Tag Archives: trade unions

“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.