‘Unions winning” declared a giant, cheerily multicoloured sign along the windy seafront side of the Brighton Centre this week. Built in the unions’ distant 1970s heyday, the hulking traditional venue for their annual TUC conference is sometimes a melancholy place, windowless meeting rooms half-full of delegates and union leaders trying to raise their spirits while talking about setbacks, betrayals and rare victories.

Yet for much of this conference the sun was out, the wind was light by Brighton standards and, inside the centre, the exhibition stand for Labour Unions, the collective body for those affiliated to the party, was plastered with uplifting posters promoting “Labour’s new deal for working people”. The employment rights bill, less comprehensive than some trade unionists would like but full of improvements never offered by New Labour, is expected to easily clear one of its final parliamentary hurdles next week.

Not since the 1970s have unions known a period when their powers are significantly expanding rather than contracting. Yet not since then, too, has there been such an unpopular Labour government – or such a menacing wave building on the radical right. With the party down to 20% in some polls, ever further below Reform UK, if we assume that Labour’s total vote of 9.7 million at the last election has fallen in line with its ratings, there may now be fewer Labour supporters, about 6 million, than there are trade unionists – who numbered 6.4 million at the last count, after almost half a century of........

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