer and a UNISON rep at Swansea University, with more conversations to come.

So here’s what I’d like to see. I want a Lib Dem leader back at the TUC Congress, picking up where Kennedy left off. We’ve even got a home for trade unionists already, the Association of Liberal Democrat Trade Unionists, though it’s been left at the margins far too long and deserves to be funded and listened to. And if you’re a Lib Dem and a trade unionist, do get in touch. There are more of us than the caricature allows, and it’s well past time we said so.

* Jack Meredith is a member of the Welsh Liberal Democrats and an active campaigner and canvasser with Swansea and Gower Liberal Democrats. His writing focuses on democratic reform, social justice, trade unionism, economic democracy, and the institutional foundations of effective government. He has written for the Fabians, Lib Dem Voice, Liberator, Nation Cymru, Bylines Cymru, and Centre Think Tank.