Professor Jason Arday’s death has reignited the question of racism in Britain and the urgent need for an anti‑racist movement to ensure an egalitarian society, free from all forms of discrimination and exploitation. However, the movement looks like an uphill task if people of colour do not fight racism together. Racism is not merely an issue confined to universities and the media, where it led to the public lynching of Professor Arday even before his death—racism is what took his life. His death has become a cause célèbre in the fight against racism in Britain. The struggle remains uphill, as white privilege fails to understand or experience the racism that people of colour endure daily. Most institutions are embedded with racism, and trade unions are not free from white entitlement based on racial bias. White supremacist ideology has even penetrated trade union movements, where unions and their white leadership neither understand nor care about racial discrimination. This is not new. History continues to display the racial past as a lively present. Alfie Hancox’s powerful essay, “When British Trade Unionists Debated Black Power,” published in the New Socialist on 30 September 2023, is a historic reminder—and a warning— a tutorial for today’s trade unionists.
Historically, exclusionary practices among white trade unionists marked the “immigrant strikes” of 1960s and 1970s Britain. In those years, people of colour from India, Pakistan and other former colonies fought unitedly against racial wage inequality, workplace hierarchies and segregated factory toilets in Birmingham, Lancashire and the East Midlands.
“Defying the racial division of labour which separated Asian and Afro‑Caribbean workers at the point of production, activists from Britain’s former colonies began uniting under a Black political umbrella”
(Hancox, 2023). Trade unions were hostile to such alliances of people of colour in their struggle against racism, inequality and exploitation. This is well documented in John Wrench’s book, Unequal Comrades: Trade Unions, Equal Opportunity and Racism (Centre for Research in Ethnic Relations, University of Warwick, Coventry, 1986). Despite subsequent improvements, Unequal Comrades remains a testament to—and continues to define—trade union movements and trade unionist leadership in contemporary Britain.
White supremacist ideology, shaped by racialised colonial capitalism, has deeply—or at least partially—influenced the consciousness of white trade unionists and the movement they led. The residue of this influence continues to guide contemporary trade union leadership. It appears as if the racial past survives in the present: many people of colour feel either frustrated at being unrepresented or distrustful of white trade union leadership, owing to past betrayals and a lack of progressive political consciousness around racial and other forms of discrimination. Racism is an everyday lived experience for people of colour in the workplace and in British society today—one that has claimed many lives in the past and continues to take a toll on their lives and livelihoods.
The experiences and expressions of people of colour are constantly undermined within trade union bureaucracies led by white trade unionists. Undermining their lived experiences and denying the conditions and contexts of their expression lies at the heart of denying their very existence—which is the core of racist white supremacist ideology. That ideology continues to inform the operational structures, trade union leadership and racialised hierarchies of contemporary Britain.
People of colour regularly raise issues of racism with their trade unions and leadership, but the unions do nothing; they do not even raise these concerns with management, nor do they provide legal support to victims of racism and other forms of discrimination. Trade union leadership often employs strategies of bullying to undermine and divert attention from the core issue of racism and racial discrimination in the workplace. Such a depoliticised, ideologically sterile, reactionary and racist environment is a product of racialised colonial capitalism, in which trade union leadership has become a cadre of managerial lieutenants perpetuating managerialism—which destroys working‑class unity and solidarity for a radical struggle to end racial and all other forms of discrimination, inequality and exploitation.
The failure of trade union leadership to understand racism beyond lip service, coupled with a lack of support and legal guidance, weakens the trade union movement in matters of wage bargaining, workplace support and radical social transformation. In this way, trade union leadership plays a reactionary role rather than contributing to a progressive transformation of the workplace, working conditions and society. Such a process compromises the revolutionary potential of the trade union movement.
It does not stop there. The unaccountable white trade union bureaucracy and its opportunistic leadership harass, bully, outsource responsibilities and create a toxic environment to ensure that activists of colour either leave the unions or become the targets of concocted stories to persecute active trade union members from ethnic minorities and active white working class members. Leon Trotsky, despite all his ideological deviations and reformism, was spot on in his analysis of the inherent predicaments of “The Trade Unions in Britain” (September 1933), published as a Labour Press Pamphlet in 1971. Trotsky’s anatomy of the limits of the trade union movement in Britain continues to define trade union leadership and its unconscious bias when it comes to issues of racism faced by people of colour. Silencing people of colour is not an option or an alternative.
The compliance culture within trade union movement looks exactly compliance culture of capitalism. The trade union leaders compromised positions with management and complicit with racism looks historically like “Quaker Complicity with Slavery”. This story of white hypocrisy is well documented in the works of Watkins, M. (2025) on Wrestling with White Hypocrisy, Racism, and Self-Interest: Quaker Complicity with Slavery (1657–1776) and White Supremacy. Talking about rituals of revolution and practicing reactionary racist politics of hierarchy is merely hypocrisy and a self-defeating proposition. It neither helps individual leadership nor promotes the movements they lead in the name of trade unionism. So, the alternatives are clear: be democratic, be decolonial, and follow the non-hierarchical principles of the trade union movement in letter and spirit. Equality and justice are not the ideals for bargain.
The revisionist and reactionary trend within the toxic culture of leadership of the trade union movement is neither an alternative for white workers nor for ethnic minority workers. It does not help to build trust, unity or solidarity. A revolutionary trade union movement and its leadership must understand the needs and desires of its membership—and beyond—if it wishes to stay relevant; otherwise, it will perish without a clear understanding. The alternative is not division and further weakening of the trade union movement. Trade union leadership, irrespective of skin colour, needs political and ideological consciousness—not only about race, but also about all other grounds of discrimination, exploitation, inequality and marginalisation. Perish together or fight unitedly on both individual and collective issues. There is no hiding ground other than being accountable to the workers.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect (North London News) editorial policy.
