As the harsh reality of last week’s events begin to sink in a period of soul-searching begins. The temptation is to glance inwards and dwell on where we went wrong, the personalities that will shape the future course of the Labour party and how best to pick ourselves back up, and deal with the five more painful years of Tory government we have in store. These are all valid questions for the Labour movement to ask. But alongside deep and thoughtful introspection our minds also need to focus on one of the fundamental issues for the country over the next few years: our relationship with the European Union.
One of the defining features of the Conservatives’ manifesto is the forthcoming EU referendum. Referendums under David Cameron have the unfortunate habit of deepening rather than healing divides. Remember how the referendum on the Alternative Vote was supposed to quell calls to move on from First Past The Post for a generation? How about that time when 55 per cent of Scots voted to remain a member of the United Kingdom and we were assured that a constitutional crisis was averted?
It would be foolish to leave this, the third referendum under Cameron’s premiership, in the Tories’ hands. We need to champion EU membership as one of our central priorities now in order to ensure that everybody knows just how much is at stake over the next few years.
Ahead of the referendum Cameron’s long-awaited ‘renegotiation’ of our relationship with the EU will put our terms of membership under the microscope. We must stand up to suggestions that Cameron would scrap hard-won employment rights, such as the working time directive and the agency workers directive, and prevent what was once a platform for equal opportunity turning into a race to the bottom. Without placing ourselves in the centre of this conversation, we stand to lose a lot.
From EasyJet to the EEF, the manufacturing association, the business community is now lining up to weigh into the referendum debate. The economic case for staying in the EU needs to be made but, as Scotland sadly demonstrates, focusing on potential job losses may do just enough to survive the vote but it will not win us hearts and minds.
Just this week over 100 British conservation groups came together to warn against rolling back EU environmental regulation. Universities UK has pledged to ‘ramp up’ its campaign on EU membership and fight to maintain standards in our higher education sector. Meanwhile, over in Brussels, EU leaders continue to work towards a common solution for all 28 member states to take action to prevent the thousands of migrant lives being lost in European waters. It soon becomes all too clear that this is not merely a campaign about our jobs and growth but one at the very heart of our communities, opportunities and our very humanity.
Our attention must now turn to how we, the progressive left, can make our voice heard as loudly as possible to shape this debate in our own terms. This referendum is not just about your job or even your child’s job either. In fact, this referendum is only incidentally about the EU. At its core, this referendum is a question about the kind of country and society we want to be. It is about a choice between a country that cowers in isolationist retreat or one that engages with the world and leads the global agenda. This is a referendum at the heart of what the Labour movement is about. Amid all the uncertainty this much is clear: this is something we need to be shouting about.
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Giampi Alhadeff and Rachel Franklin are executive members of Labour Movement for Europe. They tweet @gianpialhadeff and @RachelAFranklin respectively
But jobs were lost because of the numbers of migrant workers who came here from Eastern Europe. Our people couldn’t compete.
And we have had “employment rights” for many years – we did this for ourselves; Factories Acts – 1833, 1843, 1937, 1961 – we were barely in the Common Market in 1973 when Michael Foot pushed through our Parliament his 1974 Health and Safety at Work Act.
Why do we need an expensive quango in Brussels to achieve these measures.
WJ (below) is wrong at almost every level. Our EU membership means that we have agreed on EU level ‘Factory Acts’ equivalent to 1833, 1843, 1937, 1961 and 1974 so that employers who wish to break them can’t just go to Ireland, France or Bulgaria to produce goods more cheaply at the expense of the work force. The EU is not an ‘expensive quango’ – it is the combination of a civil service (the Commission, no bigger than Leeds Council). the directly elected European Parliament and the Council of Ministers where elected governments can agree on proposals (for example on Health and Safety at Work). Any economy will grow if migrant workers come and boost it (obviously we need immigration controls but the UK GNP overall did very well thanks out of all Polish immigrants). ‘Yay’ to Rachel and Giampi. Who wants to live in a Little England dominated by myths of greatness built on a myth that The City can always keep England rich. If we leave the EU of course Scotland and Northern Ireland would leave the UK. And its eminently possible we will leave as euromyths originally from the Mail and now from everywhere are unchallenged so people believe them after forty years of drip drip drip.
Oh please, don’t demonise me with your Daily Mail rubbish – I don’t even read the rag; and save the patronising “You’re too thick to really understand” – I’m quite capable of sifting information for myself and coming to my own conclusions.
The economy is not everything; the first thing any government should consider is the welfare and safety of its own people. In this respect whole communities have gained nothing from belonging to the EU.
I’m glad to see that you agree with controlling immigration – How?
And if importing all this cheap labour was so beneficial to this country’s economy why did 13 years of pro-EU Labour leave us with massive PFI debts and a huge deficit.
The costs of belonging to the European Union are impossible to gauge – the EU doesn’t stop at Brussels, its tentacles reach into our city councils. We have huge bureaucracies in our cities that are there to deal with the Brussels outpourings – not to mention the unnecessary doubling up of regulation, most of which is made at a global level anyway.
An increasing number of people in the EU are falling into debt whilst the bureaucrats get fatter – and I see no difference in Little England and Little EU; let’s get out into the World and come to our own arrangements on trade.
But please, don’t mistake me for someone who hankers after a colonial empire, I’ll leave that to the EU – I just want to belong to a country where my cross on a piece of paper means something; at present I see no point in voting for laws that can be overturned in another country.