Instead of obsessing about our relationship with the EU, we should be using our membership to rebuild our economy
David Cameron's pre-election instruction to the Conservative party "not to bang on about Europe" has been well and truly trashed. These days, when not taking advantage of the easy access to Spanish holiday resorts resulting from EU membership, he's at it himself. Meanwhile, the British economy is flatlining, jobs are less and less secure, and family budgets are squeezed as real wages fall for the third year in succession.
The right wing of the Conservative party, and the monkey on their back that is Ukip, prefer to blame Europe for all of Britain's ills. And a weakened prime minister has little choice but to fall in behind them.
Foreign Office minister David Lidington told a City audience recently: "What Europe needs is not … years of discussion about the intricacies of how decisions are taken in Brussels. What it needs is growth." But the government that he belongs to has condemned us to years of just such pointless discussion about Europe's rules without any real debate about its purpose, let alone the interests of the people it is supposed to be there to serve.
Instead of obsessing about our relationship with the EU, we should be using our membership to rebuild and rebalance our economy, tackle the crisis in living standards and give our young people a future. Last week, the European commission finally began to admit that the grand experiment of cutting our way to growth has failed, and failed young people in particular. It issued explicit recommendations to the British government to tackle the housing shortage, family poverty and youth unemployment.
The European austerity consensus may be beginning to crumble but the UK government seems determined to plough on regardless. What's more, the chancellor George Osborne's resistance to sensible EU measures like a financial transaction tax and a cap on bankers' bonuses is presented as a form of patriotism. Equally, the bid to back out of European legislation that has given us all rights to paid holidays and equal treatment for part-time and agency workers is portrayed as a way of standing up for Britain when the real purpose is attacking workers' rights.
This week, I will be in Dublin with colleagues from the European Trade Union Confederation. Ireland was the first European country to feel the brutal impact of the global financial crisis and it is an appropriate place for us to work out what we need to do to repair the damage. For starters, we should be developing a youth guarantee (a commitment to getting every young person into a job, an internship or training within four months of their becoming unemployed) worthy of the name, as the French and German governments were discussing last week.
High youth unemployment, including worries about the risk of consequent social disorder, is a Europe-wide problem. We are returning to the days when vast numbers of qualified young people had to emigrate to find work, leaving their native economies short of the skills and talent needed to build recovery. Irish youth were the first to pack their suitcases but now the Greeks, Portuguese and Spanish are too. How long before graduates in the UK join them?
We should be developing a European recovery programme that creates good jobs, builds affordable homes and stimulates research and technology. Europe can be a world leader in the design, development and production of green industries, as well as its biggest consumer. No one country can do that alone – not even Germany. The government talks a good talk about investment in infrastructure but its capital investment cuts tell a different story.
And we need to work together with our European partners to take back control of the finance sector from the professional gamblers who treated the real economy like their personal roulette wheel.
Britain should join the 11 EU member states that are negotiating the implementation of a Robin Hood tax, not taking them to court as Osborne is doing, having comprehensively lost the vote.
And trade should be on the agenda too. Some argue that Europe has somehow stopped Britain from making its way in the world outside the EU. But EU membership doesn't explain why Germany is trading more with China than we do, or Belgium trading more with India.
Last week, I was discussing the forthcoming EU trade deal with the US – the snappily named Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership – with my opposite number in the US trade union movement, Rich Trumka.
Our unions are working together to press for a trade deal that puts decent jobs and employment rights at the heart of the agenda on both sides of the north Atlantic. This is a markedly different approach from those in the British government who want a deal that aims for the lowest common denominator of deregulation – a free-for-all that could offer US corporations open season on the NHS and the welfare state.
It's up to us as citizens to demand a say over what goes on in boardrooms and at the workplace, in trade negotiations and our health service. We should have a right to good jobs, good wages and a good life. And the political class, whether in Westminster or Brussels, would do well to listen.
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