Here’s one way to boost investment in UK plc: make our unions more powerful | Larry Elliott

Restrictions on collective power led to decades of exploitation and stagnant pay for workers. Why not try another way?

Profiteering is nothing new. Stanley Baldwin had a pithy description for the new intake of Conservative MPs at the 1918 general election, noting that they were a lot of hard-faced men who look as if they had done very well out of the war". The future Tory prime minister was right. Many companies had found a war economy greatly to their liking, securing lucrative government contracts and making a mint in the process. Profiteering was rampant.

Sharon Graham, the general secretary of the Unite union, says something similar has been happening since the war on Covid began in 2020. A study of the reports and accounts of almost 17,000 firms - big and small - showed that pre-tax profit margins were, on average, 30% higher in 2022 than they were in the years immediately before the pandemic began.