7. Will the First Minister make a statement on the protection given to Welsh workers as a result of our EU membership? OAQ(5)0070(FM)

Since the mid-1970s, the EU has played an important role in protecting working people. Every worker is protected by a range of rights relating to health and safety at work, equal opportunities for men and women, protection against discrimination and, of course, the harmonisation of working conditions across Europe, so that one country doesn’t have an advantage over another simply because its health and safety practices are inferior.

First Minister, in 1975, we joined the EU. In 1977, the EU issued a directive to protect workers transferring from one undertaking to another, which, in 1981, became the Transfer of Undertakings (Protection of Employment) Regulations 1981, which have given protection to hundreds of thousands of Welsh workers over those several decades. In fact, when it turned out a Tory Government didn’t properly implement that directive, Unison, the public sector union, was able to go to the European Court of Justice and actually get an order to give that proper protection to those hundreds of thousands of workers. When it comes to protecting workers’ rights, who would you trust most: the European Union, Michael Gove, Nigel Farage or Boris Johnson? [Laughter.]

Not the last three, if I can say that. These people are of a tradition that demands that there should be greater flexibility, as they see it, in the labour market, which means that it’s easier to sack people, casualisation, zero-hours contracts. So, no, I don’t share any kind of faith that they will be there to protect workers’ rights. We know, particularly from the economists who support the ‘leave’ campaign, that they see the future of the UK as one where there are almost no rights for working people, where issues such as health and safety are not regarded with the same concern as they are now, and where environmental regulations are mainly discarded. So, we go back to the days in the 1980s when Britain, environmentally, was heavily degraded. That’s not the future that we want. We want to make sure that we have an environment—a working environment and a physical environment—that people want to enjoy and respect.

First Minister, who do you believe contributed more to the protection of workers in the UK? Was it the trade union and Labour movements, or was it the EU? And is your Government’s commitment to remaining in the EU an admission that Labour is unlikely ever to form a Government in the UK again?

Well, I’m a head of Government here, so no, I fully accept that we can form a Government here in Wales and, indeed, in the UK. But, the question is not an either/or, is it, because the trade unions have been working with their colleagues across the rest of Europe to ensure that there are common standards of working rights across all European countries. And that’s the way it absolutely should be, because that means there’s protection for workers across the EU, it means that one country doesn’t have an advantage over another because it has lower standards of health and safety, and that must be, surely, in everybody’s interests. I do not trust the inheritors of Margaret Thatcher to actually protect workers’ rights, if I’m quite honest. At the end of the day, people should ask themselves whose side were these people on in the miners’ strike—the wrong side. Those of us who saw the destruction of a Conservative Government of our communities in Wales, that’s what brought many of us into politics: to make sure that kind of economic vandalism never happened again.