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.