The brothers are back. Few political groups have been more exhilarated by Jeremy Corbyn’s landslide victory than the trade unions. For years they have been regarded as the difficult relations of the Labour movement, useful mainly for their financial and organisational muscle but not much else. Blairite New Labour was openly hostile towards them, Ed Miliband equivocal. Indeed his decision to widen Labour’s voting membership, a move which dramatically assisted the Corbyn campaign, was a deliberate attempt to reduce the influence of the trade unions.
But now Labour is led by someone who enthusiastically shares their anti-capitalist, anti-austerity, reform-blocking, high-taxing, state-expanding ideology. In Corbyn, they now have a political soulmate at the top of the party that most of them bankroll. ‘You have to pinch yourself that a Labour leader is saying things that all of us agree with,’ says Mark Serwotka, head of the civil service union the PCS. For most British people, the late 1970s were dark days for Britain, with union militancy regularly paralysing the country.
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