Learning the things that a EU activist needs to know about employment rights (Institute of Employment Rights meeting)

When looking at how people voted the 64% voting leave of C2 AND DE voters makes them a key group whose concerns we need to take on board if we are to build sufficiently large majority against Brexit to stop it. That’s why I went to the Institute of Employment Rights meeting last night on Brexit and Employment Rights.
It is a pity that they don’t record their meetings as so many good points were made many of which I no longer recall.
Martin Smith began outlining the casualization of many peoples jobs. He drew attention to how the problem is far greater than normally recognized. I of course had heard of zero hours contracts but not of how many have contracts that guarantee so few hours that they might as well be on a zero hours contract. This was a key problem for us during the referendum. Not because Europe itself is to blame - as someone said later in zero-hours contracts are very much a British problem. The trouble is that telling people that Brexit risks Trades Union Rights doesn’t cut much ice with people whose jobs are so precarious that any kind of employment rights is a dead letter.
Sandy Fredman then outlined how unions uniting across borders at the Europe level had been key in gaining many rights. From on I find it difficult to recall who said what. A whole host of examples of employment rights under threat were given. This is the list of the rights (wholly or partially sent to me after the meeting proof of employment terms, protection for fixed term workers, protection for part time workers, protection for agency workers, maternity rights,parental leave, discrimination law, equal pay, health and safety, tupe (that’s basically the transfer of the rights of workers when they are transferred to a new employer), information and consultation, collective redundancy consultation, european works councils, protection of wages in event of employer insolvency. Even if they don’t all lapse immediately on Brexit many will survive only as statutory instruments (which can be removed on the whim of the government) and many rest on rulings of the European Court of Justice which Theresa May has made it her priority to remove us from.
The next speaker did bring up some things that were less comfortable for a Europhile like myself such as the  Viking and Laval cases. No, I hadn’t heard of those two either before yesterday. He did concede that Trades Unions in Britain were not the most seriously harmed by them (if I remember correctly because things were already so bad that the cases didn’t make things much worse). However, my quick reading on the Laval case does make me think that the kind of solutions we need to protect both local workers and the right of free movement of people (eg insisting that wages given to migrants match locally negotiated rates) might be harder.
Then there were questions. I had a question but most of the questions were speeches so I time was quickly running out. I can’t complain - normally my questions are really speeches - this is the part of the meeting when those who are not on the platform get their say. Of course, we had a Socialist Party guy tell us what wonderful thing Brexit was and how it was a great defeat for the establishment - frankly delusional.
More typical was the guy who said he didn’t love the EU but had voted remain because of all the threats to workers rights that had been outlined by the speakers. The two who did put a for-Europe point of view (rather than simply seeing Brexit as a bad thing) were Nicola Countouris and Sandy Fredman. Nicola Countouris emphasized the positive aspects original aim of building a Federal and that this had been pressure from British governments that undermined that and the social rights that went with that. Sandy Fredman was eloquent in denouncing how “the people have decided” was both authoritarian and undemocratic.

But the meeting was then over and I never got chosen to pose my question - so I went up to the platform and asked anyway. “What do the pro-Europe groups need to take on board in relation to workers rights”. The person I asked came back with “Your group is trying to stop Brexit or just a soft Brexit?” “Stop Brexit altogether if we can - soft Brexit is plan B.”
“You should go for soft Brexit.” Having just marched with 100,000 people in largest pro-EU march there has ever been in Britain I wasn’t going to be convinced to give up on staying in Europe just yet. I knew his point of view. During the meeting he had explained that while he had voted remain he saw now prospect of the Labour party winning a general election on the basis of staying in. I don’t see any prospect of Labour winning on a pro Brexit platform which will see them losing shed loads of votes to the Lib-Dems. But what will change his mind is if he sees the pro-Europe groups showing staying power and us winning over more people to remain - not anything I might have said so I moved things back on what I knew better than I workers rights. And I get the list of key workers rights dependent on the EU that I quoted above.

But the most useful think I took away from the meeting was what someone had said earlier. The key to undercutting hostility towards migrants is sector wide negotiation of wages and conditions binding on all firms in that sector. Or to frame in our terms in which Brexit is not a done deal. It’s the key to winning people over to the value of the EUs free movement of people .

Opposing Trump - Opposing Brexit

Why Theresa May is pandering to Trump

Theresa May’s negotiating position means that it will next to impossible for a Brexit deal with the EU that allows Britain to remain part of the single market. Along with tha will be exclusion from the deals that the EU has made with 55 other countries. Even membership of the WTO is not guaranteed. Britain has the benefits of the WTO regime due to its membership of the EU and its immediate admission as a member in its own right is not automatic.
However the US has a GDP only slightly less than that of the EU so a trade deal with the US would be a big consultation prize.

Deals with Trump do not end well

The treatment of the students of the former Trump “university” and his refusal to ensure that he is free from conflicts of interest do not bode well for the honesty of the Trump Presidency. Trump words are hostile to trade deals and with the the killing off of the Trans Pacific Partnership so are his actions. Trump doesn’t grasp the idea of win-win. May may well find that any deal that suits Trump will be a scam.

Endorsing Trump is a Gamble

Trump has little tolerance for dissent and shows no respect for the law courts. The 2016 election was marked with major voter suppression. Trump’s choice for Attorney General Jeff Sessions is signal that he intends to make it even harder for Americans to exercise their right to vote.
On the other hand, Trump is already breaking records for unpopularity. Demonstrations and small scale protests are intensifying.
The future of America is unpredictable – a Putin style suppression of democracy or a lurch in favor of a reform government that will undo everything that Trump has done are both possibilities. Tying Britain’s future to the fate of a regime that may be short lived and equally may move in a direction that violates our values – both British and American is reckless. But Brexit narrows Britain’s options especially if we follow May in excluding ourselves from the single market. To take the side of those Americans opposing Trump we need to take a stand against the anti-EU path Theresa May has chosen.

Unleashing demons - useful for learning from past mistakes for the pro-European movement

You don’t read a political memoir for good overview - you read it for the view behind the scenes.

In that, Oliver delivers with a lot of detail about how the Cameron team handled the referendum and and quite a bit of insight on how Stronger-In functioned. However, the further he gets from what he has direct experience of the more hazy things get. We do get the story of Boris and Grove’s dithering before finally plumping for Leave. From then on Oliver and friends are only reacting to the Boris-Grove media show. We hear a little more of Theresa May who was nominally part of the remain camp. The story here is how she spent most of the time avoiding saying anything at all. The few times she does break silence she is so lukewarm as to seriously harm Remain.

Political memoirs usually serve to justify the actions of the writer. This is no different. He tell us that Cameron had no option but call the referendum and they ran the campaign in the possible way. He puts a lot of good arguments but the very fact that they in the end fall rather flat. Oliver may be an expert on stuff like this but Remain lost. Is there really nothing he thinks now that he could have done better?

Right at the start is the renegotiation. The concessions that Cameron got from Europe were huge – from the point of view the other European leaders. For someone in Britain who is dead against immigration – not so much. It is doubtful the concessions Cameron brought back won over more than a handful of voters. On the other hand the very fact that Cameron claimed he needed those concessions boosted the idea that there was a problem with Europe. Hence he undermined his credibility for when he eventually came out in favor of staying in. Cameron found himself backed into defending free movement as a “price worth paying” for access the single market. Muted were mentions of the positive benefits of free movement – the essential role European citizens have in the health service – how essential it is for science based industries to recruit skilled workers Europe wide etc.

Oliver still has no doubt about the wisdom of avoiding any positive message about Europe. Swing voters, his team concluded, didn’t have a positive view of Europe so any positive message would fall flat. It was too late to reverse the negative coverage European Union had been subject to for many years in a short campaign. The logic sounds fine (even if much of that negative coverage had come from Oliver’s Tories) but what was left was project fear. OK, Oliver is quite right to find it rather rich for Leave to describe Remain as project fear. Leave fear-mongering was more extreme and often bore little relation to reality but Leave wasn’t just a negative campaign. Again and again, Oliver describes how remain seems to hit home with the economic dangers of Brexit but within a few pages that boost has dissipated. On the other hand Leave claims, because they were part of a positive package, had a life of their own. It wasn’t that everyone who voted leave bought into the positive image of a go-it-alone Britain but their arguments had more resonance for being put by people who seemed to have enthusiasm for their alternative. And if there were any remaining doubt that relying on a negative campaign will fail that should be gone now that Trump has been elected US president.

Nowhere does Oliver ask to extent to Cameron’s premiership has fueled the Brexit vote. This was especially stark on pages 299-300 when in coaching Angela Eagle for the ITV debate he veered between telling Eagle to display some “righteous indignation on behalf of working people” to telling her off for blaming public services being swamped on Tory cuts. This won’t do, Oliver told Eagle, this will make the Remain side look divided. But the very reason Labour failed to mobilize working people for remain was that Leave succeeded in misdirecting indignation at the results of Tory-LibDem austerity against the EU and EU migrants. What Oliver was trying to get from Eagle was sanitized indignation and a result during the actual debate it was Sturgeon (who avoided Oliver’s coaching) who hit hardest.

  Oliver’s account is an honest one that allows us to see his thinking. As such it is valuable for pro-Europeans to read so that we can understand the mistakes of the referendum so we can avoid making them in difficult times ahead.

Richmond Park and the pro-Europe movement

When I got up yesterday and saw the result in Richmond Park I whooped and played Ode to Joy. I had been pessimistic. Out canvasing for Sarah Olney I had spent some time talking with one remain voter who thought Brexit would be a disaster but hated Olney making the by election about Brexit - “the referendum was so divisive”. Having had “traitor!” shouted at me while campaigning for remain, only days after the murder of Jo Cox, I sort of sympathized. But if many remain voters felt like that then Zac Goldsmith was safe. But hope trumped over fatalism in Richmond Park and Britain staying in the EU is back on the agenda.

Richmond Park was a Liberal Democrat victory but it wasn’t just a Liberal Democrat victory. Pro-Europe activists from across London came to help some helping the LibDems directly some working with Vote for Europe. The Greens stood down in Olney’s favor and even though the Labour Party put up a candidate many members disagreed to the extent that their candidate got less votes than members.

I’m not naive. I can see that any expression of gratitude for all that help doesn’t suit a party determined to claim momentum. It also makes sense for a party that hopes not just to win in areas that voted remain but to regain lost seats in Brexit voting areas are going quickly pivot calling the Richmond Park vote as not a vote for Europe but against “hard Brexit”. However lets call this out for what it is - dog whistle politics even if not as nasty a variety as that of Zac. Clegg and Farron are saying to remain voters ‘we are with you’ but to Brexit voters they are saying they are in favor of an improved Brexit. Clegg on Channel Four even talked about “sensible”. Okay, I hit replay and listening carefully I did hear “more sensible.” Sure, playing Russian Roulette is more sensible than blowing your brains out with a fully loaded revolver but there is nothing sensible about Brexit. A “soft” Brexit will be an unstable half way house in which Britain will still be adopting EU regulations but (where as now these are voted by British MEPs) we will have not say. The Brexiters were dishonest in claiming the regulations that are an essential part of a single market are undemocratic but under soft Brexit that will be true. A soft Brexit would only be acceptable as stop gap to give us time to persuade the British people that we need to again become a full member of the EU.

This does not apply to Sarah Olney who has committed herself to voting against Article 50 under all circumstances. Interesting the former MP for neighboring Kingston and Surbiton, Ed Davey who used to be rather bland has, since he left the Westminster bubble, found a harder edge expressing bitter opposition to Brexit. And it was still the right decision for pro-Europeans to back the Lib-Dems.

They are using pro-European Activists but we are using them. Richmond Park blows away the fatalism the feeling that there is no way of stepping back from the chaos that May’s Brexiters are leading us into. We need that victory.

The point is that relying on political parties alone will not stop Brexit. We need to be active in the pro-Europe organizations and win the argument as to why the EU maters. Then, when the political parties see the voters have moved, they will fall into line.