The next few months will prove crucial for the labour and trade union movement and for all working people. We are faced with two stark alternatives.

On the one hand, we have an unstable right-wing government, intent of enforcing decades of austerity onto working people. Our schools and our NHS have been opened up to private profit and, in or out of the EU, the vultures are circling. Our unions remain shackled by the most regressive anti-union laws in Europe.

On the other hand, we have the biggest opportunity for working people in a generation: the chance of a Labour government which will actually listen to the working class. A government which will end austerity and invest in our economy, which will bring our public services back into public ownership and control, which will abolish the unjust anti-union laws which tie one hand behind our back and replace them with pro-worker legislation, including the restoration of collective bargaining.

These are the two futures in front of us and our movement will have a key role to play in determining which of them becomes a reality.

A general election, and a real shift away from the neoliberal consensus that has dominated British politics for the past four decades, will not be won through clever manoeuvres in Parliament.

It will not be won through TV debates and opinion polling. And it will not be won on the conference floor this weekend.
It will be won on the streets and in the workplaces.

Because real change needs the mobilisation of the mass of working people.

That is not to say that the debates that take place at Labour Party conference this weekend are unimportant. Far from it. The content of Labour’s radical programme, its genuine relevance to the daily lives of working people, will be essential in mobilising to fight for real change.

A general election, and a real shift away from the neoliberal consensus that has dominated British politics
will be won on the streets and in the workplaces

For example, in education, the bold move to create a National Education Service, to end the academies and free school programme that fragments our schools system, to take on the unnecessary and damaging overtesting of our young people, and to commit to proper funding of education are crucial.

And there is more that can be developed, to bring schools back into local democratic control, to deal with our broken accountability system, to end the injustice of private education for the rich.
But winning will take more tha  just having the right policies, as important as this is.

As a movement, we need to shift up a gear.

The trades union movement needs to reorient itself towards the four in five workers who are not in a union, towards their families and the communities they live in. We need to speak, not just for our own members, but for all working people.

Too often, trade unions are dismissed as simply lobby groups speaking for workers in one particular workplace or industry. We need to be embedded within working-class communities across Britain, fighting for a new deal, an alternative future, for all workers.

For the National Education Union, this is the thinking behind our School Cuts campaign.

We have mobilised our members, alongside the communities they live and work in, bringing together support staff teachers, headteachers, parents and others to defend our schools against the relentless attacks of successive Tory-led governments.

But we need to go further. We need to flip the narrative from the defensive battles we have been forced to fight under the Tories to the real opportunities presented by a left-led Labour government with a radical programme to transform Britain. We need to construct a vision of real change that we can fight for and deliver.

This vision must connect to our workplace struggle. Community-based campaigning must not be seen as an alternative to industrial militancy; they need to be integrally combined.

The trade union movement needs to look to the example of those unions who have used the challenge of the anti-union laws to double down on workplace organisation, to deliver ballot results which smash the thresholds imposed on us. We need to combine our workplace organising with the broad appeal of a radical programme to transform Britain.

Whatever the future, this will be essential for our movement. If we fail to deliver a general election and a Labour victory, we will be faced with years of aggressive attacks by a Tory government, and we will need to be ready to fight, and win, in that context.

If we win a Labour government, our demands remain the same. We will be the conscience of that government, the voice of working people, the guardians of Labour’s radical programme.

Our job is to speak up for the whole of the working class: for a future for all our people.

Gawain Little is a member of the NEU executive.