Britain’s Unions Are Back, Just Not the Way You Expected

The scale of industrial disputes currently taking place across the UK suggests a trade-union landscape in motion. Unions are depicted as more confident and legally protected than at any point since the 1970s—yet their actions remain fragmented by sector, geography, and timing.

To critics, Antonio Gramsci’s observation feels apt: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born.”

But theory will get us only so far.

Perhaps closer attention should be paid to how unions are attempting to organise more effectively. Whether welcomed or not, this may yet amount to a form of revival. This can only be understood if we accept that industrial action today no longer resembles the mass protests associated with earlier periods of union power—and for good reason.

Today’s disputes are different. They are shaped by an irregular labour market and rely increasingly on enterprise-level bargaining, operating within a political culture where national confrontation carries significant risk. This means injunctions, lost pay, dismissal, even de-recognition.

Under these new conditions, smaller actions can sometimes reflect not failure but intelligent strategy—an effort to apply pressure where control is possible rather than where it might once have been expected. What this reflects is not retreat but recalibration. As Bernie Sanders has often argued in a very different national context, “unions built the middle class of this country, and they will build the middle class of the future.” The form that organisation takes may change, but its economic function does not.

Nowhere is this tension clearer than in health, where even limited industrial action reveals just how fragile the system has become.

In England, the government is wary of another prolonged confrontation with resident doctors—always an emotive issue—aware that it carries significant political and operational costs. Leaders within the National Health Service have warned that the service is already operating at what one describes as “permanent surge capacity,” leaving little slack to absorb further walkouts.

The stakes are high—higher than they were a year ago. Waiting-list performance remains fragile, and, unlike previous confrontations, both sides now appear focused on endurance rather than escalation, suggesting that at least some of the lessons of 2023 have been learned.

The contrast with Scotland—where ministers moved earlier to settle—has not gone unnoticed within English medical unions. Aneurin Bevan’s insistence that the NHS must answer to “the needs of the people, not the convenience of administration” continues to shape expectations of how far industrial conflict in healthcare can legitimately go.

Nor does the public appear especially sympathetic to guerrilla-style tactics in the health service at a time when many are struggling themselves.

Beyond healthcare, similar questions of legitimacy and restraint are emerging elsewhere. The Lloyds Banking Group’s case has become a test of how far employers can go in using internal data during negotiations. At issue is whether an employer crossed a legal line by making use of employees’ own banking data in the course of pay talks.

The fact that the matter is now under review by the Information Commissioner’s Office has sent a powerful shiver through HR departments well beyond the world of banking. If the union Accord succeeds, it could significantly redraw the boundary between “business intelligence” and unlawful surveillance of union activity, establishing a precedent that other unions may seek to rely upon.

Even without litigation, the dispute has already hardened attitudes within financial-services unions. Sophisticated employers are increasingly turning to technology and analytics to shape negotiations over pay and conditions—confirming Michel Foucault’s warning that power often operates most effectively when it is quiet, technical, and difficult to see.

The legal backdrop matters. The Employment Rights Act 2025 is widely regarded as the most union-friendly statute in a generation. It grants trade unions a right to request physical or digital access to workplaces in order to meet, support, represent, recruit, or organise workers.

This has sent shockwaves through the employer community. Less visible than strikes, it may prove far more consequential, loosening long-standing controls over who gets to speak to workers, when, and on what terms. Ministers involved in shaping the reforms have been clear that the aim is not to engineer mass waves of protest or industrial action, but to rebalance workplace power.

Union officials agree that it has already altered certain calculations. There is now greater emphasis on claims, thresholds, and the protection of workplace representatives—and far less on headline-grabbing national ballots. Yet many privately acknowledge that the law’s real impact will only become clear once it is stress-tested in sectors where union density is low but workplace grievances are high, such as logistics, retail, and manufacturing. That test is underway.

This readjustment is not confined just to the workplace. Within the labour movement itself, there are growing discussions about whether the Labour Party remains the sole political home for organised labour. These range from exploratory debates around disaffiliation within parts of the Trades Union Congress, to more tentative conversations about alternative leaderships.

Names such as Andy Burnham were recently circulating before he was blocked at the weekend, reflecting wider unease rather than any settled strategy. One union follower put it bluntly: rather than speaking truth to power, unions increasingly appear to be brokers of it—or, at times, constrained by it—to the possible detriment of sections of their own membership.

On the railways, this tension is visible in ongoing disputes over rest-day working, driver shortages, and long-promised restructuring. While national strike action has dipped, the conflict has not disappeared so much as reconfigured itself into overtime bans, increasingly localised stoppages, coordinated refusals of rest-day working, and quiet resistance to roster “modernisation” without firm guarantees in place. This continues to place significant pressure on staffing models that are already widely regarded as stretched.

Transport unions increasingly believe that this patience works, particularly given that a post-election government typically seeks stability rather than spectacle—echoing Harold Wilson’s observation that politics is often “the art of managing the inevitable.”

Similar logic is visible in education. In further education, turnout has been high and local organising unusually dense, suggesting intensity rather than breadth. Some colleges have moved quickly to settle, anxious to avoid insolvency risks. Others appear to be digging in, gambling that staff fatigue will arrive first—a high-risk strategy.

In schools, unions are watching closely. The National Education Union has so far held back, but officials warn that another below-inflation pay round could rapidly reopen wider disputes.

Meanwhile, UNISON’s row at Ash Field Academy has taken on symbolic weight far beyond Leicester. The suspension of workplace representative Tom Barker has become something of a rallying point—circulated in training sessions and regional meetings as a test of whether the new legal settlement has real force.

Barker was suspended immediately after members voted for strike action, with no prior warning of any complaint—a sequence the union describes as a form of reprisal linked directly to the dispute. If the case escalates, it may become an early test of whether the strengthened protections can operate in practice rather than merely in principle, allowing workers to organise without placing jobs or workplace representatives at risk.

Beyond this lies a growing confrontation over civil liberties themselves. Opposition to the Crime and Policing Bill has been framed not as a niche concern but as existential. The ability to assemble, picket, and protest remains central to union power, particularly in disputes that depend on sustained visibility rather than short, dramatic stoppages. Senior figures warn that new “cumulative impact” powers could be deployed to neutralise long-running conflicts through procedure rather than negotiation.

George Orwell’s line—“if liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear”—has begun to reappear in briefing notes and delegate packs, not as nostalgia but as a practical warning.

What emerges—in health, transport, finance, education, and civil liberties—is not a single “union moment” but a kind of mosaic. Pressure without spectacle. Confidence without density. A movement relearning how to exercise power in conditions not of its choosing.

Union membership remains historically low, yet levels of activism among workplace representatives and organisers remain high. Questions also persist about whether younger members are being adequately represented and engaged. Trade unions represent only a proportion of the workforce overall, a constraint that continues to shape their reach and tactics.

The broader question is not whether unions matter, but whether the new legal framework can work. If it delivers meaningful change—faster recognition, safer picketing, fewer injunctions—the decline in membership numbers may slow, perhaps even reverse. If it does not, today may come to be remembered not as a revival, but as a final, disciplined surge before ultimate retreat.

Either way, Britain’s unions are no longer operating at the political margins. They have re-entered the political arena—not as a mass movement in waiting, but as a strategic force, fragmented, adaptive, and increasingly hard for employers and government to ignore. The spectacle is gone. The pressure remains.

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