I HAD one thing in common with Jacques Delors. We both attended our first TUC Congress in 1988. He had been brought in to seduce the hitherto largely Eurosceptic British trade union movement to support the then-imminent Single European Act to create a single European market of 320 million consumers.

At the time I thought that the standing ovation he received was a little more worrying than just overpolite applause. It represented a really dangerous throwing in of the towel.

Our movement was still reeling from the aftermath of wave after wave of deindustrialisation, failed factory occupations and mass unemployment, the sale of council housing, the lifting of exchange controls on capital, successive rounds of anti-union legislation and of course the severe battering of the print workers at Wapping, and the coal and steel industry generally post-miners’ strike.

Prospects for removing the plague of this unprecedented ferocity of the neoliberals fronted by Margaret Thatcher seemed very bad and anyone — particularly a big cheese from “Europe” who spoke warmly about workers’ rights and things being “social” rather than individual — offered, it seemed to many, at least straws to cling on to.

Things must have appeared so desperate that the normal common-sense scepticism and independence of thought in the British trade union movement was tragically suspended and Delors’s very rhetorical, very thin speech was swallowed whole. He offered merely some scraps in return for surrendering opposition to the domination of market forces and to the power of unelected EU commissioners over our national economy.

A deep-seated socialist concept of democracy, as being rooted in the accountabilities of national parliaments and self-determining political and economic policy-making, was rejected by many in the unions as being old hat.

They were in favour of the new-fangled fantasy that none of the countries in Europe needed sovereignty. Instead, they needed a single capitalist market in command which was able to move labour, goods and services, and above all capital, around the world without restriction. 

This “uniquely European model of society,” as Delors called it in his speech at the TUC, was painted in the soft pastel colours of social democratic impressionism.

We would get, he said, “close co-operation and solidarity as well as competition.” We would be strong on “social solidarity of protection of the weakest and of collective bargaining.”

And, he went on to assure delegates: “…the large market should not diminish the level of social protection already achieved in the member states … every workers’ right [would be] covered by a collective agreement and more specific measures concerning, for example, the status of temporary work.”

Not only would we get all this, we would see “the extension to all workers of the right to lifelong education.”

On the basis of these promises — and there were no others in his speech — the organised trade union movement raised the white flag, opened union offices alongside the much more effective 30,000 corporate lobbyists in Brussels and said it could rely on those we never elected and the ever-so-clever lawyers in Europe to save us from everything bad in Britain.

Fortunately, workers generally, including the vast majority outside of the trade union movement, remained consistently more shrewd and sceptical, and voiced their opinion eventually in the 2016 referendum when the people were given their first opportunity to comment on EU membership.

The trade union movement has been slow to realise that union activism and membership also declined in direct relationship to the pro-EU proclamations of many unions. Believing that joining a bigger jungle would make the jungle any better was always seen as daft.

Even if Delors believed his own rhetoric in 1988, he would not have been able to claim that the “social Europe” he promised had subsequently either protected social benefits in member states, or introduced a range of measures to increase solidarities.

Indeed, the demolition of collective bargaining, final-salary pension schemes and relentless attacks on workers’ rights across the EU as it ruthlessly prioritised the needs of the employer’s market always demanded that we should look at reality not rhetoric.

The aspirations for a Europe of united nations that arose after the first world war then again after the second did indeed include some socialist and more latterly social democratic political traditions. Many of these currents came from experiences we simply had never had in Britain. In most European countries fascism had been successful in ways that it never had been here, and there was a laudable imperative on the heart of the European mainland to prevent its resurrection.

But one form of autocracy would never supplant another. And dreaming that the peoples of Europe could be saved from the horrors of themselves by hollowing out their democratic national institutions and replacing them by directives written by unelected bureaucrats was a sure way to ignite the forces of reaction once more. And it did.

Capital demanded that to secure its new single market in Europe it needed a single foreign and defence policy to back it up. This would drop bombs on the former Yugoslavia, returning warfare directly to European soil. And it would require the stunting and suppression of emerging producers and markets, notably in Africa. While being a market in part designed to compete with the US, the EU, German-led market would know where its bread was buttered short term and would take the side of the US and Nato in Ukraine against Russia, and support Israel in the Middle East.

No-one rejected the illusion of EU membership in order to buy into the continuing illusion that the hidden hand of the market and the ownership of our national assets by overseas corporations can bring prosperity and social solidarity. 

So to rid ourselves of the Delors delusion that underpins much working-class thinking about how to run society and the economy, regardless of the EU, we have to reassert some hard truths —  the competitiveness of the capitalist market in all things cannot be tempered and tamed by minor legalistic adjustments; workers’ rights are not given, they are fought for; public services cannot be in private ownership; movements of goods, services, capital and labour must be controlled nationally; peace will come to the world if there is mutual respect for the self-determination of nations.