Dear Editor,
In response to Bob Fleming’s letter which totally misguided in the assumption that he is voting out for his grandchildren. As the Chair of the Board of Trustees of NAYCC (Newton Aycliffe Youth & Community Centre) I Vote ‘Remain’ for our Young People’s future and future apprentices.
I am totally amazed at Bob Fleming’s article in the Newton News given his links with the trade union over the years. It is the trade union rights that have come out of the EU that Johnson, Gove and Farage want to destroy. We want the ‘Leave’ campaign to be straight with you as to what leaving the EU would mean, and how it would impact on the lives of British workers. At Labour IN for Britain, we’ve launched a petition. We’re demanding the Leave campaign come clean with the British public and tell us which vital workers’ rights they’d look to scrap if we left the EU.
Many of the employment rights and protection millions of people rely upon are safeguarded by EU legislation — but Leave campaigners including Boris Johnson, Chris Grayling, Nigel Farage and Priti Patel & others have suggested they’d strip back our hard-fought rights if they got the chance.
So we want to know: which rights would be scrapped? Maternity Leave? Parental leave? Holiday pay? Equal pay? Given their abject lack of a strategic plan for Brexit, their inability to pay for all of their pledges and their tendency to immediately backtrack when challenged, the ‘kippers and the hard-right fringe of the Tory party look increasingly like the Simpsons character Montgomery Burns offering the public a “mystery box” in order to convince them to vote for Brexit.
What’s in the box, nobody knows for sure. But the Brexit campaign seem intent on promising everyone that it’s going to be exactly what they want it to be, even if that’s a multitude of different things to different people. Perhaps one of the most important considerations when being offered a “mystery box” is who is doing the offering, and how much you trust them. How much do you trust a bunch of hard-right Thatcherites to keep their word that they’re going to invest in socialist spending like funding the NHS or saving the steel industry for example?
My knowledge is that we are much better off in the EU and I could go on with all the good things that have come out of the EU just on the issues under the Social Chapter alone and if people think it will stop immigration then they a badly misled.
We then have to look at the number of jobs coming to Britain as a direct result of being a part of the EU we have just got Hitachi to build trains but what of the supply chain how many jobs would the bring to Newton Aycliffe I think that this is too big of a risk to take, we also need to take a look at the new super college being built on the Business Park for our young people to learn engineering skills for the new industries in engineering like Hitachi.
Tony Blair weighed in on the debate over Brexit, warning that leaving the European Union would hit living standards and hit the poorest in society most. The former Prime Minister appears to make an appeal to Labour supporters – seen as an important swing demographic in the vote – in two interventions.
Tony Blair laid into the Out campaigns, saying they were determined on making the debate about immigration because the economic case for staying in has already been settled. His comments come as Vote Leave chiefs sent an open letter to David Cameron, accusing the Tory leader of “corroding public trust” on immigration.
“These people are focussing on immigration because on the economy it is now clear that we will suffer a deep aftershock if we leave the European Union,” said Tony Blair in a TV programme with Andrew Marr. He added: “We have got over four decades of these interlocking economic relationships, you break that up and how can anyone argue that you’re not going to have a problem afterwards, economically?
”On those running the Leave campaign, he said: “These people say they care about people’s living standards and the poorest members of our society; those are the people who are going to suffer.”
He warned that the true motives for those who would manage Britain’s exit from the EU for wanting to leave would be an anathema for most Labour voters. “The pain is relatively easy to predict. That pain is measured in jobs, living standards, the value of the money in your pocket,” he said.
“The intellectual reasoning behind “leave” is to take us out of that European polity altogether and make us a global outlier. These are the folk who oppose the social chapter of basic employment rights and opposed the minimum wage. Most Labour voters would run a mile from that. These are the very people they have spent a lifetime fighting.”
Major New Labour figures are throwing their weight behind the campaign to keep Britain in the EU, with a series of major interventions. Former Chancellor Alistair Darling has warned that a vote to leave the EU could cost the UK £250 billion in lost trade, while Peter Mandelson has hit out at the anti-immigration rhetoric of the Out campaign.
Darling said that pulling out of the single market would introduce greater trade barriers, and that there was no feasible agreement that would be able to give Britain the level of free trade it currently enjoys.
“Those wanting to leave the EU want to pull Britain out of the single market, which would mean introducing tariffs and barriers to our trade and putting billions of vital trade at risk,” Darling said. “There is no trading arrangement outside the EU that gives us the free trade we rely on today. Leaving would put jobs, low prices and financial security at risk.”
Lord Mandelson used an article in the Guardian to accuse Outers of running a campaign that is “a disturbing echo of UKIP”. But the New Labour architect said that the focus on immigration simply shows that the Leave campaign has nothing of substance to say about economic benefits of Brexit. “In a disturbing echo of UKIP’s last party political broadcast, which told numerous untruths about Turkey, Gove asserted that 77 million Turkish Muslim citizens would soon be using the NHS, and Albanian criminals were about to flood Britain.”
Mandelson wrote. “From Johnson questioning President Obama’s “part-Kenyan ancestry” to EU migrants being blamed for the problems in everything from British schools to our health service to our prisons, every recent Vote Leave intervention has had immigration at its heart. “Should we be disappointed by this change in tone? Yes. Should we be worried? NO!
”Mandelson added: “Swallowing the nasty Ukip strategy wholesale may energise the right-wing base of the leave campaign but I cannot see it being enough to persuade more than half of the voting public to take a leap in the dark in quitting the EU. People want to know what will happen to their jobs, their pay packets and their weekly shopping bill more than they want to hear abusive rhetoric and nationalistic myths.
”New reports suggest that Tony Blair will also enter the referendum campaign, by helping to organise an endorsement for Remain from former US President Bill Clinton. A Stronger In source recently told LabourList that the campaign would be happy to work with any major political figure backing a Remain vote, including Tony Blair.
However, given the former Prime Minister’s divisive reputation, rumours suggest that the campaign are trying to limit his involvement, and see getting him to secure an intervention from Clinton as the most useful contribution. Gordon Brown recently made a low-profile entrance into the campaign, and is expected to make a bigger intervention when he makes a keynote speech on the subject at the Fabian Society conference later this month.
Vince Crosby