Europe

Jack Dromey Excerpts

Wednesday 30th January 2013 Commons Chamber

[Jack Dromey (Birmingham, Erdington) (Lab)]

In the 1970s I was chairman of the north-west London “Get Britain Out” campaign. I remember chairing a rally addressed on the one hand by local Labour MPs and Ken Gill, the general secretary of TASS—the Technical, Administrative and Supervisory Section—and a leading member of the Communist party on the party, and Enoch Powell on the other. I believed that position in good faith and I worked hard for it. I was disappointed by the outcome, but I soon came to recognise that I was wrong, just as I came to recognise that continuing to fight yesterday’s battles was wrong. We took a long time in the Labour party to recognise that. Indeed, when Labour members first went into the European Parliament, the Spanish socialists nicknamed them “Los Japonistos”, after the soldiers who emerged from the jungles in Guam 40 years after the war was over asking, “Is the war continuing?”

Why did I change my mind? I remember an excellent German-Jewish friend who had lost his family in the camps saying to me, “Jack, I’m not the greatest fan of the common market,” as it then was, “but we’ve had a continent at peace for a generation, unlike that which took my family from me.” I remember a very honourable Macmillanite Conservative in the 1980s—in the days when there were such people, before, in the immortal words of Julian Critchley, the “garagistes” took over the Conservative party—saying, “Jack, I’m proud of my country, but we can only be strong in a modern, bi-polar world,” as it was then, “if we are at the heart of the European Union, with its great traditions of Christian democracy and social democracy.”

The reason I changed my mind was also, yes, the rolling forward of the social dimension in the 1980s, when Jacques Delors—Frère Jacques, as we came to call him—came to address the TUC. However, it was also because of my experience in the real world of work, dealing with hard-headed business people—enlightened in their approach—who rightly argued that we needed a single market with common standards, at the heart of which was a social dimension that reflected a belief in the simple truth that how we treat workers is crucial to the quality of the service they provide and what they produce.

[Richard Drax]

Why do we need to be a member of a federalist state to treat our workers properly? Why cannot we pass those laws ourselves? Indeed, we have.

[Jack Dromey]

I am coming to that point in a moment.

On the argument that I have just deployed, I remember the chairman of the company then known as British Aerospace saying that we needed a single market, but that as a company and as a continent we could not succeed in the world on the basis of a race to the bottom. That brings me to my first concern, which is the hidden agenda that lies behind the Prime Minister’s argument. There was a tantalising glimpse of that last week when, extraordinarily, he seemed to suggest that we should return to the days when a junior doctor could work 100 hours a week. Repatriation is the cry, but the reality behind that is rolling back a generation of progress on workers’ rights and taking us back to the 1980s, an era I remember well.

Let me give the House an example, which relates to the acquired rights directive. The directive was legislated on at European Union level in 1978, and introduced here, reluctantly, by a Conservative Government in 1982. However, that Government did not extend it to cover 6 million public servants. What we saw was the most appalling Dutch auction, involving cut-throat competition as workers were transferred and suffered cuts to their pay, their holiday entitlement, their sickness entitlement and, often, their pension arrangements as well. I remember a particular example that I dealt with early on involving the Moreton-in-Marsh fire service training college, where 130 women caterers and housekeepers had seen dramatic cuts to their terms and conditions of employment. The only humorous side to that otherwise sad story was the fact that the managing director of the company concerned—Grand Metropolitan catering—was none other than a Mr Dick Turpin.

Two things happened at that time. First, in 1991, I took the case of the Eastbourne dustmen to the European Court of Justice, and we won. It was ruled that the British Government had acted unlawfully in denying protection on transfer from the public to the private sector. Secondly, employers themselves began to speak out. I remember Martin O’Halloran of ISS, the then chair of the CBI, saying that it was madness—that employers did not want a market based on a race to the bottom, and that they wanted a market in which we competed on quality and productivity, characterised by fair treatment and fair competition.

[Mr Redwood]

I, too, found that my attitude towards the single market changed in the 1980s, when I became the chairman of a big industrial company. I discovered that I had much better access, as an investor and as an exporter, to leading non-EU countries than I had to France and Germany.

[Jack Dromey]

I say this to the right hon. Gentleman and anyone else on the Government Benches: let us have some honesty in this debate. If they want to go back to the days of the 1980s, they should say so. If they want a Beecroft Britain, they should say so. If they believe that Britain can succeed only by driving down workers’ pay and conditions of employment, and by reducing their health and safety protection at work, they should say so. We will certainly be seeking to draw out what is undoubtedly their hidden agenda.

[Damian Collins]

The hon. Gentleman is making an impassioned case, but there is nothing to prevent the British Government from introducing legislation of that kind. What has created frustration about the EU is that those powers have come in under the guise of European treaties and not been put before the House properly. They have come in through the back door.

--- Later in debate ---

[Jack Dromey]

They have come in as a consequence of our membership of the European Union and the move towards a single market based on clear ground rules, including the fair treatment of workers. I will say it once again: if Government Members want the repatriation of the legislation that protects workers’ rights so that they can cut that protection, they should say so.

My final point relates to the immense economic damage that this debate will cause. I have worked with the automotive industry for many years.

[Oliver Colvile (Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport) (Con)]

The hon. Gentleman is making his case very eloquently, and I congratulate him on doing so. I do not agree with him, but that is another issue. I am curious as to which way he would vote in a referendum if we had been able to negotiate the return to the United Kingdom of some of those regulations.

[Jack Dromey]

What I certainly will oppose is the madness of saying now that we are going to have a referendum on an in/out basis in five years’ time, for exactly the reason that 82% of the cars that we produce in this country, through our world-class success story that is automotive, are exported—and half to the European Union. Key to the future of the industry is inward investment, and key to inward investment is continuing membership of the European Union. There is already a chorus of concern from Ford and BMW, for example, about the grave consequences of prolonged uncertainty, while the director general of the Engineering Employers Federation has said that this is the worst possible way to go about negotiations, as it will weaken any negotiating leverage we need rather than strengthen it.

That is why I believe that the good Lord Heseltine is right and the Prime Minister is fundamentally wrong. With an economy bumping along the bottom and a triple-dip recession possible, this is the worst possible time for prolonged uncertainty, which will inevitably impact on crucial investment decisions. Far from standing up for Britain, as the Prime Minister says he is doing, he is putting party interest before the public interest, and he runs the risk of doing great damage to the economy of our country.

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[Neil Carmichael]

Absolutely not. We do not want to “reduce workers’ rights”, as the hon. Gentleman puts it, but we do want to ensure that more people can be employed. That is being made possible by the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Bill, which is probably an Act by now. It copies legislation introduced by the German Chancellor who, at the time, was none other than Chancellor Schröder of the SPD—the Social Democratic party of Germany—to make it easier for small firms to employ people. Those are the sort of measures that we should be introducing here, and we are starting to do exactly that.

[Jack Dromey]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Neil Carmichael]

No, because I am running out of time. I was asked specifically which policy areas we should be changing. I have dealt with the second, and I now want to talk about the third, which, although more long-term, is critical.

What are we going to do about the Council of Ministers? It needs to be more transparent, and it needs to have more capacity. I think that we can provide the answer to the democratic deficit in two ways. First, this Parliament and the Parliaments of the other member states must become more interactive, engaging in the kind of discussions that take place in the Council. We need to hear more about the agenda, we need to hear more about what is actually said and done, and we need to hear more about how we as parliamentarians can influence all that through our own national Parliaments. The second way in which that can be beneficial is in challenging the effective supremacy of the Commission in ensuring that treaties work as they should, which drives a hole into the argument about the European Parliament’s position that I have heard mentioned several times in the debate today.

There are a great many areas of policy that we can change, but let me canter through the ones that I have mentioned. First, we need to act immediately to deal with the common agricultural policy. We are already too late for 2012, as we are now in 2013, but there are changes on which we should now be insisting. Secondly, we need to extend the single market to energy—although not just to energy: I could have mentioned the digital economy and financial services. Thirdly, there is the constitutional aspect, which I think is central to what the Prime Minister said in his speech.

If we can deliver on some or all of those areas— policy, the single market and the construction of the European Union itself—we shall have something really interesting to say to the electorate at the time of the in/out referendum. Meanwhile, we shall be protecting and, indeed, strengthening our interests. Above all, we shall be producing a better Europe, because it will be more flexible, more competitive, more transparent and more democratic.

Finally, I want to talk about President Obama. It is true that he said we should remain in the EU, but he is not the only American President to have said that: every single one has since Dwight Eisenhower in the 1950s. It is a consistent message, therefore, and we should listen to it, but the clear message we are getting from our electorate is this: “Make a difference in Europe. Reform it where necessary. Make it more flexible. Make it more competitive. Make it more useful to us, and make it less intrusive.” I can take that case to my constituents in Stroud, valleys and vale, and to businesses and everyone else who has a clear interest in protecting Britain’s interests through having a reformed and effective Europe.

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[Chris Heaton-Harris]

This is a fairly simple matter, and I tend to agree with what the Prime Minister says: we should renegotiate, get our deal and then go to the British people and settle this question. We should end the uncertainty by putting our trust in the British people and asking them, “Do you want this on the basis of the package that we have renegotiated or not?”

[Jack Dromey]

On ending uncertainty, does the hon. Gentleman accept the warnings given by Ford, BMW and the Engineering Employers Federation that the danger of prolonged uncertainty is that it will have an impact on vital inward investment decisions?

[Chris Heaton-Harris]

The biggest uncertainty and biggest danger for the British economy is the chance that Labour might be elected to government. There could be no greater uncertainty for the British economy than that—[Interruption.] The right hon. Member for Warley (Mr Spellar) mentions democracy from the Opposition Front Bench—absolutely damn right. That is why we should trust the British people, because they will have the final say. We should be able to agree on reform of the European institutions.