Matthew Jeffery is an experienced global talent and recruitment leader, with more than 25 years advising boards and C-suite executives on workforce strategy, skills, and productivity.
Conservatives are making a political mistake.
We are handing millions of working people to Labour simply because they carry a union card. These voters are not our enemies. Many should be natural Conservatives and millions could become Conservative voters. Yet for 40 years we have behaved as though Labour owns them and barely bothered to ask for their support. That surrender should end now.
Thatcher was right to take on union power when it threatened democratic government. She won that battle. But winning yesterday’s battle is not an excuse for fighting it forever. The closed shop is gone, Arthur Scargill is history and Britain has changed. Too much Conservative thinking about trade unions remains frozen in an argument we already won.
Look at who carries a union card today. Nurses coming off twelve-hour shifts. Engineers buried in compliance paperwork. Teaching assistants buying classroom supplies with their own money. Warehouse workers who have calculated exactly how far their pay packet will stretch. These are not militants plotting the downfall of capitalism. They are working people trying to get on and millions should be natural Conservative voters.
Labour behaves as though their votes come automatically with their union subscriptions. Why should they? A union card is not a Labour vote. These voters do not belong to Labour. Their support has to be earned and it is time Conservatives went out and earned it.
The New Monopoly Is Knowledge
For most of the 20th century, politics was a struggle between capital, labour and the state. But Britain has changed and power has changed with it. The great monopoly of the 21st century is knowledge.
Britain is drowning in information while millions struggle to make sense of it. Employment law, pensions, taxation and regulation have become so complicated that people increasingly depend on institutions to interpret their own lives. Government understands the legislation. Regulators understand the rules. Banks understand the finance. Trade unions understand employment law. The individual is expected to trust them all.
Take a nurse handed a hundred-page pay settlement covering her salary, pension, overtime and working conditions. She can sacrifice her weekend deciphering it or trust someone else to tell her what it means. The institution understands the detail, frames the choices and recommends the answer. The individual lives with the consequences.
Expertise is essential. Dependency is not. When complexity prevents people from challenging decisions governing their money, work and future, knowledge becomes power. Choice without understanding is a pretty thin version of freedom.
Conservatives have always challenged concentrated power. The new monopoly is not sitting on a picket line or behind a factory gate. It is buried in the contracts, regulations, algorithms and small print governing modern life. The next great political battle will not be capital versus labour. It will be institutions versus individuals.
Artificial Intelligence Can Put Power Back in the Hands of Workers
Previous Conservative revolutions dispersed power through ownership. Home ownership, share ownership and secret ballots all gave individuals greater independence. AI offers the next great dispersal of power. This time, it is knowledge.
Most politicians talk about AI as something that will happen to workers. Conservatives should talk about what it can do for them.
The internet gave people access to information. AI gives them the ability to interrogate it. A worker could finally answer a question that really matters: am I getting a fair deal? They could compare their salary with similar jobs across Britain, discover what their skills are worth in another industry, understand their pension and see whether a qualification or change of employer could leave their family thousands of pounds better off. Instead of being told what their labour is worth, they could find out for themselves.
Now take that power into the negotiating room. When an employer says there is no money for a better settlement, workers should be able to test the claim. What happened to turnover, profits and margins? What are competitors paying? What happened to executive pay? For too long, negotiations have rewarded whoever arrives armed with the most expertise. AI can start levelling the table. If the company can afford more, workers should know. If the business genuinely cannot, they should know that too. The point is not to rig the argument for either side. It is to make bluffing harder for both.
Labour’s historic answer to worker power has been to strengthen the people who represent them. Ours should be to strengthen the person being represented. We should not tell union members to tear up their cards or surrender collective bargaining. We should give them the tools to challenge their employer, challenge their union and, when necessary, challenge both.
Do not replace the individual with the machine. Arm the individual with it. Give millions of workers access to knowledge once reserved for lawyers, accountants, officials and specialists, then trust them to decide what is best for themselves.
The Capability Society Should Become Conservatism’s Next Big Idea
The ambition should reach far beyond trade unions. A Capability Society would use technology to tear down the walls of expertise that leave ordinary people dependent on institutions to navigate their own lives. The purpose is not to build a smarter state that makes decisions on people’s behalf. It is to create more capable citizens who can make better decisions for themselves. Trade unions are the perfect proving ground for that idea.
Imagine the same principle everywhere. A parent challenging a decision about their child’s education. A small business owner taking on the tax system. A patient interrogating their treatment choices. A saver finally understanding their pension. For too long, complexity has been power. The institution knew. The individual trusted. That relationship can now be broken.
That leaves Conservatives with a defining choice. We can use AI to make the state smarter, bureaucracy stronger and institutions better at managing people. Or we can use it to make individuals harder to control, harder to mislead and harder to ignore. Conservatives should choose the individual.
That is the Capability Society. Not technology used to manage people from above but technology that gives them the power to stand on their own. Not a smarter establishment but a more capable population. This should become the defining Conservative idea of the AI age.
Why Trade Union Members Have More to Gain from Conservatives Than Labour
Labour has spent generations claiming to be the party of working people. Trade union members are entitled to ask what that loyalty has actually delivered. Forget the conference speeches, union endorsements and warm words from ministers. Are working people richer? Is work more secure? Are opportunities growing? Does the pay packet stretch further? Labour should be judged by the lives of the workers it claims to represent, not the union leaders standing behind it.
Look at the labour market. Unemployment stands at 4.9 per cent. The latest provisional estimate suggests payrolled employment is down 94,000 over the year. Vacancies have fallen to 707,000, the lowest level outside the pandemic since 2014, while real regular pay growth is just 0.5 per cent after inflation. Inflation is heading the wrong way again, climbing from 2.6 to 2.9 per cent in July. Money is tight, opportunity is shrinking and working people are feeling it.
Labour cannot pretend its own choices have nothing to do with the pressure employers face. Employer National Insurance is now 15 per cent, while the National Living Wage has risen to £12.71 an hour. Add higher employment costs to an expanding burden of regulation and eventually somebody pays. Investment is delayed. Vacancies disappear. Hiring slows. The worker Labour claims to protect ends up carrying the consequences.
Those numbers become painfully real around the kitchen table. A worker feels them when a colleague leaves and is not replaced, overtime disappears, a pay rise barely changes what the family can afford or a decent vacancy suddenly attracts hundreds of applicants. They feel them when the mortgage, energy bill and weekly shop swallow the salary before anything reaches the savings account. Working people do not need politicians telling them whose side they are on. They need an economy that lets them get ahead.
That is the economic argument Conservatives should make. The greatest bargaining power a worker can possess is an economy in which employers have to compete for them. Investment creates jobs. More jobs create choice. Choice gives workers the confidence to demand better pay, leave a bad employer or build a better career elsewhere. Trade unions can negotiate how prosperity is shared but they cannot negotiate prosperity into existence. Without investment, productivity, enterprise and growth, eventually there is nothing left to bargain over.
The dividing line is simple. Labour can point to the institutions that represent working people. Conservatives can make the case for making working people more prosperous. Earn more. Keep more. Have more choices about where you work and what your skills are worth. That is the test on which any party asking for the support of trade union members should be judged.
From Worker Representation to Worker Power
The argument now needs to become policy. Every worker should have the tools to understand their rights, know what their skills are worth and make informed choices about their working life. Three reforms could start putting that power directly into their hands.
Every trade union member should have access to a personal AI workplace adviser that understands their contract, pension, qualifications and employment rights. It could explain agreements in plain English, compare pay across employers and industries and show what different choices could mean for their income and career. Crucially, it should work for the worker, not the employer, the union, the government or the technology company.
No worker should vote on a major agreement without being able to explore the alternatives for themselves. What would a settlement mean for pay, overtime and pension income? What happens if negotiations continue or industrial action succeeds or fails? What can the employer genuinely afford? A ballot should be an informed decision, not an act of faith. Give workers the evidence and let them make up their own minds.
In the industrial age, ownership of capital determined economic power. In the AI age, control of data will increasingly shape it. Workers should control the information generated throughout their careers, with unions acting as trusted custodians rather than owners. Members could voluntarily pool anonymised information on pay, progression, skills and workplace conditions while deciding how their own data is used. That would give each worker the collective intelligence of thousands without surrendering control to anyone else.
None of this works without trust. These tools would need independent oversight, strong privacy protections and transparent auditing. The principle should be non-negotiable: the worker controls their data and decides who can use it. Technology should not create another institution workers are forced to trust. It should give them greater confidence in their own judgement.
The Next Conservative Revolution
History remembers political movements for the future they build, not the battles they keep refighting. Conservatives won the argument about restraining trade union power. The challenge now is to build something new from that victory.
Conservatives should offer working people something bigger: aspiration, prosperity and power over their own lives. Stop seeing the union card and start seeing the person holding it. No party owns these voters. Their support must be earned.
That means leaving the ghosts of the 1970s where they belong. Labour wants their loyalty. Reform wants their anger. Conservatives should fight for their ambition. Give working people a reason to believe that tomorrow can be richer, freer and more firmly in their own hands.
The twentieth century spread ownership. The twenty-first must spread capability. If Conservatives have the courage to lead that revolution, trade union members will not be our enemies. They could become our greatest allies.