Nigel Farage has suffered a swift and stinging rebuke from Britain’s biggest trade unions after offering to let them cut ties with Labour and join Reform UK instead – an invitation the union leaders dismissed as a “con” from a man who is “no friend of the workers”.
In an interview with The Times, the Reform UK leader declared: “If you represent working people in this country, my door is open.” He urged unions to attend his party’s conference in September, pointing to a poll published in the same newspaper that named him the most popular party leader among trade union members.
“Unite, Unison and GMB have forcefully rejected Nigel Farage’s invitation to join Reform UK, calling him no friend of workers.”
But the response was near-instant and brutal. Unite general secretary Sharon Graham said: “Reform have shown absolutely no evidence that they are friends of workers.” She added: “What needs to happen now is for the Labour Party to stop dithering and be the voice of workers.”
Unison’s Andrea Egan accused Farage of a “con”, saying Reform had “shown what it thinks of working people” by pledging to scrap the Employment Rights Act – legislation that guarantees sick pay from the first day of work and the right to claim unfair dismissal after six months. “It’s a con to think Nigel Farage and his rich cronies are interested in unions for anything but cold hard cash,” she said.
A GMB spokesperson went further: “Mr Farage and his Reform MPs say one thing to workers and do another… we see them for what they are – re-badged Tories after union members’ basic rights.”
Wes Streeting, who resigned as health secretary last month and has said he would enter any future Labour leadership contest, piled in: “Farage has the audacity to vote consistently against the rights of workers and then claim he’s open to trade unions.”
Farage acknowledged in a social media video that there would be “disagreements”, but insisted there could be common ground. He cited “historical injustices” around the British Steel pension scheme, which he said his party would “like to help you sort out”.
The snub comes as the wider trade union movement faces its own internal fractures. The NEU, Britain’s largest teachers’ union, is locked in a bitter dispute with Unite, Unison and the GMB over the right to organise teaching assistants – a row that, according to a source familiar with the matter, could even lead to the teachers’ suspension from the Trades Union Congress.
That disunity reflects deeper questions about what it means to be working class today. Mick Lynch, the former transport workers leader, has argued that “if you don’t own the means of production, you are working class. If you have to get up when the alarm clock goes off and do a job and you depend on your earnings rather than your assets then you are working class.”
Labour, for its part, remains deeply tied to the unions it relies on for both money and votes. The party received £1.4m from seven different unions in donations in the first three months of this year alone. Unison gave £366,936, and Unite – despite its frequent criticism of the Labour government – donated £392,544. Eleven unions, representing four million workers, currently back Labour, with union representatives sitting on the party’s National Executive Committee and members able to vote in leadership contests.
Farage’s offer was never likely to loosen those bonds – but the speed and ferocity of the unions’ rejection leaves Reform with little to show but a closed door.