EC Meeting Papers January 2018

an engineer you join the union for engineers, if you are a footballer you join the footballers union and so on. Whether you are left wing, right wing, or of this or that religious persuasion does not matter. What matters is your class identity with workers in a similar occupation and your solidarity with all other trade unionists. Our unions have local regional and national structures where they all get together. There is another difference. More or less all of our unions, regardless of what workers they represent and who the main employers of their members are, event government and local government officers, are independent. They have no formal role in delivering the line of any political party or of the state. They represent their members first and foremost. Only 15 of 54 or so unions are affiliated to the Labour Party in Britain, and of course the Labour Party, now the largest political party in Europe, is now full of new vigour and led by a peace loving leader with great knowledge of the Middle East. These points are very important to bear in mind in this debate. The independence of the British trade union movement has been coupled with another distinctive aspect that I know is not so prominent in Europe and elsewhere. The British trade union movement is the most solid and active source of international solidarity in Britain. Any important international solidarity movement you can think of is substantially organised and funded by the trade union movement in Britain. Many unions have international officers and in the GFTU for example international issues are on every Executive meeting agenda. This spirit of internationalism goes right back to the period of formation of the unions in the late eighteenth century when they opposed slavery, when they supported the French and American

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