In 1967 my predecessor General Secretary, Gerald Croasdell, penned an explainer called ‘On Politics and Non-Politics’. He addressed head-on the importance of Equity being political, albeit non-party political, in supporting striking miners. Equity had been threatened by reactionary members with a legal challenge on its policy – members whose real ambition was to take Equity out of the broader movement to build worker power.

In recent years, particularly in recent months, the same lines have been drawn by uninformed observers of our movement – lines between the industrial and the political. It is a false dichotomy. To not challenge it will mean a failure for trades unionists in the debate about our twenty-first-century role, which cannot be framed by those outside of our movement. Our politics doesn’t look like the politics of the bosses – of self-serving personal friendships. But building worker power isn’t apolitical, whether we’re uniting our class or fighting for it.

First to Croasdell. He was, like all Equity General Secretaries before and since, a political person. A contemporary of Burgess, Maclean, and Hobsbawm at Cambridge, and fellow member of the Apostles, he campaigned for (and perhaps even fought with) the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War. He chaired the University Labour Federation at the start of the Second War, which unequivocally opposed war until the collapse of the Non-Aggression Pact, and was expelled from the Labour Party. When the Soviets joined the Allies he served with distinction, and was awarded an OBE for his service in Asia.

As Equity General Secretary he founded our international federation, FIA, which unusually accepts, now and then, unions from both capitalist and communist countries. His solidarity was especially valued by artists and trades unionists in Argentina and Chile under years of fascism, and he laid the groundwork for Equity’s boycott of apartheid South Africa. There is a perhaps apocryphal story from his funeral in 1998, when a previously unknown man stood to give a simple eulogy. He had lived with Gerald for decades, he said, and could give no better account of who he was than the three things ever in his wallet: ‘A picture of me, his Communist Party card, and the words of the Internationale.’ Some allege the last item was in Russian.

So Croasdell was political, radical, subversive, gay: but that was not why he was the most influential of all General Secretaries. He is one of my heroes because of his transformative industrial work. During his tenure, Equity established our first agreement with ITV (and took action to secure a quadrupling of fees), expanded the stable work provided by Repertory Theatre, won payments for rehearsals for the first time, and won ongoing payments from broadcasters in compensation for a brave new technology: the ability of audiences to record on video tape.

Critically, too, he engineered the incorporation of the Variety Artiste’s Federation into Equity, ending decades of division and undercutting in agreements. This newly combined force had a radical industrial agenda, too – across the country, actors started pickets against booming working men’s clubs with colour bars for artists and audiences.

The almost faultless march of the union’s industrial strategies during Croasdell’s sixteen-year tenure was not, of course, as a result of one man, but rather his ability to stimulate grassroots democracy, and unite a membership politically split, pretty evenly, between radical socialists, patrician liberals, and big-C Conservatives. Industrial success was appealing to all, one older member commented: ‘Back then we disagreed about a lot, but agreed on one thing: the luvvies, united, would never be defeated.’

Contemporary debate would leave Croasdell there: an exceptional Jekyll and Hyde – his shrewd, silver negotiator’s tongue occasionally sampling the radical elixir of militant socialist internationalism, but never mixing the two personae.

But this is absurd. ITV negotiation was strategically placed significantly in excess of the BBC Agreement, prompting outrage in the Commons that the quality of talent on the public service was in peril. This, coupled with industrial action, saw BBC payments rise to exceed those won at ITV. Jennie Lee’s vision of an empowered Arts Council, funding work in every town, was an Arts Council model essentially drafted by Equity. It was the enthusiasm of a fellow Spanish Republican advocate, Jack Jones, which solidified the TGWU’s support of Equity’s action against working men’s clubs with racist policies. When TGWU members refused to cross Equity’s pickets with beer deliveries, most clubs crumbled. Only by acting politically could Equity win industrially.

In the midst of the Covid pandemic, Equity members elected a new Executive, the Council and General Secretary. There was a stark choice: ambitious industrial strategy, or passive reliance on management benevolence. Members overwhelmingly chose the former.

These priorities are being put to action. We need an audiobooks agreement. We need a new agreement in TV Commercials. Pay in subsidised theatre has to rise in double figures, and fast. Replacing our members’ six-day working week with five days is one hundred years overdue. With black women leaving the industry faster than any other group, ending the underrepresentation of women and artists of colour is an industrial priority. After the pandemic, these changes could not be more urgent – and with the highest density since the closed shop (over eighty percent in theatre), we can, and must, deliver radical change.

This is the pattern seen the union movement over – Sharon Graham’s victory at Unite is the most recent high-profile example of bold industrial strategy receiving overwhelming membership backing. The bakers’ union are winning big at Wetherspoons, and the UCU are beating redundancies across the UK. The NEU’s organising strategy to close schools last November to protect their members saved us all from reckless public health policy. The times in which we live are industrial ones, with a new realisation across the economy of what it means to be a worker – and the power of labour.

This contrasts with a legacy of the ’90s, which has dogged the union movement until recently: an obsession with membership figures detached from industrial reality, manifested in grotesque beauty parades resulting in no-strike deals; a belief that New Labour’s minimal safeguards are victories hard won – not merely necessary, but sufficient in themselves; defaulting to the personal ambitions of individual politicians whose commitment to trades unionism is a direct debit and crossing a picket; and the sheer horror of unions taking action in local authorities run by the Tories, but turning a blind eye when Labour is in power.

What we cannot allow, however, is for that recent legacy to be described as the political one. In truth it was an apolitical one – devoid of the ambition to grow worker power. The ambition of modern trades unionists is for the opposite. It is not industrial versus political, but straightforwardly: grow the power of those who capital has oppressed however you can, and do not be distracted.

Equity has sectoral bargaining in almost every area we cover, and mostly in the private sector – but to win this back where it has been lost and expand it to the whole economy requires political action. Better pay is more likely on the back of proper arts subsidy. Losing Channel 4 to the private sector will affect under-represented groups of artists more than any other. Forty percent of our 47,000 members have been deprived of furlough or self-employment support through Covid, and now face a rise in their self-employed National Insurance, while still excluded from proper statutory maternity pay and other benefits.

Therein lies the rub. Lofty columnists portray industrial unions as those who won’t have a row with the Labour Party, locally or nationally, because they’re staying in their industrial sphere. The desire of non-political advocates for years is passivity in the face of political failure. Reactionaries want us to back off a cry of Black Lives Matter. Self-appointed foreign policy experts sigh relief thinking our movement will lie still on Belarus, Burma, Colombia, Palestine, or Peru. Thinking ‘industrially focussed’ trade unions mean nothing more than the characters in Carry On at Your Convenience shows how unqualified these views are, and how their real aim is to mute worker power in favour of cosy relationships with the wonks.

In truth, industrially focussed unions will do the opposite. As a political union, independent of any party, we’ll be first to praise Tracy Brabin’s spirited defence of Channel 4, and Andy Street’s clear strategy for broadcast in the Midlands. But when Labour mayors in London and Bristol have reductive plans which ignore our members, we’ll be the first on the streets. Producers may be forced through secretive agreements to praise the government’s Cultural Recovery Fund, but Equity is unbought and unbossed.

It is tempting to comply with the simplistic narrative of a split between the industrial and the political, if only in our desire for clear messages, and to break with the neutered approach of unions struggling with the legacy of Thatcher. To comply with the presentation, however, leaves you open to defeat on your own terms; that first dispute with a Labour authority, the first time you condemn a politician’s betrayal will become all the noise, when all the focus must be on the action and impact of members.

Alas, in the end of Croasdell’s tenure lies a stark warning. In 1974, Equity registered as an approved closed shop under the Heath government’s Industrial Relations Act. Croasdell had advised the Council that to not do so would distract the union from its industrial mission, and involve it too far in party politics. Expulsion from the TUC followed; eventually the policy was reversed, but rejoining the TUC was harder to achieve. Croasdell overnight became derided by the union’s left, and a hero to its right. He found himself being erroneously defined by self-interested factions too hard to bear and stood down. The consequence of the union’s political timidity, and isolation from the trade union movement, was twenty years of introspection and factionalism. Membership collapsed, as did one of our most strategically important agreements: TV Commercials.

I don’t think that our generation of trades unionists will make Croasdell’s mistake. Through joined up, international action, we’ll improve the terms of our members and show solidarity around the globe. No politician who wavers in their support for our movement will find refuge with us. We’ll use our only source of strength to define us politically and industrially: the power of united working people. Above all else, we will not let our struggles, beliefs, or visions be defined by passive observers who don’t have the interests of our members at the forefront of their minds.