Labour is readying the unions for war with a Right-wing government

Two months after Andy Burnham emerged victorious in his guerrilla attempt to replace Sir Keir Starmer as prime minister, he permitted himself a moment at Labour’s party conference to wax lyrical about trade unions. The UK is, he told the rapt auditorium in September, the country that had given “trade unions and the cooperative movement to the world”. We are, he added, “a country of solidarity, not separation”. After the speech, heads of unions agreed it had been very strong indeed.

One general secretary reported that among her delegation, the speech had left “not a dry eye”. Labour is now following the praise that Burnham lavished on Britain’s unions with action to ensure unions are given the conditions to usher in what could well be a new golden age. Last week, unions gained a legal right for which they had long campaigned, to engage with employees both in person and digitally in the workplace. Businesses that have been reluctant to let unions run riot – for fear that doing so could make them less nimble, slower and less price-competitive – will now face fines of up to £500,000 if they fail to welcome unions in.

These are far from the only powers that Labour is granting to unions. In August, they were given flexibility over how to hold ballots, so are now able to swap effortful and expensive postal ballots for electronic ballots, which can cost as much as 88 per cent less to administer. The six-month mandates sparked by successful ballots have been increased to 12 months; the notice period unions must give employers if they are undertaking industrial action has been shortened to 10 days from 14; and the 40 per cent threshold that “important” public services must clear to undertake strikes has been removed.

Since they began to emerge in the 18th century, Britain’s trade unions have endured all kinds of political weather. Under Burnham, the sun could scarcely be shining more brightly. With this in mind, The Telegraph has undertaken the first comprehensive analysis of AR21 forms – the mandatory documents produced by unions every year, which offer a tantalising glimpse of what is really going on within them. The Telegraph has analysed forms released between 2018 and 2025 by the 30 largest unions in the country.

Rebuilding strength What emerges from the data is evidence that unions are quietly rebuilding their strength after a rocky few decades. This is nowhere clearer than in the figures released by unions about their finances, which indicate they are in ruder health than they have been in years. The largest 25 unions that published AR21 forms are currently sitting on funds worth £1.36bn – more than double their combined general fund in 2018 (£737m).

In the last two years alone, the unions’ total general fund has increased by £238m. While much of this wealth is not immediately accessible, being tied up in property, investments or pensions, it also includes growing cash funds set aside for future strikes. Meanwhile, although membership remains a good way off its 1979 peak – when some 13 million people across the United Kingdom belonged to a union – the bleeding appears to have staunched.

Membership of unions is actually now gently increasing, and rose from 4.4 million in 2018 to 4.6 million last year. There also appears to have been an uptick of commitment among union members who are taking part in ballots. Last year, among the 269 ballots made with over 100 entitled voters, average turnout was 45.2 per cent, up from 38.4 per cent in 2024. If unions are richer than they have been in years, it is likely to be in part because they have been relatively quiescent since Labour came into power.

According to the AR21 forms, last year, among Britain’s largest unions, there were just 269 ballots undertaken with more than 100 entitled voters – compared to 1,564 ballots undertaken in 2022, when the Conservatives were governing. Data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) underlines just how much the unions have quietened down, since Labour – which of course emerged from the union movement – was returned to power. In the year to July 2026, 691,000 days were lost to strikes; but in the year ending July 2023 (which saw three Tory prime ministers: Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak), 4.2 million days were lost to strikes, more than at any period since the 1980s.

There is no legal obligation on British unions to replace striking members’ lost earnings with strike pay – but many do ( Unison , the largest union, pays up to £50 a day, and Unite , the second largest, up to £70); and the costs of ballots add up too. So the fewer strikes happen, the less unions have to spend. From the unions’ point of view, the boost Labour is giving them represents a once-in-a-generation moment. “This is the best opportunity unions have had,” says Mike Clancy, general secretary of Prospect, which represents engineers, scientists and other specialists.

“And of course, it is dependent upon a Labour government.” Clancy is particularly hopeful that the legislation that came into force last week, giving unions the right to access workplaces, could represent “a very significant organising opportunity for unions”. Surveys suggest, he points out, that “the main reason people haven’t joined a union is they haven’t been asked.” If more workers were made aware that their interests could be protected by a union, so the argument goes, they would sign up in their droves.

Changes kicking in from January are likely to further ensure workers are made aware of unions, as employers will have to give new workers a written statement informing them what a union is, what their rights are regarding membership, and contact information for any unions the employer recognises. The days when employees simply didn’t know they could join a union – or even, among younger workers, what a union is – look numbered. Preparing for battle The building prosperity of unions begs an obvious question: what are unions planning to do with their rapidly consolidating riches?

For many on the Right, fears are growing that unions are massing a “war chest” that will be used to mount resistance to a Right-wing government, if one is voted in at the next election. To an extent, unions’ concerns about what a Right-wing government could entail are well founded. Reform has pledged to slash the numbers of civil servants by around 40 per cent, to repeal the Employment Rights Act 2025 (the legislative vehicle Labour is using to broaden unions’ rights), and even to replace the 2010 Equalities Act , as part of its war on “DEI”.

The Conservatives, meanwhile, have also pledged to repeal the Employment Rights Act and to scrap some diversity and inclusion reporting requirements. With a recent poll putting the Conservatives and Reform on 24 per cent and 20 per cent respectively – behind Labour’s 32 per cent – many in Westminster believe it likely that after a general election, Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage’s parties could end up governing together, in some form of coalition.

In Reform, at least, they are trying to get ahead of efforts that might be going on within the labour movement to kibosh the party’s vision for a Britain in which unions hold less sway. “We’re very conscious that there are plans being developed in the unions to try and sabotage the plans that Reform have for reforming our economy, and the Civil Service in particular,” says Danny Kruger , the Reform MP who leads the party’s work on preparing for government.

“We are building our own contingency plans to ensure that the unions will not be able to hold a Reform government to ransom,” he adds. “There has been talk of a general strike, and what is worrying is that it looks like unions are coordinating a war chest or strike fund in order to fight us.” Prospect’s Clancy dismisses such fears as “conspiratorial” – and another union source tells The Telegraph with a laugh that trying to get unions to set aside their rivalries, and push for one thing, is nigh-on impossible.

But there are certainly signs that some unions are thinking ahead to the next election and beyond. In May, the Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS), which represents 170,000 civil servants, voted to double its financial surplus target to 10 per cent annually, to fund industrial action in the event of a Reform UK government. A motion passed at the union’s conference declared that a Reform government would be “deeply hostile to both trade unions and to its own workforce”.

Kruger insists the party’s plan is not to go to war with the Civil Service, however, but to make it “more agile and a better place to work”. Meanwhile, The Trades Union Congress (TUC) – the umbrella organisation for unions in England and Wales – projected attack ads on to locations around Birmingham during Reform’s conference in the city last month, as well as deploying a van that described Reform as a party “for hire” rather than “for workers”.

Clancy, of Prospect, believes the Conservatives, who introduced laws making it more difficult to trigger strikes, would be no “friend” to unions if they are elected back into office; but he is more concerned by what an empowered Restore or Reform could mean for the labour movement. “I think they are a different political conundrum altogether, and that there would be in that space much more of an existential threat to trade unionism.” Making hay Still, other union leaders are evidently concerned by the prospect of any kind of Right-wing government at all, even if it were just the Conservatives.

In September last year, Simon Weller, assistant general secretary of Aslef, the train drivers’ union, lamented that at a meeting he’d just attended of the TUC, the conclusion had been that Labour would be in power for “one term” only. This meant, he warned, that for unions: “We’ve got a really short window in which to prepare for whatever replaces it… And whatever replaces this government will be hostile to us as trade unions, and train drivers in particular… I know it’s not particularly optimistic, but I think we’ve got a problem, so we can’t be complacent.”

For many in the union movement, therefore, there is a feeling that they should make hay now, while they have a government in place that is so well disposed towards them. Clancy, however, says that a key challenge unions are currently facing is to grow membership “across the entire economy” – because while union membership is strong in the public sector, where nearly half of employees belong to a union, in the private sector the proportion drops to just 12.1 per cent.

Any large-scale transformation of unions’ fortunes in Britain will therefore require a concerted increase of unionisation within the private sector . This is no small task, however – not least because nearly half of those working in the private sector in Britain are employed by small businesses (of up to 49 employees). Penetrating these, and even medium-sized businesses, has doubtless been made easier by Labour’s reforms, although it requires a lot of effort for unions – and is therefore expensive.

And while unions had little trouble forming coherent arguments in the postwar era for how they could improve the lives of those toiling away in manufacturing, the argument as to what unions have to offer private-sector workers can be harder to make. It is also, the economist Len Shackleton points out, much easier to unionise workers within a single factory or dock than those working from home or in offices in towns across the country. Many in the labour movement today blame the hostile legislation introduced by Margaret Thatcher and John Major’s governments for the long-term decline of unions.

The 1980 Employment Act, for instance, limited “secondary picketing” – which meant that workers were banned from striking in solidarity with