The TUC: In Complete Lockstep With Imperialism

On 22nd February, the Trades Unions Congress will be joining unions including the National Union of Mineworkers (total number of members 196), the Associated Society of Locomotive Engineers and Firemen (ASLEF), Unison, GMB and PCS in a rally in London alongside such luminaries as Peter Tatchell and John McDonnell to call for the withdrawal of Russian troops from Ukraine.

US President Donald Trump, as head of state of the nation which has most openly and materially backed the Nato-led proxy war in Ukraine, has spent the last few days openly attacking Ukraine, blaming them for the outbreak of war in the country, as well as criticising Vladimir Zelensky as a dictator – a criticism which is actually accurate given that it was Zelensky who has cancelled his own presidential election, banned trade unions, restricted the national media and repressed opposition parties, all key identifiers of what would normally be considered to be dictatorial actions.

Despite this, sizeable sections of the trade union movement, no doubt influenced by rabid Trotskyites from organisations including Alliance for Workers’ Liberty (or AWL, or better yet CIA-WL), the Socialist Workers Party and others have decided to yet again set aside the true causes of the war in Ukraine, its roots in the Maidan Coup of 2014, the actions of the Nazi Azov battalion in the civil war that followed and the anti-democratic tendencies of Vladimir Zelensky to instead rally in support of Ukraine, and presumably the continuation of the hostilities which have devastated the country.

As is common in the modern trade union movement, the stated aims of this rally were vague and nebulous, but Paul Nowak, contemptible imperialist stooge and General Secretary of the TUC, stated in a bile-inducing thirty-odd second clip posted on the TUC’s X account:

“It’s now three years since Vladimir Putin launched his illegal and indefensible attack on Ukraine. Last year, I visited Kiev to meet our sister unions [presumably the ones that Zelensky didn’t ban] and I saw first hand the impact of the war on the people of Ukraine and on union members and their families, the police stations and hospitals and the bombardments, the constant threat of air raids.

The TUC stands in solidarity with our sister unions in Ukraine and the people of Ukraine”

The British trade union movement’s actions on the war in Ukraine have been heinous from day one. In 2022, my former union TSSA passed a motion which called for the withdrawal of Russian troops from Ukrainian territory and support for Ukrainian ‘workers’, accompanied by a speech from the now disgraced General Secretary, Manuel Cortes, calling for the Ukrainians to be armed by the West, while in 2023 delegates at the annual conference of the wretched and contemptible University and Colleges Union (UCU) passed a motion (Motion 5) which, while wildly inaccurate in its definition of imperialism (which the liberal left seems to believe is defined as ‘big country picking on smaller country’), it was correct in condemning the actions of Nato in fomenting the war and was opposed to supplying arms to Ukraine, which the motion believed would only exacerbate the conflict.

The democratic passing of the motion was then swiftly condemned by the UCU’s General Secretary, the ludicrous Dr Jo Grady, as well as the lickspittle collective of fools and reactionaries which calls itself the trade union’s executive. According to UCUleft, supporters of the motion have been subject to an online witch hunt, being smeared as being ‘pro-Putin’, despite the motion’s somewhat cowardly attempt to equivocate on the Russian state being openly provoked into opening hostilities against Ukraine after eight years of bombardment of the Donbass region by Banderists.

In March 2022, state asset Paul Mason and paedophilia apologist Peter Tatchell were amongst the distinguished attendees as a rally which took place in London calling for all-out, imperialist-backed war in Ukraine, fully supported and endorsed by the bulk of the trade union movement, including the UCU, CWU, TSSA and others. It was at this march that attendees, festooned with trade union paraphernalia, chanted “Put an end to Putin’s reign, arm, arm, arm Ukraine” and Paul Mason made an impassioned speech to the blood-soaked imperialists present when he called for Russian President Valdimir Putin to be “hanging from a meat hook”.

In 2023, the largely useless and wholly inadequate Trades Union Congress, which exists in order for its General Secretaries to serve their time in order to eventually don the ermine of the House of Lords, passed the repugnant and monstrous Composite 21, a motion so factually inaccurate and stuffed with emotive language like ‘ethnic cleansing’ while posturing that the trade union movement is ‘anti-imperialistic’ at the same time as it pins its colours firmly to the mask of the western imperialism. The motion was supported by the biggest (and in effect the worst trade unions) including Unite, Unison and the reactionary GMB.

Only the Bakers, Food and Allied Workers’ Union and the Fire Brigades Union found it within themselves to vote against the imperialist motion, with RMT abstaining after an intervention by Trotskyite elements within their delegation to vote against the wishes of the union’s General Secretary and President. As dark days in the trade union movement go, 12th September 2023 will go down in infamy as one of the darkest.

While the trade union movement will make platitudes to the working class and dress their imperialist motions with the tinsel of protecting working class interests, the trade union movement in 2025 is in reality run by a tiny clique of imperialists and class collaborators who are as distant from the working class as it is possible to be. They have long-since eschewed the principles of building true working class power and instead have embraced bourgeois ideologies like identity politics and support for fascists in Ukraine.

Perhaps it was inevitable that, after the bitter defeat of the strongest cohort of workers in the Miners’ Strike in 1985, the trade union movement would find itself in the position that it finds itself in today. But it would have taken the hardest and most cynical of people to have ever predicted that the movement would not only have gone into a period of weakness and disarray following the ending of the Miners’ Strike, but also went into a period of outright class collaborationism and fealty to imperialism. But that is where the trade union movement finds itself today.

Until there can be a strong and lasting movement for change in the trade union movement, beginning at its ground roots and led by workers who are educated in the principles of socialism and communism, then the movement is doomed and it will deserve nothing more than its own demise.