GFTU BGCM 2019 Minutes

moment when there was an opportunity to shift politics in a leftward direction,

but actually the moment was lost and in fact the vacuum was filled by the

wrongheaded politics of the right.

The third anniversary, we are just coming up to it, is the anniversary of the EU

Referendum three years ago. This time three years ago we were a month away

from Referendum day and the backdrop to the Referendum was this, in my

view. The consequence of the Thatcherite revolution had been to hollow out

entire communities. The result of it had been to destroy large chunks of the

manufacturing industry and to actually force people who had had good, well

paid, unionised jobs into low paid, ununionized, casualised insecure jobs. That

was the first stage. Stage two was to say to those people post 2010: “We are

going to cut public spending in your areas, we are going to slim down the

scope of the State which has been supporting activity in your area and we are

going to cut your benefits”. The 2015 Election which the Tories won with a

small overall majority led to a summer budget of 2015 where George Osborne

decided it would be a great idea to reduce welfare spending by around £12

billion. He targeted all sorts of things like child benefit, child tax allowances,

working families tax allowances, took a real axe to public spending.

So you have had communities hollowed out, you have had people with their

benefits cut. They are then asked: “Would you like to remain a member of the

European Union?” The European Union in 2015 had just been going through

the Greek crisis, it had shown itself to be as wedded to neoliberal policies, if not

more wedded to neoliberal policies, than the Tory Government had been here.

When it came to bailing out Irish banks the prerogative was to actually make

sure that German and French investors who had invested in bonds got their

money back rather than the welfare of the people of Ireland. So you had had

this really turbocharged austerity programmes by the European Union which

was in even bigger trouble than the UK was at the time. Its biggest project, the

euro, had proved to be an abject disaster. Then you ask people: “What do you

want to do? Do you want to remain in the European Union or do you want to

leave?” It was a no brainer. You asked people their opinion of their lives, “Are

you happy or not?” They are obviously deeply unhappy with their situation and

114