THE LAST year has seen major challenges affecting Britain's trade unionists, each of which the TUC has monumentally failed.
These include the miners' struggle, vital local struggles like the Timex dispute and Burnsalls, the 1.5 per cent pay freeze in the public sector, rising unemployment and closures, rail privatisation and more attacks on the NHS, the question of the Labour-union link and the effects of the 1992 anti-union law.
By any yardstick this was a full agenda for the TUC to get its teeth into, and one full of opportunities for delivering blows against the Tories.
But where there were victories, as over school testing, it was entirely because the TUC had nothing to do with them.
At the same time major structural changes are taking place in the union movement; the NALGO-NUPE-COHSE merger has taken place to form UNISON and the TGWU and GMB are discussing merger.
These changes are in the process of rendering the TUC semi-redundant as three or four major union federations dominate the movement.
The most gigantic failure of TUC has been the miners' struggle, a fitting epitaph to Norman Willis' period of office.
The days when the TUC brokered relations between the unions and the state, and the unions and the Labour Party are finished. Thus the Congress House bureaucracy is reduced more and more to a research, education and information role.
Illusions that the TUC's problem was Norman Willis will be shattered by the experience of a few months of John Monks as general secretary.
The fact is that the TUC had a role when it could deliver deals with government; since the advent of Thatcher such a role has been excluded.
Alternatively it has a role when it could, on rare occasions, act as the 'general staff' of the labour movement (and that only because of irresistible pressure at the base).
The threat of a general strike over the imprisoned Pentonville Five in 1972 was the last occasion it played this role.
In the epoch of new realism and mega-federations, relations between the unions and the Labour Party will go directly via individual union leader and not the TUC. Bill Morris, John Edmonds and Bill Jordan don't give a fig what the TUC thinks.
In this new order of the labour movement, debate on the left about how to respond is very underdeveloped. The creation of new super-federations is a major challenge, and this is highlighted by developments in UNISON.
The new federations are potentially extremely powerful weapons of struggle. But the gap between potential and reality is enormous as in the short term the grip of the bureaucracy is strengthened.
In UNISON the previously strong NALGO left can find itself marginalised as the NUPE leadership increasingly takes political control.
The conflicts between leaders like Morris and Edmonds with the Labour leadership over the link demonstrate that British trade unionism is some way off collapsing into American-style business unionism.
But it would be foolish not to understand the trend. The new realist right has made all the running over the past decade. The NUM is all but destroyed; the left is very weak.
In Brighton at the beginning of September the assembled bureaucrats will go through the pantomime ritual of portentous resolutions and amendments whose only function is to filed in the basement of Congress House.
The sleep-walking will only start to be broken by a fight from below and the organisation of the left.