THE trade union movement risks “sleepwalking into catastrophe” by mutely following a Tory government bent on escalating war with Russia, delegates at the first ever Stop the War Coalition trade union conference heard today.

Stop the War vice-chair and former Unite chief of staff Andrew Murray warned that the British government had the most aggressive stance of any world power on the war in Ukraine — with even the United States seeing more “nuance and dissent”.

By contrast, a cross-party consensus in Britain was pushing the war’s “continuation, exacerbation and extension” — and the TUC’s endorsement of more arms spending showed it failed to understand that “war is a class question and the working-class movement must stand against it,” he charged.