John McDonnell
MP for Hayes and Harlington · Labour · United Kingdom
“It is not a laughing matter—I am sorry for interrupting the flow of the discussion. It would be useful if the review looked at NATS’s long-term investment plans, particularly since its partial privatisation in 2001, which I opposed. I thank the Minister for meeting Unite this morning and thanking the workers, who have worked so hard.”
“On a number of occasions, I have raised the case of Lee Cheuk-yan, who many Labour Members will remember was the general secretary of the Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions and founder of the Labour party in Hong Kong. He was detained during the democracy movement five years ago.”
“I thank the Minister for his statement. NATS used to be in my constituency and then moved down to Swanwick. Of course, with Heathrow in my constituency, I receive—as I mentioned yesterday—a large amount of correspondence from a whole range of other MPs’ constituents, who think I am responsible for Heathrow airport.”
“I fully agree, and let me also say that wheelchair compensation is significant in this legislation. Most of us have dealt with cases like that. Going back to accountability in the process, a number of different organisations have provided us with notes on the legislation.”
“I apologise to my right hon. Friend; I should have checked this before the debate. The proposed new section 61G refers to priorities and objectives of the Secretary of State, which include a requirement for the Secretary of State to issue a document setting out those priorities and objectives for the CAA.”
“At the moment, when people in my constituency are faced with these problems, they do not know where to go; it is as simple as that. Finally, the debate that we will have on Heathrow expansion and the new policy statement will be interesting, given that we do not know what the flight paths will be. If I was a constituent of my hon.”
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“It is a privilege to follow the hon. Member for Harwich and North Essex (Sir Bernard Jenkin). I rise to support a range of amendments—amendments 1, 2, 11 and 12, new clauses 9, 11 and 13 to 16, and most of those that stand in the names of the hon. and learned Member for Edinburgh South West (Joanna Cherry) and the hon. Member for Glasgow North East (Anne McLaughlin). I commend my hon. Friend the Member for Walthamstow (Stella Creasy) for her continuing campaign on this issue, and the right hon. Member for Romsey and Southampton North (Caroline Nokes) for the eloquence with which she spoke on it. I believe that we should consider carefully the implications of any piece of legislation for our constituents. We must ask ourselves who will be affected, and how?”
“I agree with the hon. Gentleman to a certain extent. I congratulate Hillingdon Council, which has worked on a cross-party basis, and commend it for the work it has done with other local authorities of all political parties. I do not think, however, that the legal process was sufficient. What changed the minds of politicians— of David Cameron and the Conservative party—was the mobilisation of mass demonstrations and mass public support. I had been campaigning on the issue for 30 years before we saw that shift in policy.”
“The backdrop to today’s statement is not just the chaos of the last fortnight. It is also the report of three weeks ago which demonstrated that, as a result of austerity, there have been more than 300,000 excess deaths. May I ask the Chancellor to recognise, during his preparations for 31 October, that, unless he increases benefits by at least the rate of inflation, there will be more excess deaths and suffering?”
“The cut to the 45p rate benefits the richest 1% in our society. When that is combined with lifting the cap on bonuses and the Chancellor’s attack on those on universal credit, does he not realise that this is the most socially divisive Budget in a generation? Has he not looked at the history of engineered booms of this sort? In the 1960s, the dash for growth created catastrophe in our economy; the Barber boom of the 1970s created unemployment; and the Lawson boom eventually created chaos. The only benefit that each of those three engineered booms had was that they resulted in the fall of a Tory Government.”
“We are introducing legislation and placing in it a reliance on the structures that we established after the 2007-08 crash, particularly the FCA. I believe the FCA has been a catastrophic failure. My constituents have gone through London Capital & Finance, Woodford and Blackmore Bond. We saw the FCA’s failure to address HBOS and RBS properly, and we are supposedly still waiting for the independent review of Lloyds that was established in 2017, yet the FCA has moved not one inch to take further enforcement actions. As I have made clear on the Floor of the House, I was concerned that the FCA chief executive at the time was accused—rightfully, I believe—of being asleep at the wheel. Before we even had the report on London Capital & Finance and so on, we appointed him as Governor of the Bank of England.”
“The City of London and the finance sector are the most successful lobbyists in the history of politics in this country and they are incredibly powerful. Sometimes, that results in corporate capture, not just of Governments but even of Oppositions at times. That period of enthusiasm for deregulation resulted in a casino economy that eventually resulted in a series of crashes—we endured not just 2007-08 but other crises. I was in this House in 2007-08 and was the first Member to raise the issue of Northern Rock. I remember that in the debate after Northern Rock, the Treasury itself spoke about the “excessive concern for competitiveness” that brought about elements of that crash. I worry that we are re-inserting into legislation an emphasis on competitiveness that could override so many other issues of concern. Here we go again.”
“I hope there will be plenty of time to discuss the detail of the Bill both in Committee and on Report, so I wish to make some general comments on my worries about where it is situated. When J. K. Galbraith wrote about the 1929 crash, his advice for the future was that people could set up all the institutions they needed to try to prevent it from ever happening again, but the greatest protection would come from memory. I therefore want to go back in time to some of the lessons that we perhaps should have learned but did not. I wrote about the big bang in the 1980s and I can remember the concerns we expressed about a wave of enthusiasm for deregulation similar to what we see today. That enthusiasm resulted, in effect, in a casino economy.”
“I am particularly concerned about the issue of food. The UN special rapporteur Olivier De Schutter has said that what is happening now is that people are betting on people’s hunger. That cannot be right. Anything that we do that undermines in any way our own national legislation, which is against speculation in essential products such as that, is dangerous, but if we fail to ensure that we take up our international responsibilities, we will regret that for the future, as our people increasingly confront the problems of hunger and starvation.”
“I was critical of Gordon Brown on some of his response to the banking crash in 2007-08, but one thing he did successfully was bring the world together, and there were international meetings where we looked at a global response to these problems. I believe that we now need to look at a global response to the food and energy speculation that is taking place, which is exacerbating the cost of living crisis that our constituents are facing. In that way, the Government’s approach is lacking. We will have the discussion tomorrow about their response to the energy prices increase and the cost of living crisis. I am hoping that from that, and as we move forward, we will recognise that there is an international role to be played by this Government in bringing people together, in the same way as Gordon Brown did.”
“Of course the cost of living crisis has been caused by a combination of the breakdown of supply chains, covid and the war in Ukraine, but there is significant evidence now that these increases in energy costs and food costs have been exacerbated by speculation in the markets. This is speculation where the paper markets are distinct from the reality of commodity supply. It is not just me expressing that; it has been expressed elsewhere, particularly in the States, but also by a number of global institutions. I regret that we have not addressed that issue in this legislation. We need to hold to the MiFID II, particularly the constraints on asset holding with regard to food commodities, as I am anxious about price speculation forcing prices up.”
“I am also concerned about the fact that, although we are having the debate about this legislation, we are not debating potential future threats. I am anxious that in this legislation we are not addressing shadow banking, where we have already seen elements of individual firm collapses, particularly in respect of equity firms, that could create a domino effect and then produce a significant collapse. I am also anxious about the move away from MiFID II. That issue has been raised and was derided by some in the House. We have recently seen the evidence with regard to speculation on both energy and food prices.”
“The hon. Gentleman knows where my mind is going. We instituted a regulatory review a couple of years ago, and Prem Sikka, a professor of accountancy, and a team of corporate specialists and finance specialists introduced an excellent report. He is now in the Lords and I warn Members that he will shred this legislation when it goes up there. He outlined that 40 bodies are regulating our finance sector in some way and that there is a need for consolidation and to learn the lessons of the experiences of some of these bodies so far. That job is still to be done. I was hoping that the bringing forward of this legislation would coincide with the Government’s clear recommendations on where we go on that structure and, in particular, the role of the FCA.”
“Yesterday, we discovered that over 1 billion doses are believed to have been wasted around the world. That would have been sufficient to vaccinate everyone in the poorer countries.”
“Friend the Member for Birmingham, Edgbaston (Preet Kaur Gill), the shadow Minister for international development, recently uncovered, a year ago the Prime Minister promised to share 100 million surplus vaccines with the world’s poorest countries. That is a very small amount, but at least it is something; yet a year later, barely a third have been delivered. Those are the doses that we had already bought and were otherwise going spare. They would have been thrown away if they had not been distributed, yet they counted against the aid budget. In fact, it gets worse: we charged the aid budget double what the UK was widely reported to have paid for those doses. The Government had charged around £4.50 per dose versus the £2.30 per dose that they paid, as reported by The British Medical Journal .”
“At the top end, it would likely have had far more than it needed, and at the bottom of the scale, many countries had almost none at all. Still today, just under 20% of people across the African continent as a whole are fully vaccinated, and only 16% of people in low-income and poor countries are vaccinated. The Prime Minister has talked about vaccine hesitancy being the main factor accounting for that. That is simply untrue. Studies have shown that there is far more vaccine hesitancy in the United States than in most African countries. However, the way that the giant pharmaceutical corporations—big pharma—and richer countries have behaved has certainly fuelled that scepticism, which should worry us all. The problem is not simply a lack of solidarity or generosity, although that is shocking in itself. As my hon.”
“It is also worth using these debates to record one’s position, because when our children and grandchildren look back in decades to come on the Government’s performance, I think they will ask why we did so little to intervene effectively when there was such a huge scale of human suffering across the globe. The global vaccine story is one of gross inequality. I heard the Prime Minister when he made the statement that it was greed that brought us the vaccine. It was not greed; it was public money. Very significant public resources went into all the vaccines. However, greed was certainly responsible for the obscene inequality that followed. Over the last year, the richer an economy was, the more likely that country was to have vaccines.”
“I beg to move, That this House has considered disparities in the global distribution of vaccines. I submitted a request for this morning’s debate because I want to draw attention to the grotesque inequalities in the distribution of vaccines to tackle the covid crisis. When we convene for these debates, often it is to seek more information from the Government or to make a request for changes in policy. Now that there will be a change of Prime Minister and potentially a rearrangement of the Government, including of Ministers responsible for this area in particular, this is a particularly opportune moment to place all the issues on the agenda and hopefully see some change.”
“It is good for the big pharmaceutical companies, and Pfizer predicts $50 billion revenue for its covid vaccine—an anti-viral pill—in 2022 alone. These are the most lucrative drugs in history, and more than one Moderna executive has become a billionaire off its publicly funded and publicly created vaccines, but this situation is bad for us because it has not only created massive inequality, but allowed the virus to go unchecked in many parts of the world, mutating in a way that risks undermining the medicines we already have.”
“Around the world, factories offered to produce the vaccines, and one factory in Bangladesh said at the start of the pandemic that it could turn out 600 million doses a year. Compare that to the 35 million doses that the British Government have donated. More than 100 factories around the world could have been safely producing mRNA—messenger ribonucleic acid—vaccines, but were unable to do so because the trade-related aspects of intellectual property rights, or TRIPS, agreement locks that knowledge, which is often publicly produced, behind a wall. The TRIPS agreement allows huge corporations and their shareholders to profit while preventing us from taking the action that we need to take to protect our own society, as well as people around the world.”
“I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention and for his dogged pursuit of the issue in Parliament and with Ministers. There is an issue about the strength of the voices of individual Commonwealth countries, and a real concern about some not being listened to. As a result of that, interventions are not taking place effectively in those countries, but it is invaluable that the hon. Gentleman has consistently raised individual issues with regard to particular countries in which he has an interest through the Christian movement. That adds to the pressure on Government for more effective action, and I am grateful for that. The situation is worse than just failure to donate at scale. We did not donate as we promised on the scale that we promised, but we also worked to stop others producing the vaccines in their own countries.”
“It is worth reminding the House that there was a call from most countries to waive the rules during the pandemic. The tragedy for us was that the British Government were implacably opposed to the waiver. Britain was one of the last countries standing, and only on the last day did Britain sign up to the World Trade Organisation’s very poor compromise on the waiver. I will be frank: I think that is disgraceful. It is disgraceful for a Government of a country that had all the vaccines we needed. The onus was on us to do everything we could to prevent this infection from spreading, and to do all we could to assist poorer countries.”
“There is a lesson I thought we had learned decades ago, which is that when we have viruses such as this, whether it is polio, covid or others, unless we treat the world, eventually we will become vulnerable again. That is exactly the experience we are going through now. Even with covid, we are going through it again. As we know from information from the past month, a new covid variant has arisen, and from what we hear, that variant is more transmissible than anything we have experienced. On all those issues, unless we have a global strategy to vaccinate the world, unfortunately we will not be able to isolate ourselves from future infections and future tragedies. Let me return to the issue of the TRIPS waiver, which a number of hon. Members present have raised in various debates.”
“If it is not, that will be a stain on this Administration.”
“I hope that, with a change of Prime Minister and Administration, there is a window of opportunity for the Government to think again on the vital issue of how to prevent the loss of life and human suffering that has taken place on a global scale, which we have done so little to assist in tackling. I expect the Minister will repeat the Government’s response to the petition that was lodged on this issue by many members of the general public, restate the various contributions and donations that have been made and compare us to others. The reality is that the financial contributions do not go anywhere near what is necessary. More importantly, the issue that must be addressed is the blocking of the local production in lower income countries of the means by which we can tackle the pandemic.”
“Specifically, the UK Government should call on Moderna to revoke the patents they hold in South Africa and prevent other pharmaceutical companies from similarly undermining the work of the new mRNA hubs. Secondly, will the Government make a public commitment to support and finance the €92 million that mRNA hubs need to fund the initiative over the next five years? Some 59% has been raised so far from other countries, but not this country. Thirdly, will the UK stop blocking the trade-related aspects of intellectual property rights waiver at the World Trade Organisation? Will the Government ensure that the TRIPS waiver has a minimal duration of five years and includes all forms of intellectual property, including medical tools beyond vaccines, treatments, and diagnostics?”
“More broadly, the hubs will support self-reliance, independence and health equity in lower income countries. They will ensure that we are adequately prepared for the next pandemic. The UK Government must provide financial support to the hubs and ensure that pharmaceutical companies share their manufacturing know-how and refrain from undermining the success of the hubs with intellectual property barriers. As the new Administration is formed under a new Prime Minister, will the Minister, first, now back the coalition’s request that the Government use their influence to encourage Pfizer, Moderna and BioNTech to share their technology and know-how, and urge companies to remove intellectual property barriers to the production of mRNA products and related technologies?”
“It is telling that some of the hospitals that were supported with British development funds refused to treat covid-19 patients in the first wave of the pandemic. Many died, and many were left destitute by this model. It is time for the Government to stop pushing that failed model and start helping to build national health services for all. Let me come to the specific requests for the Government. A coalition of different organisations, which includes Just Treatment, Global Justice Now, Oxfam, STOPAIDS and many others, is calling on the Government to demonstrate support for the World Health Organisation’s mRNA technology hub initiatives. The hubs will help to end the covid-19 pandemic for all by increasing manufacturing capacity for treatments and technologies.”
“We have to change that, and conversations are happening across the world about how to do it—except here, where the Government’s commitment to shareholder return appears sacrosanct and is prioritised above saving lives and reducing human suffering. My warning is this: it is not only ethically obscene; it is bad for us, too. It means that the British taxpayer is getting a terrible return on their investment in new medicines, that the NHS is overpaying for medicines such as covid vaccines, and that we are not developing the medicines we need to prevent the next health epidemic. There are huge healthcare disparities, because many people still lack adequate public, universal healthcare systems. Sadly, however, the UK Government, like the World Bank, is still pushing a deeply inadequate private, market-based healthcare model in many countries.”
“It is not just about covid. I believe that the way we produce medicines is broken. I ask the Minister to talk to Lord Jim O’Neill, who has been trying to get the pharmaceutical corporations to produce the antibiotics that our medical establishment has depended on for many years. He has been trying to engage in a dialogue to change practices within the pharmaceutical industry, but the corporations have done nearly nothing. Look at HIV/AIDs. We now have the means to wipe out HIV through pills that stop transmission. New injectables have just come online. Again, the countries that most need them are being overcharged or shut out of the market altogether. It goes on and on. We have an industry committed to making huge amounts of money, but not to making and sharing the medicines that humanity needs.”
“South Africa has set up an mRNA hub to try to crack this revolutionary technology, which we think can be used not just to prevent severe cases of covid, but potentially to create treatments for a wide range of diseases, such as HIV, malaria and certain types of cancer. The big corporations still refuse to share their know-how, but South Africa has worked out how to make mRNA vaccines and—even better—is sharing this know-how with other countries patent-free. A couple of weeks ago, President Biden’s Administration announced that they would work with the hub to help it. Many European Governments have offered funds, but Britain has done nothing. The Government must support those efforts and protect them from the pressure that will come from the industry. This is a new model of how medicines can be developed, and it deserves our support.”
“The issue that my hon. Friend raises is something that we have raised before. I commend India and South Africa for the work they did in lobbying so hard to try to get international agreement on the TRIPS waiver. We need to learn some lessons from this period, and one of them is that when the Government act unilaterally in this way, they contaminate future relationships—whether they are over trade or other matters of co-operation. I think that is the anxiety that many of us have. It is a disgrace that we actually sought to prevent others from making the drugs that they needed. Many countries around the world are shocked at the way they have been treated by this country, and they want to start to do things differently.”
“The Minister will soon run out of time, so will she address the issue of support for the WHO’s strategy of rolling out hubs? Will the Government think again?”
“These measures will cause animosity and division, but if that is what this Government are all about, I say, “I think you’ve misjudged the public mood when it comes to support for trade unions in this country at the moment.””
“Interestingly, with regard to the fines imposed, not a single example could be quoted of where the existing system was not working. In addition, unions are meticulous in the way they go forward on these matters, but where they are not, the injunction route for the employer has worked effectively. At the airport, we had one problem in the cabin crew dispute where the union was unsure who it was balloting, because halfway through some of the staff had been made redundant. An injunction came in, the union started again, the process was legitimised and the dispute took place, and we resolved the dispute through negotiation.”
“They would not have taken illegal action; it is easy for workers to find a grievance at the airport if they want to. They would have gone through the legal procedures and that airport would have been shut down. Do not tell me that agency staff can fill in for air traffic controllers, firefighters, baggage handlers who have security clearance—it takes months to get that security clearance—immigration officers and others. This is a serious piece of legislation going through tonight, and it will exacerbate industrial relations across the whole of the country. I say to hon. Members from all parts of the House to be careful what they wish for, and to be careful what they legislate for. I am fearful about what this legislation could do. It is not just the public sector that is affected, but the private sector at Heathrow and elsewhere.”
“The assurance given was that, as we became fully operational again, wages would be reinstated. When we became nearly fully operational—at 80%—the company reneged on that commitment for a group of workers. Members can imagine how angry those workers were. They were not asking for a pay rise; they were asking for the 10% cut to be reinstated. That was all. We did the normal thing that we do at the airport: we went into negotiations and we settled the dispute, but there was a threat of industrial action. If that had happened, my whole community would have supported it. If there had been any hint of bringing in agency workers, not only would that dispute not have been settled, it would have been bitter and long-winded. Members should not think that other workers in the airport, not implicated in that dispute, would have stood on their own.”
“These two small pieces of legislation could have the most serious impact of any we will be considering in this Session. BA has been mentioned. That is in my constituency. Let me explain what happened. When we went into the covid crisis, the airport was shut down. Many workers were asked to remain in post to bring in essential supplies and, as we repatriated people back into this country, two of our immigration officers caught covid and died. Others continued to go into work. When hon. Members went out to applaud key workers on the doorsteps, we went out to applaud our workers at the airport who were putting their lives at risk. We negotiated a deal. The union accepted that there would have to be some jobs reduced in the short term and wages reduced to ensure that the company survived. That was the negotiation.”
“It would be very useful if he could write to us specifically about the points raised by the SMEs, so that that can be built into further monitoring of the projects.”
“I do not want to delay the Committee, but the explanatory memorandum states: “Public interest in the Exclusion Order is expected to be minimal. There are two projects under active development and a further 18 strategic water resource schemes are being progressed which may meet DPC eligibility criteria”. We are, therefore, talking about projects being developed at a significant scale. Following on from the question asked by my hon. Friend the Member for Hackney South and Shoreditch about Ofwat and monitoring, do the Government intend to provide the House with regular reports on the schemes? If they are of a significant scale—they may be innovative, but they may also be an unknown quantity—we will want to monitor them more closely. Secondly, on the consultation, the Minister skated over the issue of the SME response.”
“I will try to make this suggestion in as constructive a way as possible. The Minister’s own involvement with the PAC will have demonstrated to him that Ofwat may not be the most effective means by which to monitor projects of this scale. It might well be that the Government will have a direct role to play alongside Ofwat in informing the House on how the new regulations are being implemented.”
“We all have history on this. As a youngster, I was the deputy head of the social insurance department at the National Union of Mineworkers, managing the mineworkers’ pension scheme. As my hon. Friend says, many of the miners are now elderly. They, or their widows, are pensioners. There could be an act of good will by the Government on this matter by their implementing the recommendations of the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee on the mineworkers’ pension scheme. The elderly mineworkers and their widows could then have a greater share of the pension scheme that they funded throughout their lives.”
“In my area, we witnessed the Paddington and Southall crashes. One of my constituents was a driver who lost his life. We were told then about the modernisation of safety inspections and it was the workers who pointed out what risks they caused. We hear today that there will be a 50% cut in the safety inspections of the infrastructure. Does the Secretary of State really think the British public have more confidence in his assessment of safety on the rails than in that of the workers who actually implement the safety inspections? I believe the British public expect the Secretary of State not to come in here ranting to provoke a strike but to behave with the dignity and responsibility of the high office that he holds.”
“The question was raised as to whether the Secretary of State or the Government had met the RMT, and he basically said, “Let the negotiations go”. I cannot recall the exact phrase he used. Mick Lynch, the general secretary of the RMT, has written to him today, “I am writing to seek an urgent meeting with the Government, without any preconditions, to discuss the national rail disputes prior to the planned strike action next week, and I would be grateful if this could be arranged without delay.” Will he respond —[Interruption.] We are trying to resolve this matter. Will he respond immediately to Mick Lynch, positively, that he will meet the union now?”
“Let me clarify one point if I may. There has been reference to RMT donations to individual Members and the declaration of interests. I thought the declaration of interests was annual, but I make it absolutely clear that the RMT contributed to my constituency party during the general election, which I declared properly and of which I am proud. RMT members were the first to move at the TUC that the Labour party should be established; that union is part of our movement. I am proud to be supported by it and I am proud to be part of the RMT parliamentary group. That gives me a relationship with workers in the railway estate in my constituency, which enables me to speak with some authority—I try, anyway—on rail matters. Let me put that to rest: I am proud of the support that it gives to my constituency party.”
“If it is on that, no, because there are more important points to be honest. We need to return the debate to what the dispute is about. I refer to the hon. Member for Bexhill and Battle (Huw Merriman). The union has three demands in the negotiations so I will make three points. The first demand is for no compulsory redundancies—compulsory is the key word. There has never been a time when the RMT has not negotiated job losses, but there has always been a principle that they should not be compulsory. I remember that Bob Crow never lost a dispute, and neither has Mick Lynch, because they are sensible about the nature of the disputes that they get into.”
“Let me press on. The union’s second demand is to get some form of inflation proofing of members’ incomes, and who can blame it when inflation is rising by anything between 7% and 11%? That is what ordinary working people want.”
“That is why today’s letter is important. The hon. Member for Bexhill and Battle is right to say, “Well, it was unconditional”, but it is unconditional from the Government as well. At the moment, it is important to just get everyone through the door. The Government have not put conditions on and neither has the union. The union has not asked for conditions from the Government, and nor should the Government ask for conditions from it. Often, in organising a ballot about industrial action, time limits are in place. At this time, when we are faced with the disruption that is there, an act of good faith such as sitting in the same room is important—it might not work.”
“Let me press on. Let us also be clear about wages in the industry, which are linked. The median wage is £31,000. Drivers are largely represented by ASLEF, so the vast bulk of people who we are talking about are station staff, cleaners and others whose wages range between £20,000 and £30,000. We are not talking about people on very high wages, so inflation proofing is important to them at the moment The third demand is where we have some problems—I understand that. It is that when there are changes in jobs and conditions of work, they should be subject to negotiation and—this is the difficult bit—agreement. We know that this dispute will be settled at some stage, so the issue is how bloody it will get. What we all have to do, as I say on the RMT parliamentary group as well, is to facilitate an exchange that enables a resolution.”
“There is an anxiety about protection of their members against this cost of living crisis, and I have to say that there is an anxiety about protecting themselves against some of the threats that have come from the Government—minimal services, bans on overtime and all the rest—which is inflammatory when we are trying to get a negotiated settlement.”
“Friend the Member for Wansbeck (Ian Lavery), who is here, was an active miner at the time, and I was a member of the NUM head office. What happened then was that there was a Government will to somehow take on the trade union movement, and we got described as the “enemy within”. If anyone thinks it is to their advantage politically to start taking the RMT on as the enemy within in this situation, they are sorely mistaken, because it is not just about the RMT. At every union conference I have been to, there is a real anxiety.”