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Back to topONLINE ROUNDTABLE: Rejoining the EU: A Challenge to the Trade Union and Labour Movement?
Andy Burnham has stated his intent to raise the issue of rejoining the EU in the next parliament. Speakers are asked to assess the current political and economic direction of the EU, the impact of Britain’s existing EU settlement and the consequences of re-engagement.
Pannelists
- Brian Campfield, former President Irish Congress of Trade Unions and Gen Sec NIPSA
- Professor Jonathan Michie, Oxford University
- Professor Engelbert Stockhammer, Kings College, London
- Professor Helen Thompson, Cambridge University
Convener: John Foster
The current situation in Britain - where Johnson’s withdrawal negotiations pasted EU neo-liberal regulations into British law, further centralising control in Westminster, effectively outlawing comprehensive nationalisation of services and industries and overriding any residual powers over industrial policy held by the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Senedd and, in the North of Ireland, creating a duality of regulation.
The current situation in the EU – where the collapse of Germany’s industrial base and the parallel crises in France and Italy have seen deepening impoverishment, the rise the far-right and the use of militarisation to concentrate EU funds in the hands of the block’s biggest economies.
In this context the roundtable may also pose the question of how far the debate on the EU can be refocused around the more fundamental issues of the concentration of economic power, neo-liberal financialisation and militarisation – thereby re-opening the question as to how working people can collectively develop their own power.