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Alan Johnson MP, Chair of Labour In for Britain, speaking at the USDAW Annual Delegate Conference, Blackpool said:

Let me start by paying tribute to John Hannett. I don’t know how many of you know this but I was sacked by Tesco when I was 16. Well, they claim they sacked me, I claim, I walked out. I know it was 50 years ago but I’ve spent the last 20 years trying to convince John to take my case to an employment tribunal!

If anybody can, John can.

John, you are an inspiring leader, a great trade unionist, and a good friend.  Thank you for your outstanding contribution to our movement and our public life.

And to Paddy Lillis, your Deputy, thank you for your tireless efforts on behalf of workers and the Labour Party, where you’ve been one of the most effective Chairs I’ve seen.  Together you’ve helped USDAW to grow by almost 110,000 members, new members recruited in your work places, thanks to the hard work of your union and bucking the trend of declining union membership.

And to Barbara Wilson, for welcoming me this morning, as Chair of the Standing Orders Committee.

One thing I learned a long time ago attending union conferences is always be nice to the with the Chair of the Standing Orders Committee!

Can I share your concern on behalf of your members and those workers in BHS. I hope that they will open a dialogue with you at this difficult and worrying time for staff.

USDAW is such a vital part of our trade union movement.  A strong, respected voice for workers, grounded in the practical concerns and realities of the modern workplace.

It is a trade union born in times of great hardship.

The shop and distributive workers of the Victorian era were some of the most exploited of the age.

Low pay.  Long hours.  Forced to stand up all day, and fined if they dared to sit down.

Often ‘living in’ their workplace in cramped, dirty conditions.

And if a customer took against them, for whatever reason, they would be sacked on the spot.

Many of them were women, denied even the right to vote.

The shopworkers helped form the Labour Party which became the first political party to campaign for votes for women; and it was the shopworkers who produced the first ever woman Cabinet Minister in Margaret Bondfield.

I want to thank you for your work in the modern era establishing the Minimum Wage, extending protection to young workers, increasing maternity leave and your successful battle on behalf of the whole country to keep Sunday special.

The success of this union is testament to the quality of its leadership, but more than that, it is testament to the loyalty of its members.

As you may know, I was a postman for many years and a union representative, representing workers, negotiating with management, organising in workplaces.

It’s a hard job.  It takes time.  It soaks up evenings and weekends.  It takes you away from your families.  It can be frustrating.  Compromises have to be made.  You don’t always get everything you want.

But what you do matters enormously.  It matters to individual workers who you defend every day and it matters to their families. But it also matters to the community.  It matters to future generations who will benefit from the work you do.  You help civilise our society.

The miners had a slogan.  You can still see it on the miners’ lodge banners – ‘The past we inherit, the future we build’.  And that’s what you’re doing in USDAW:  building a better future.

So be proud of your union, and be proud to be trade unionists.

I’ve spent whole chunks of my life in this hall at union and Labour Party conferences.

If the walls of the Winter Gardens could talk, what tales they would tell!

It was here in this hall that the first post-war Labour Party Conference met after VE Day in 1945.

It was chaired by Ellen Wilkinson, a suffragette, socialist, leader of the Jarrow Crusade, and former organiser for your union.  In May 1945, she sat where John Hannett is sitting right now, chairing the Labour Conference.

Many of the delegates were in the uniforms of the Army, Navy and Royal Air Force, with medals on their chests from campaigns in Africa, Italy and Normandy.  Major Denis Healey made his first ever speech to a Labour Conference.  So did Barbara Castle, demanding ‘jam today, not jam tomorrow’.  Clem Attlee was seeking permission to dissolve the wartime Coalition Government and force a General Election to chuck out the Tories and vote in a Labour government.

The delegates sitting where you are now demanded two things.  First, they wanted peace. Two world wars had started on our continent in the space of just over 20 years: and every 20 years for centuries before that Europeans had been slaughtering one another on the battlefield. 

Labour leaders like, Clem Attlee, Ernie Bevin and Herbert Morrison, helped create the United Nations, NATO and the great institutions of the post-war world.  They knew that to keep the peace, nations needed strong international institutions to work together, not to cede sovereignty but to pool it, not to reduce British influence, but to enhance it.

But they also wanted what Nye Bevan called ‘serenity’ in the lives of working people.  They heeded the lessons of what happened after the First World War, when the men came home from the trenches and found only slums and slump and soup kitchens.

What good is peace, they said, when the children are crying with hunger, and there’s no money for food, clothes or medicine?

So they demanded a fair share of prosperity.  Jobs for all.  Social security.  And they built a national health service, described by Bevan as ‘the most civilising thing in the world’.

In this room, a social revolution was born as the Labour movement sought to lay the foundations of a New Jerusalem.  They rose to the challenge of their age, and they secured a peace in Europe that has lasted for over 70 years.

Now, colleagues, it’s our job to ensure that the great post-war vision of our predecessors is not diminished and undermined by those whose vision of Britain is as an off-shore, regulation free, anything goes economy engaged in a race to the bottom.

I believe that the referendum on June 23 is every bit as important as that election in July 1945.  Perhaps more so.

It is a vote about whether Britain remains in or leaves the EU, and there will be immense consequences for everyone here, and for every family in the land.

But it’s about more than that.  For me, it’s about what kind of country we are, what kind of society we want to be.

Our world is changing faster than our institutions can catch up with.  The pace of change is accelerating.  We know about the rise of India and China, churning out manufactured goods and millions of graduates in science and engineering and medicine.  The most recent Chinese Five-Year Plan revised the economic growth forecasts downwards – downwards – to 6.9%.

And it’s not just China and India.  Africa is a continent on the rise – growth rates of five and six per cent, a new urban middle-class, new cities, airports and motorways.  Malaria deaths halved, life expectancy on the up.  Yes, there’s terrible conflict and hunger on the continent of Africa, but there’s rapid urbanisation and growth as well.

The technology revolution is changing our lives from week to week.  A child today with a smartphone has access to more information than their grandparents could have gleaned in a lifetime.

Everywhere, automation.  In factories, warehouses, supermarkets.  You know more than most how automation is changing the world of work, not always for the better.

So the bigger question on June 23 is how do we confront this relentless challenge of change?

Now, there are those whose answer is to build a wall, pull up the drawbridge, wander off into self-imposed isolation and hanker after some misty-eyed version of the past.

They hope that somehow the torrents of change will leave them untouched, as they sip their Ovaltine and listen to the strains of Vera Lynn on the wireless.

Nostalgia can be a powerful force in politics.

I have to say, whenever I hear UKIP hanker after the sepia-tinted world of the 1950s, I’m reminded of the conditions that we of a certain age in this hall, grew up in. Living in slums which had been condemned years before as unfit for human habitation.  The cards in shop-windows advertising rooms-to-let – “no Irish, no blacks and no dogs”.

A young black man, Kelso Cochrane, was murdered on the corner of my street in the Notting Hill race riots.  If you fell in the Grand Union Canal you’d die of the pollution before you drowned.  The war hero, Alan Turing, chemically castrated by the state for being homosexual. A married woman couldn’t hire a telly or buy something on hire purchase without her husband being present to counter sign the agreement.

That was Britain in the 1950s – Nigel Farage and his cronies are welcome to it.

And what about Michael Gove and Boris Johnson?  Does anyone really believe they want to leave the EU in order to help Britain’s workers?

No, their vision is a small state with few, if any, workplace rights, and the Thatcherite “supply side” economy that Nigel Lawson was eulogising about the other day.  They know the EU protects workers’ interests, and it’s one of the principal reasons why they want to leave.

According to Michael Gove, we should emulate Albania.  Boris Johnson says we should ignore the President of the United States because of his Kenyan ancestry, and Chris Grayling says that our country is never on the winning side whenever there’s a vote at the Council of Ministers when the facts show that we get our way on the vast majority of occasions.

They want the British people to choose isolation.  Instead of being part of the biggest commercial market in the world, bigger than the US, bigger than China, with over 500 million consumers, able to stand up to China and India, to stand up to the tax avoiders and the powerful international corporations. They want Britain to go it alone.  It’s like being on-board a ship at sea in a terrible storm.  The crew has a choice – pull together and sail into the maelstrom, or jump overboard.  They want us to jump.

The alternative is to do what Britain does best- rise to the challenges of the modern world like the generation of 1945.

At its best, the EU has been a positive force for good.  We have gained materially because of our membership, thanks to the hard work of Trade Unions and Labour representatives working to deliver change in Europe.  British workers have gained:

•           A limit on working hours, with rest breaks and the right to at least one day off a week;

•           Rights to 28 days of paid leave;

•           Paid maternity and paternity leave;

•           The right for part-time staff to get the same hourly rate as full-timers;

•           The right for those on temporary contracts to be paid the same as regular staff;

•           Protection against discrimination in the workplace;

•           Workers’ councils, TUPE, the Information and Consultation Directive.

This is the ‘social dimension’ of Europe that a Labour government fought to implement, and the Tories wanted to scrap – and many still do, by the way. Just look at the Trade Union Bill that we’ll be fighting to amend or defeat tomorrow in the Commons. And for those who think those rights would be handed back to us by a Tory Government if we left the European Union just think back a couple of years to the proposal that workers should give up their rights in exchange for some shares in the company.

This social dimension is probably the single biggest reason why the Labour movement, divided in 1975 when this country last had an EU referendum, is united in 2016.

But there are other reasons.

The EU won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2012, not just for its role in ensuring peace on our continent since 1945 but for its contribution to the cause of democracy, free speech and the rule of law since 1975.

Back then, Franco, the Fascist dictator, was still in power in Spain; Greece had only just emerged from military rule; and Portugal had yet to go through its Orchid Revolution.

A whole swathe of Eastern Europe was under the totalitarian heel of the Soviet Union.

By joining the EU those countries have converted from oligarchy to democracy without a shot being fired, and Britain played a central role in that process.

President Obama was right – being in the EU doesn’t moderate British influence – it magnifies it.

That’s why unions like USDAW have been pro-European.  Unions want what’s best for their members, and what’s best for their members is Britain remaining in the EU.  But they also want to see the Union movement’s cherished principles of freedom and democracy exported across our continent and across the world.

In 1975, as a postman bringing up three kids on a council estate, I voted to remain in the European Community, along with 17 million others – nearly 70% of the vote.

And not once have I regretted the choice I made.

I think Jeremy Corbyn had it right when he said that we should back Britain’s place in the EU.  Because our membership gives Britain “the best chance of meeting the challenges we face in the 21st century”.

We know it is an imperfect institution.  The perfect institution doesn’t exist.  But as trade unionists, our challenge is to continue to campaign for change, for reform, for a better Britain and a better Europe.

But we know, don’t we, as trade unionists, you can’t win those improvements or deliver change without a seat at the table.  You don’t win a negotiation by derecognising your union.

That’s why USDAW is not alone in its support of Britain’s membership of the European Union.

BECTU

Unite the Union

GMB

Unison

The CWU

Community

The Musicians’ Union

The TSSA

Along with USDAW, that’s almost four million workers in every trade and sector, in every corner of Britain; from nurses and builders to steel workers, bus drivers, postal workers and of course shop workers;  campaigning for Britain to remain in Europe.  Campaigning for a Europe that protects working people and keeping the swivel-eyed alliance of the right of the Tory Party, and UKIP, away from hard won workers’ rights.

The trade unions working together, in solidarity and strength, across our continent to deliver a better Britain, a better Europe and a better world.

Ends