Brexit: where now?

My speech at the Oxford and Cambridge club

Last week, I was a platform speaker at a seminar held to discuss the question of how the government can use Brexit to revive the British economy. Other speakers at the event – which took place at the Oxford and Cambridge club in central London – included Lords Glasman (Maurice) and Gove (Michael), and Jonathan Hinder MP.

I was asked to speak about Brexit from a trade union perspective (at the time of the EU referendum, I was the national organiser of Trade Unionists Against the EU).

Below is the text of my speech (which has been edited slightly for reasons of length and clarity).

I am that rare thing: a trade unionist who is a full-throated supporter of Brexit. We are treated like museum pieces in the labour movement these days, but of course the movement can boast of a rich history of Euroscepticism. In the Common Market referendum of 1975, for example, a majority of trade unions and Labour MPs supported the ‘No’ campaign.

Those of us in the movement who voted for Brexit follow in that tradition. We see that the European Union is an explicitly anti-socialist institution, and one that is pro-privatisation, pro-austerity, blocks state aid to industry through strict rules on competition, prevents public ownership of some industries, and inflicts on us ‘free movement’ – which is ultimately a bosses’ dream, allowing them to shunt workers from low- to high-wage economies, with all that means for downward pressure on wages.

The EU also imposes the wretched Stability and Growth Pact, which prohibits member states from running budget deficits of more than 3% of GDP. Though it had a special exemption from this specific rule, the UK was still required to ‘endeavour to avoid an excessive government deficit’. This anti-growth measure is essentially the outlawing of Keynesian-style economics in the EU.

The EU is also fundamentally undemocratic. The power of legislative initiative rests with the unelected commissioners. The EU parliament has no authority to initiate its own legislation. I’m not sure there’s a parliament anywhere else in the world that possesses such limited power – well, there are, but we know the type of regimes under which they operate.

Ultimately, people must be able to elect and remove those who make the laws which they are expected to obey. If they can’t, they aren’t living in a democratic system.

Trade unions once understood all this, of course. But then along came the-then EU commission president Jacques Delors, who seduced delegates to the TUC’s annual congress in 1988. Delors sold them the dream of the ‘workers’ Europe’. And after being battered at the hands of Thatcher – witnessing the miners’ strike and the introduction of anti-trade-union legislation – many trade unionists started to see the EU as a kind of bulwark against a union-hating Tory party in government.

It is important to draw a clear distinction between the EU and Europe. The EU is a particular political and economic arrangement which counts only just over half of European nations as signatories; whereas Europe is a continent that offers so much, such as in the way of the richness of its culture. One can oppose the former while supporting the latter.

The argument that the EU delivered major advances in the way of workers’ rights was always overblown. The truth is that most advances for workers in Britain – such as the national minimum wage, equal pay legislation, and health and safety legislation - came through the national parliament following campaigns by trade unions.

Yes, the EU has given workers some limited statutory rights, such as the working time directive. But the broad sweep of workplace law lies outside of the remit of the EU. And on some things – maternity and parental leave, for example – British workers have long enjoyed a higher minimum than the EU prescribes – even under Tory governments.

In 2016, most trade unions put themselves on the wrong side of the argument. The Brexit vote was a genuine democratic revolt – and one that was delivered mainly by the working class. In the years since, unions have been far too pessimistic, seeing Brexit as a problem rather than an opportunity.

Trade unions should now be campaigning for all the things that we didn’t have the freedom to demand while inside the EU.

We were told that the nation state was dead. But after the pandemic, with all the problems we experienced with global supply chains, and in this age of global insecurity, that is no longer the case, and we need to take advantage of that.

We must seek to revive our domestic industrial base, including by use of regional aid, targeted particularly at our disadvantaged and post-industrial areas.

We need to re-energise Britain – our lack of energy security is inexcusable.

We should take energy, water and steel into full public ownership. The government has made some headway in terms of renationalising the railways, but they should do it fully and quickly. We could not have done that inside the EU.

We should elevate the needs of the real economy – the productive sector where goods are made and wealth is created – above those of the financial sector and the City.

We should restore the Bank of England to democratic control and recognise that government should again be a main driver in the economy, using its massive fiscal capacity to invest, particularly in manufacturing. In 1980, manufacturing accounted for 30% of our GDP; today it is less than 10%. We should not resign ourselves to this decline. It is not inevitable, as Japan and Germany have shown us.

To that end, we must also end the persistent overvaluation of sterling, which has throttled manufacturing and made us uncompetitive.

Free from the EU’s competitive tendering rules, we should ensure public procurement favours domestic industries.

And with any revitalisation of our industrial base must come an expansion of our skills base. That means focusing much more on vocational and technical training and apprenticeships, and having less of a reliance on imported labour.

Brexit has given us the opportunity to do many of these things. It’s time that we grabbed it.

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