<p>Membership of the European Union</p>

Part of 2. 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 2:25 pm on 21 June 2016.

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Photo of Carwyn Jones Carwyn Jones Labour 2:25, 21 June 2016

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.