GFTU BGCM 2019 Minutes

is by embracing the EU. Tony Benn had a good response to that which was

that people who went down that road preferred a good king to a bad

Parliament, but actually it has turned out that the king is not so good after all.

This is why I am coming from where I am. I do not actually see a lot of what is

coming out of the European Union as being that progressive. I do not see what

happened in Greece as being very progressive. I do not see mass

unemployment as that progressive. I do not see the stability and growth pact

as that progressive. I do not see the whole drift of neoliberalism in Europe as

being in any way what I want as someone on the progressive left. I totally

recognise that there are people who say remain and reform, but it just seems to

me that you start where you have got some locus on the political system which

is at the national level. To actually change the European Union would require a

treaty change involving a change of government in very many countries which

seems to me to be unlikely to fall for it, so what I see happening is if we remain

without any real change of direction either here or in the European Union, you

get precisely the growth of those nationalistic fascist tendencies that both of us

want to avoid.

On the left leaver side we see ourselves as internationalists. We do not see

ourselves as narrow nationalists at all. We see ourselves as promoting the

union of workers across the European Union and beyond. That has always

been part of the left’s pitch, which is that it is an internationalist movement, not

just a nationalist or even a regionalist block. I just do not see how the remain

and reform policy is driven through. We hear a lot about it, but actually there is

not an awful lot of meat on the bone and actually, yes, there is a danger that

politics here remains in the hands of the right, but actually there is an even

bigger question about who continues to control politics at the European level

where the direction of travel is driven by the German Finance Ministry, some

hard line neoliberals in Brussels, so I actually think that that is a much more

likely route to the sort of growth of right wing nationalist parties, as we are

seeing across large chunks of Europe. I think this is where both sides of the

left need to actually think about working out their proposals for dealing with

these fundamental problems, because there is a vacuum there and if it is not

filled by either the Remain left or the Leave left, it is going to be filled by some

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