Secret consultation documents finally released after the Morning Star’s two-year freedom of information battle show the Home Office misrepresented public opinion, claiming support for policies that most respondents actually strongly criticised as dangerous and unfair, writes SOLOMON HUGHES
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Jacques Delors – end of an illusion
DOUG NICHOLLS, former general secretary of the General Federation of Trade Unions and lifelong campaigner against the European Union, reflects on the recent death of one of the main architects of the EU
Jacques Delors, President of the European Comission, addressing the Trade Union Congress in Bournemouth, September 8, 1988
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The FBU is demanding 52 weeks of full pay for women firefighters, highlighting the unique health risks they face — and the continuing need to recruit and retain more women if policies like this are still not in place, writes SEONA HART
I HAD one thing in common with Jacques Delors. We both attended our first TUC Congress in 1988. He had been brought in to seduce the hitherto largely Eurosceptic British trade union movement to support the then-imminent Single European Act to create a single European market of 320 million consumers.
At the time I thought that the standing ovation he received was a little more worrying than just overpolite applause. It represented a really dangerous throwing in of the towel.
Our movement was still reeling from the aftermath of wave after wave of deindustrialisation, failed factory occupations and mass unemployment, the sale of council housing, the lifting of exchange controls on capital, successive rounds of anti-union legislation and of course the severe battering of the print workers at Wapping, and the coal and steel industry generally post-miners’ strike.
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In the second of a two-part feature for TUC week, DOUG NICHOLLS, general secretary of the General Federation of Trade Unions discusses the underestimated strength of community organisations and the value of a new working relationship with trade unions
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