November EC Meeting 2019

Time for the GFTU.

It is not my habit to reflect on the political situation in my reports, but this is the end of our 120 th year as an organisation and some reflection for the record should be undertaken, especially as this EC comes in the middle of a critical general election campaign. Every EC member will have their own and contrary views, and my purpose in setting down some thoughts is so that our customary comradely debate can be held. A couple of areas of these reflections are in italics indicating I think they may need special policy attention.

It is best to be honest about an uphill struggle.

The 2015 GFTU BGCM was held just after the re-election of the Tories. The mood was exceptionally glum, but instantly the delegates picked themselves up and got on with union building. In the last, 2017, election Labour did increasingly well as the campaign went on when they moved the debate off Brexit and onto domestic social and economic concerns. After all their programme of green industrialisation, reinvestment in public services, reducing the obscene wealth gap and nationalising key industries, is the most popular one. Britain has to be rebuilt and transformed, everyone knows that, except a few at the top in the board rooms. And everyone knows Labour has the best policy answers. The machinations of Hilary Benn, Yvette Cooper and other Remain supporting Labour MPs in Parliament has done, I believe, untold damage and diminished chances of electoral success. Given the origin of the Labour Movement and Trade Unions in the long struggle for the universal franchise (achieved for all over 18 in 1969) there should have been greater concern both about the role of the Supreme Court and the attempts by many in Parliament to overturn the result of direct democracy with a strange form of unrepresentative decision making in Parliament. People see Labour as trying to obstruct a clean Brexit. The Labour position that we need to be in an EU customs union and in closer alignment with the single market is, whether we like it or not, unpopular. Their idea that Labour could achieve a quick re negotiation on the EU withdrawal deal and put it to the public in a referendum is similarly not convincing people at the moment. But this is not the 2017 election. A Brexit deal should have been concluded before an election, this would have enabled the Labour Party to fight the election on the domestic policies needed to rebuild an independent country in the interests of the majority. This has not happened. Consequently, I do not believe that it will be possible for Labour to move the election away from Brexit. It is a Brexit election. My sense is that the majority of trade unionists and people at large, regardless of how they voted in the referendum want to honour the democratic mandate and get us out of the EU and concentrate on putting our country back together again. Bad sequencing.

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