The BNP has launched a trade union. It doesn't have much more than a paper existence, and what paper there is doesn't mention the BNP, but rail workers will be familiar with some involved. Remember Jay Lee, expelled from ASLEF? Or Pat Harrington, kicked out of RMT? He is now president of ‘Solidarity’, this would-be union "for patriotic and nationalist British workers".

The BNP needs a new angle on union work to maintain the turn to working-class politics it took in 2000. Its policy had been to get members to join unions and seek confrontation, leading to illegal expulsion in the hope of securing cash payouts. But this has been stymied by changes in the law.

At first glance this “union's" aims seem like a rehash of "social partnership"; the belief that a union’s task is to show that it can enhance a business and so deserve to be treated by the bosses as partners. As the BNP sees it: "[Solidarity aims to] improve the relations between employers and employees throughout all industries served by the union." How quaint. Tell that to EWS RMT members struggling to beat back an employer's onslaught to derecognise their union, or Gate Gourmet workers provoked by employers and then summarily sacked!

Yet there is a rationale for this "wolf lying down with the sheep": the BNP don't believe in independent trade unions. They say that in a BNP Britain there would be no need for them as employers and employees would be involved in the same organisations. It is a party that during the miners' strike called for the army to be used against the NUM while one of its candidates in Yorkshire funded scab miners. In 1977 the BNP's political antecedents in the National Front demanded that the police be given carte blanche to use teargas, rubber bullets and water cannon against striking workers!

In a sense, the formation of this "union" could be seen as a victory for anti-racists and anti-fascists. BNP members will leave our unions, and take their virulent racism and homophobia with them. They won't be able to sow disunity and there will be no more financial damage to our unions.

But out of sight is not out of mind. The BNP has made electoral gains amongst working-class people largely because the Labour Party has deserted them. This could happen because trade union leaders have allowed Blair & co to drive the concerns of working-class people out of Labour politics.

We must put class at the centre of our politics where the BNP has race. Probably the most important arena for that right now is in our trade unions.