Brown fights the EU to block workers' rights

Submitted by martin on 14 December, 2008 - 9:58 Author: Colin Foster

A bit of Keynesian economics means that New Labour is no longer "New" Labour? Not so. On 12 December Gordon Brown was in Brussels... fighting to make sure that the European Union can't increase workers' rights in Britain.

In Brown's view, agreements on common standards made by the EU - that is, right now, by right-wing governments such as those of Sarkozy in France, Merkel in Germany, and Berlusconi in Italy - might threaten New Labour's "pro-business" course by giving workers too many legal rights.

The occasion for the row was negotiations over "add-ons" to the Lisbon Treaty - the document designed to streamline decision-making in the larger EU - which Irish Taoiseach (prime minister) Brian Cowen can present to Irish voters as reasons to reverse their "no" vote on the Treaty in a second referendum.

Cowen himself is a "green Tory" - the prime minister whose education cuts provoked a demonstration of 70,000 (the equivalent, in proportion to population, of one million in Britain) in Dublin on 6 December. And his main negotiations were with right-wing French president Nicolas Sarkozy, since France currently holds the EU presidency.

But, according to the Irish Times, "Britain... [and no other member state] raised an unexpected objection to the nature of some of the legal guarantees being sought by Mr Cowen [and agreed by Sarkozy], particularly to legally binding assurances about workers’ rights.

"The issue of workers’ rights is particularly sensitive in Britain, which negotiated its own protocol to the Lisbon treaty to ensure the charter of fundamental rights could not override British domestic law. EU sources said there were concerns that legally binding guarantees offered to Ireland on social rights could cause political problems in Britain".

On 31 March 1997, in the run-up to the General Election, Tony Blair boasted that New Labour “would leave British law the most restrictive on trade unions in the western world.”

Gordon Brown is as "New Labour" as Tony Blair ever was - as determined to focus on offering Britain as the most workers-rights-free site in Western Europe for global corporations to perch on.

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