YESTERDAY we gathered with the friends and family of Kevin Halpin, a remarkable comrade. We shared their grief, but we shared their pride too.

Kevin was a comrade who did not just spend his life in the struggle for a better future, but spent his life in the front line of that struggle.

Kevin was a member of our union for nearly 70 years, joining the AEU out in Dagenham after the war, and remaining a member through all mergers up until his death, through all the ups and downs, innumerable strikes and several different workplaces across London.

Throughout, he was a militant voice for the rank and file, a champion of lay democracy and an uncompromising advocate for the left. In short, he was everything that makes trade unionism great.

Indeed, it is humbling for me to consider his life and his record because it is proof positive that you do not have to be a general secretary, you do not have to be an official at all, to exercise the most profound influence on the life of the working-class movement.

In the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s and beyond, Kevin chaired the Liaison Committee for the Defence of Trade Unions.

The Liaison Committee — and Kevin — stood in the forefront of the battles to Kill the Bill, to defeat the Heath attack on the unions, to free the Pentonville Five, to support the Upper Clyde sit-in and against the social contract.

Kevin was thus at the heart of some of the greatest defeats the ruling class has suffered in this country, and of a huge leap forward for working men and women.

These battles shaped the lives of hundreds of thousands of trade unionists — I am one of them. We learned from Kevin the importance of fighting against governments of any party which try to limit working-class self-organisation, or restrict the right of workers to freely fight to improve their conditions at work.

His work, his spirit, gave us self-belief, confidence in our power as a movement and a class.

Kevin always led from the front, and he did so by relying on the rank and file, the workers in the factories, bus deports, construction sites, docks and elsewhere.

Indeed, so far from relying on union hierarchies, Kevin often led the struggle against general secretaries who were selling their members and the wider movement short.

Certainly, he was never afraid to offer union leaders advice — “sharply and to the point” as the subtitle of his wonderful memoirs put it.

I am among those who benefitted from that advice — it was borne of a depth of experience of life at the sharp end.

And Kevin always delivered those opinions with wit and insight, but never with bitterness or malice. Read those memoirs to get a flavour of it.

He sought — and exercised — influence for his views and for the Communist Party, of which he was an unflinching and proud member for all his life, although he was often, by his own account, as awkward a customer for the party’s leadership as he was for the trade union hierarchy.

But the only power Kevin ever sought was for his class, rather than himself; and the only honour he sought was the opportunity to serve.

He was, above all perhaps, a socialist; never satisfied with arguing over the division of the cake when he wanted control of the whole bakery.

His socialism was rooted in Marxism, of course, but it was a socialism of good fellowship, of laughter, of a breadth of understanding and of a warm humanity which touched thousands.

In Kevin’s life we see a great and tumultuous past. But we see more too — the qualities of solidarity and strength which sustain our movement today, and which are the earnest of a brighter future.

The union I am proud to lead, a union which Kevin did so much to build, commits itself today and every day to that future.

Today, Unite dips its banner in memory of one of our greatest members, and one of the finest working-class militants of our times. Kevin Halpin will endure in our life and our struggles.