Flickr/Chris Boland. Some rights reserved.
No one is prospering in the European Union these days except the super-rich. Unemployment has rocketed to almost 23 million and under-employment is rife. The jobs that do exist are low paid and insecure; our pensions are being haemorrhaged and our personal debt has reached astronomical levels. We live from week to week, struggling to pay the rent or mortgage, energy bills, phone bills, rail fares and childcare.
This is a world away from Jacques Delors’ land of milk and honey that he promised to the TUC in 1988. Of course his Social Europe offering was always a fairy-tale destined to have an unhappy ending, but our movement was still recovering from the 1984/85 miners’ strike and the 1986 Wapping dispute. His words were a refreshing change from the cold ferocity of Thatcher’s Tories perhaps, but empty none the less. The price was always too high: giving up democracy, trade union influence and the privatisation of public services through the various treaties, legal judgements and corporate diktats.
