How Jacques Delors changed British history

Jacques Delors who was a French and European patriot also changed the course of British history with one speech, delivered in heavily accented English. I heard it live at the Trades Union Congress annual conference in September 1988.

The background to the Delors speech was that Labour had recently lost yet another election to Margaret Thatcher. Although Neil Kinnock had moved away from the primitive leftism of Militant he could not dissuade the core of the Labour Party, and especially its affiliated trade unions, from their hostility to Europe.

One must first recall the postwar history of the British Left on Europe. Labour had fought the 1987 election  on a strong Eurosceptic platform. It was not quite the out and out withdrawal from the then European Community of the 1983 election, when Michael Foot lined up with Tony Benn, Neil Kinnock, Robin Cook and unions chiefs such as Arthur Scargill in calling for an instant Brexit had Labour won in 1983. But Labour in 1987 was still pledged to a referendum after a renegotiation – essentially the policy of David Cameron from 2013 onwards.

Tony Blair and Gordon Brown had both entered the Commons on the basis of Labour’s 1983 withdrawal platform. This was in line with Labour policy and sentiment since the Clement Attlee government. He was invited to join the Schuman Plan in 1950. This was the embryo of today’s EU. German, France, Italy, the Netherlands and Luxemburg agreed to place their coal and steel industries under a common authority which later grew into the European Commission. It was based on no discrimination in hiring of foreign workers on the basis of nationality – the origins of the EU’s Freedom of Movement for workers. This was the principle which Nigel Farage, the Daily Mail, the Telegraph and Rupert Murdoch’s papers denounced with such venom from the 1990s onwards.

Denis Healey, a gifted young Oxford intellectual, was sent by Clement Attlee to tell the new rising economies of Europe that sturdy trade union-dominated Labour wanted nothing to do with this esoteric project. Thus it continued under successive Labour leaders. Hugh Gaitskell said joining Europe meant an end to “a thousand years of history”. James Callaghan said entering the European Community meant embracing “continental claustrophobia”. Michael Foot said sharing any power in Europe was like Hitler’s burning down of the German Reichstag (Parliament) in 1933.

In early 1988 the TUC, whose leaders by then actually knew how Europe worked and how much stronger German or Dutch or reformist French trade unions were by embracing European construction and social partnership, was in despair. It seemed as if the union-crushing Thatcherite ideology was unassailable.

But then a union official had a brainwave. The TUC leaders had been in Stockholm, where the European Commission President Jacques Delors had been warmly received by Sweden’s Labour Party and trade unions – perhaps the strongest labour movement anywhere in Europe.

His vision of social partnership was along Nordic lines. No strikes, support for Swedish firms investing abroad, secret ballots for key decisions, works councils elected by employees separate from union shop stewards. Draconian rules to stop communist or Trotskyist infiltration of unions.

Ron Todd, the burly Dagenham Ford car worker who was general secretary of the Transport and General Workers Union, heard Delors  speak at the Swedish  labour movement conference. He agreed to a suggestion from David Lea, the cerebral Cambridge economist who was Deputy General Secretary of the TUC, that Delors should be invited to the British trade union gathering.

TUC wordsmiths worked on the Delors text. He studiously avoided any condemnation of Margaret Thatcher. After all, she had backed him becoming President of the European Commission. That came after a stint as François Mitterrand’s finance minister, when he had quietly defused the French Socialists’ 1981 election manifesto. It was a wish-list calling for nationalisation of much of the French economy – the demand of the French Communist Party and the French equivalent of the Bennite left in the Socialist Party. Rather like Liz Truss’s budget, the programme came close to turning France into Italy or Greece, as every international investor ran for cover, the French franc was devalued, inflation and unemployment took off.  The guachiste experimentation  collapsed in on itself.

Delors was thus in Thatcher’s eyes a solid pro-market, economically orthodox, safe pair of hands. She looked forward to him helping her to forge the Single Market, which she thought would turn Europe into the de-unionised pro-American European Community of her dreams.

Delors had no qualms, as a reformist social democrat, in supporting a strong profit-driven market economy. His views were favoured by Gemany’s Helmut Schmidt, Spain’s Felipe Gonzalez and the Nordic or Dutch left.

But in line with classic Roman Catholic social teaching, he supported the right of workers to join trade unions and the obligation of employers to negotiate with them.  If Europe was to move to endorsing a borderless free market, for which Mrs Thatcher was the evangelist, it followed that trade unions, free collective bargaining, and right of workers to fair wages, health and safety rules and decent pensions negotiated between workers and bosses were also part of the new European market economy he wanted to shape.

I was present as Delors made these points in heavily accented English. The TUC delegates filtered out his promotion of a competitive open market economy, with firms relocating across Europe to increase their share value. All they heard was that for first time in a decade someone from Europe with the title of “President” was using language about workers’ rights and employers’ responsibility that had been banished by Margaret Thatcher in her endless crusade against the “enemy within”, as she had once called militant trade unions.

They rose as one to stamp their feet and sing “Frère Jacques” or the miners ‘chant “Here We Go” to the tune of Ça ira, the anthem of the French revolution.  I saw the tears in Delors’ eyes as he got a far warmer reception from British trade unionists than he ever enjoyed from their French counterparts. In his own country the left and the unions regarded him as too pro-market and pro-management.

The rest is history. If she had been smarter, Mrs Thatcher might has welcomed Delors as a supporter of her trade union reforms, such as secret strike ballots which had long been the norm in social democratic partnership labour markets on the Continent. Instead she went all-out to condemn Delors and the right-wing press demonised him as an enemy of Britain, a country he actually admired. On the principle of my enemy’s enemy is my friend the man Mrs Thatcher denounced as the Devil incarnate became a God for trade unions and for Labour.

“All roads lead to Brussels”, declared John Edmonds, the leader of the big GMB union. It was just the signal that the younger Labour leaders, who rejected the Foot-Healey-Benn generation’s hostility to Europe that seemed to keep Labour permanently in opposition, were waiting for.

Neil Kinnock, John Smith, Gordon Brown and the TUC’s new young Europhile general secretary John Monks all moved Labour to a pro-European position after 40 years of Euroscepticism. It was the birth of New Labour and Jacques Delors was its midwife.

But as Labour became pro-European thanks to Delors, the Conservatives moved in the opposite direction. Tony Blair became Prime Minister and signed the very middle-of-the-road European Social Charter. In 2001 William Hague said that to re-elect Labour meant Britain would become “a foreign land.” Robin Cook was elected to the largely ceremonial post of President of the Party of European Socialists. David Cameron became leader of the Tories and led the party out of its decades’ long leadership of the European centre-right Christian Democrat political confederation.

So Delors’ speech made Labour pro-European and the Tories anti-European. Indirectly Delors was thus a godfather of Brexit. Few speeches in history, and certainly no intervention by a foreign political leader speaking in Britain, have had such a big and lasting impact.

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