The trade union movement faces a “deep threat” to its values posed by the growth of the far-right in the UK, delegates at the Trades Union Congress were warned.
Former NASUWT General Secretary Dr Patrick Roach said trade unions needed to continue to be “joined up” in their response and counter the sense of economic injustice many voters and trade union members felt.
Dr Roach, who chaired the TUC’s Anti-Racism Taskforce, warned that a sense of economic injustice -which was a “genuine concern” among citizens - was being twisted by the far-right for their own racist ends.
Tackling racism had to be at the top of the organising agenda for unions and with six million members, the movement could counter racist narratives which were being spread, he said.
Dr Roach was speaking on a panel with trade unionists from Spain, Argentina and the Republic of Ireland who gave powerful and inspiring insights about how unions were fighting extremism in their countries.
He said: “The whole of our Congress has been punctuated by that deep threat, that existential threat, not only to our movement but to our values, posed by the far-right.
“At the heart of all that is the underpinning of racism of which the far-right movement is built, but not only racism, sexism, misogyny, misogynoir, transphobia, islamophobia, homophobia, anti-Semitism, disablism, I could go on.
“The fact of the matter is these agendas are joined up and we need to be joined up in our response.
“It’s fantastic that in the TUC and as a movement we have been joining up our response.
“But the far-right feeds on is injustice and a sense of economic injustice. It twists that message for its own ends.
“The reality is, and it’s a genuine concern that our members have and those who are not yet members have, is a sense in which they are powerless in the context of which they feel their voices are not being listened to, not being heard and in which they are struggling to make ends meet.
“So we have to be addressing those issues, those structural issues around economic injustice which is what the TUC’s Anti-Racism Taskforce was seeking to do and continues to do through the work of our affiliates.
“Tackling racism needs to be at the top of our organising agenda, but we need to recruit, we need to build our movement and we need to campaign.
“Campaigning in our workplaces is crucial because one of the things the far-right are good at is they have the tools, they have the means for spreading their division and their hate.
“Well we have got six million members in this country and we have workplaces where we can get our message across and we need to be using that as part and parcel of delivering on our manifesto to tackle racism and to tackle the far-right.”
