“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.
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8 Comments
I have been a trade union member since 1980 and for 20 years was a full time representative of the postal workers union CWU.
Yes Liberals do need to relate more to the trade union movement but we also need to highlight reforms that are needed to make unions truly democratic. The Tories passed legislation in the 1980s aimed at doing this. However to many union hierachies have found ways around the law.
The regulator is useless. We need a US style National Labour Relations Board to effectively govern the unions.
@ David Warren You write approvingly, “we also need to highlight reforms that are needed to make unions truly democratic. The Tories passed legislation in the 1980s aimed at doing this”.
I don’t know whether it was intentional, but you omit the word ‘Thatcher’ from your comments, David. Interestingly AI doesn’t…… but it mentions ‘courts having the power to seize union funds’.
What AI says, “Margaret Thatcher aggressively curbed trade union power through a series of sweeping employment acts in the 1980s. Her government ended the “closed shop” (requiring employment at a company to be tied to union membership), banned secondary action (sympathy strikes), mandated secret ballots before strikes, and removed legal immunities, allowing courts to seize union funds”.
I’m not sure how much of a welcome you’d get if you cheered that lot on, particularly the last sentence. I would be helpful if you could spell out what you mean by ‘truly democratic’.
@David Raw
I don’t agree with the draconian laws introduced by the Thatcher government that allow union funds to be seized and campaigned vigorously against them at the time. However the measures introduced required top officials and executives to be elected by individual member ballot have been circumvented by high nomination thresholds which favour candidates supported by union HQ’s. That is what I want to see changed.
@ Jack Meredith “Henry Campbell-Bannerman’s Trade Disputes Act of 1906 stopped unions being sued for damages over strike action.”
Are you aware that in 1926, Sir John Simon (a member of the then Liberal Shadow Cabinet), with the Party Leader Asquith’s approval, threated to punish the Trade Unions and their individual members, “down to the last farthing” for supporting the locked out miners who faced a 40% pay cut and longer hours.
It’s all in Hansard if you care to look, Jack.
“But you’re a Lib Dem, I thought your party didn’t like unions.”
You have to ask why people think this. LibDems are largely seen as well meaning respectable relative well off members of the middle classes, many of whom are concerned with levels of poverty and inequality in society, offering , at best partial, solutions largely centre on increased welfare payments.
The Unions, however, tend to focus on jobs, including their availability, and the levels of pay given to those doing them. So, there is a clear mismatch.
Hardly anyone in working class communities believes that welfarism is the key to poverty and inequality alleviation. Working class people accept the idea of welfare for those who are genuinely in need of it but they can be as harsh as anyone on those who may be guilty of rorting the system. There are a few.
The idea of giving everyone a UBI is risible to most. What is wanted are decent jobs, decent pay, and decent conditions of work. You don’t need to set up focus groups to know this. Just go out and talk to the electorate in places like Burnley where you once managed to elect a Lib Dem MP but now you might struggle to hold your deposit.
Hi Peter,
Thanks for your comment. Just to be clear, I’m not running focus groups, but I’m undertaking a personal project just talking to representatives from unions about their view of the Lib Dems.
….Liberals and the unions: time to talk again…….
It’ll take a lot of talking to undo the blatant hostility to unions and employees shown by Vince Cable during his time as Business Secretary in the coalition years..
@ Jack,
Starmer knew how to have good relations with the Trades Unions. Pity it didn’t last. As soon as he was PM he was suspending his own MPs for doing what he himself was doing just a few years previously.
https://tinyurl.com/7vbpv2n7