A RECENT trade union visitor from Uruguay could not understand our question when we asked how many workers were covered by collective bargaining in his country. It is 100 per cent of course by law, he said.

He also raised an eyebrow when we asked if utilities, natural resources and key industries were in public hands serving national interests. Of course they are.

He was bemused that we had a government privatising everything, cutting public spending and amassing a national debt.

In his country the constitution gave the opportunity of a referendum if 25 per cent of the population called for one. The unions there led a campaign for a referendum and successfully used it constitutionally to reject the neoliberal agenda.

This sets us thinking about unions, democracy, power and the constitution in Britain.

There was a gasp of horror just after the mini-Budget from the coalition government in May 2010.

No-one could quite believe it. The 30-year whittling away at the post-war settlement and social democracy was about to be accelerated.

Following the Lisbon Treaty, schools, pensions, pay, local government, the Civil Service, Royal Mail and NHS were clearly in the government’s sights as remnants of a bygone era and obstacles to a zombie-like free market that had risen from its grave. The BBC licence fee wasn’t far out of focus. There wasn’t much else to sell as profit rates fell further.

It got so horrifying that some people said the coalition would never last and the liberals would wobble.

So in came the Fixed Term Parliaments Act in 2011 to make sure there could be no election until May 7 2015, and out went attempts to give the people a right to recall MPs except for serious wrongdoing following the expenses scandals.

In the unions, community organisations and social movements, most elected representatives are subject to recall if they fail to deliver what they were mandated to. We are accountable to each other in our organisations in a unique and important way.

Now we face an unwritten constitution, a first-past-the-post system and pollsters, pundits and media moguls driving a narrow agenda to divert issues from the big ones.

Instead of the important economic indicators of employment levels, equality, poverty rates, balance of trade deficits and manufacturing investment, we got the hocus-pocus of debt and deficits.

This is all code for bailing out the gamblers who had lost our money but fancied running our parliaments by default.

Private wealth in Britain far outstrips government revenue.

We were treated also to a heavy dollop of the mystical illusion that businesses and banks create wealth.

David Cameron had laminated Liam Byrne’s foolhardy note from the Treasury that there was no money left, as if the nation were a piggy bank in a child’s bedroom and not the fifth largest — and very flexible — economy in the world.

Voodoo economics dominated the election. Create ruins and rubble and things can only get better, was the mantra from the Tories.

While gobbling a trillion pounds of public money, the City of London said privatise everything else.

While dominating the state, they said shrink the bits of the state workers need to live in dignity.

Austerity was something post-war generations put up with as certain foodstuffs and certain luxuries were scarce during the rebuilding of the country in the common good.

Austerity is too feeble a word to describe undoing and unpicking all of that sacrifice and history and the advantages of public ownership, the common wealth shared and greater equality.

It is too feeble a word to describe the way in which unelected bankers and corporate executives now seek to overrule sovereign parliaments.

The democratic root of trade unions in collective and inclusive practices and values had established by the late 1970s a coverage of 82 per cent of workers by collective bargaining.

It was this that gave us a more equal society, near-full employment and reduced poverty levels.

It was unions’ influence in a range of decision-making bodies that gave public service and economic development a sense of national purpose and accountability.

Collective bargaining also cemented the national desire to ensure that workers in Glasgow, Gloucester and Glamorgan were all equally treated and looking out for each other.

A national industrial plan had to benefit all parts of the nation and not divide us into competing economic zones. National shop stewards committees spoke in the varied accents and dialects of Britain with a common sense of purpose.

Our union origins coincide with the first battles by reformers to extend the electoral franchise beyond a few propertied individuals.

Unions and social pioneers fought a long, hard struggle for the universal franchise. Everyone over 18 secured a vote regardless, ultimately, of gender.

Elected representatives were elected to Parliament to follow their voters’ wishes. This agenda was fought all the way by employers and the landed aristocracy.

This legacy is being dangerously overturned. There’s a new authoritarianism in the air: “We, elected by one in four of the voters, can do what we like. You, the people, can’t do anything about it. Lobby and protest all you like, we are in charge.

Strike as much as you want: we will outlaw it or ignore it.”

Neoliberalism, a term coined expressly by Thatcher and Reagan advisers, was always a bit of a tongue-twister in the trade unions.

It was easier to think things were just like the old days, but it has been so extreme, and will now get so vicious, that a new tongue-twister might be in order.

We need a neosocialism rooted in that long struggle for national democracy, and a genuinely independent and united nation determining the destiny of its three component parts without the interference on those we do not elect — whether in the City of London or the European Central Bank.

Many will take to the streets in sheer frustration and form yet more campaigns against this and that in the theatre of cruelty to come.

But above all we need trade unions powerfully supported in their communities, fighting for a new Britain with a vision that embraces the 99 per cent and rejects the tyranny of the 1 per cent. Anger must be channelled through democratic organisations.

• Doug Nicholls is general secretary of the General Federation of Trade Unions.