Andy Burnham is ‘best chance for working people’ – CWU general secretary Dave Ward

This year’s TUC Congress in Brighton has a very different feel to the event last year. There’s a sense of optimism about the government that was distinctly absent 12 months ago.

Speaking to delegates and trade union general secretaries, it’s clear that the movement feels there is a much better prospect of Andy Burnham delivering a political programme in their members’ interests than there was of Keir Starmer doing so.

Dave Ward – general secretary of the Communication Workers Union (CWU) – is among those who has hope that the government can deliver. In an interview with Left Foot Forward at TUC Congress, he called Burnham “the best chance for working people, for Labour”.

Despite this hopeful tone, Ward argued that it is also “the last chance”, and that he wants to “make clear that if we want to bring about change then the government has to do certain things that take on vested interests”. He continued by arguing that the government needed to “rebalance economic power [and] wealth back in favour of working class people and create growth that workers benefit from”.

What does this look like in practice? Ward told LFF: “You don’t rebalance the economy if you don’t put money in the pockets of people that then spend that money on growing the economy.

“And at the moment, we got it wrong. We’ve had decades where – by any measure – wealth inequality has grown. People are getting richer who don’t put a day’s work in, and the people that are suffering is the millions and millions.”

Ward then added: “We have to fundamentally shift the balance of forces in the world of work because the same people that are benefiting from that, they benefited from decline.”

In order to deliver this, Ward is arguing for the trade union movement to “reignite” its campaign for a “new deal for workers”. He told LFF this should “focus onbringing in sectoral collective bargaining, focus on ending bogus self-employment – bringing legislation forward that deals with the senior status of worker and actually makes a big difference in workplaces up and down the UK”.

Ward also told LFF that the government needed to look at the tax system. He said: “There has to be a change in tax. There has to be – whatever system you want to use – there’s got to be a fairer tax system that the ultra rich, the people that have benefited from the last 30 or 40 years have to now pay their fair share”.

While Ward is calling for the government to make radical changes, he’s pragmatic about the timescale of delivering on this. He told LFF that he wants to see the trade union movement “playing its part” in delivering the change he wants to see, but doesn’t want to see it “getting into a debate where we become cynical if Burnham doesn’t do the change in about six weeks”.

Still, he acknowledges the scale of the challenge Burnham faces. “I think if he doesn’t get it right,
Labour are out of power for a long, long time”, Ward told LFF, warning it would be Reform that would replace them.

Like many in the trade union movement, Ward is deeply worried about the impact Reform would have on workers. He told LFF: “Reform’s agenda is to maintain the wealth that’s there at the moment and to do it by stoking division. We can’t have that and we can’t have Nigel Farage being the voice of working class people.”

Ward believes that the trade union movement can play an important role in combatting Reform and the far-right. He told LFF that trade unions should “just be honest with people, get out there, talk to your members, not have a go at them if they’ve got concerns around things like immigration. There does need to be some controlled immigration in the UK. But it’s got to be fair. It’s got to be fair to the workers. It’s got to be fair to immigrants. At the moment we need to be leading that debate.”

He went on to add: “One thing that always strikes me about workers I’ve worked in the industry for years […] I’ll tell you now what brings them together is when you convince them that there’s an issue that’s worth fighting for, they don’t look around the workplace and go well this person don’t live in the UK or this person weren’t born there”.

Alongside this, Ward said that he had “faith in Burnham” to deliver for Labour and prevent a Reform government, and that “he’s the right politician for these times”.

Why? Ward said that Burnham’s analysis is “correct”, arguing that he his right to criticise the record of previous Labour governments as well as Tory ones.

Ward told LFF: “He’s the first Labour politician who’s had the courage to actually say that Labour got it wrong as well – and let’s be honest, Labour did get it wrong”. He acknowledged that Labour in power “did some good things”, but argued that “too many Labour governments” didn’t take on “vested interests”.

Ward continued: “If you don’t change the balance of power back to working class people, if you don’t create wealth for working class people, how do you deliver change? And I think these ideas that Andy’s setting out are the right ideas.”

Chris Jarvis is head of strategy and development at Left Foot Forward