FWIW, if you were a large trade union looking to invest in media, a TV operation would be the icing on the cake, not where you would start. TV is crazy expensive to produce. Better surely to start with lots of experiments with audio and YouTube content ...

Find personable presenters doing interesting things and tie them into to a cooperative funding platform, so that the union has a steady flow of seed funding and can then work with partners on increasingly ambitious projects.

You want to mass produce effective communicators for different demographics, not least to show how stale and stupid most mainstream media is. You do that by producing content that starts with where people are, but doesn't impose dumb limits on itself.

So, a podcast about fishing, say, that talks (sometimes) about the politics of water management. A podcast about gardening that talks (sometimes) about the politics of land. History podcasts that notice the existence of class struggle. And so on.

General interest content provides easy routes into news and current affairs coverage. And only then, when you've figured out how to piece together large audiences on digital, do you worry about broadcast.

The first step would be a conference that brings together trade unionists, co-operators (including digital cooperators, crucially) and existing left media. Quite modest investments could go a long way towards cementing a new common sense. But best to start with the apex medium.

It is difficult to imagine Labour winning in 1945 without the collaboration between Ernest Bevin and Julius Elias at the Daily Herald. A new generation of union leaders have to find a new generation of partners in the media sector, if we are to have any chance at all.