President, members of the CIA, fellow guests, ladies and gentlemen.

It’s nice to be here, along with some good trade union friends and colleagues. It’s nice to see them looking very much at home in these lavish surroundings, wearing our “away” kit.

This is quite an attendance. I have been on smaller demonstrations. In fact, I have been on smaller demonstrations when the organisers have claimed there were 100,000 present.

It’s been quite a change moving from the TUC to the European TUC.

Unlike the Beckhams, a transfer to Europe means a lower profile at home than abroad.

When I come back to London, I occasionally get people coming up and saying “didn’t you used to be John Monks?” Or more worryingly “didn’t you used to be John Edmonds?”

Last time I was in this hotel at the Professional Footballers Dinner earlier this year, the star comedian said “What a wonderful hotel. The towels are so thick and fluffy, I could hardly shut my case!”

Now I’m not encouraging larceny but one thing about being General Secretary of the TUC before and now of the ETUC is that you get plenty of variety - from those raucous workplace meetings to places like this, to meetings in Downing St. or say the Elysée in Paris with the French President;

; from the backstreets of multi-ethnic Oldham to the White House and to lunch with the Queen at Buckingham Palace.

I have to confess that this last one was not an unalloyed success. Along with a small group of fellow guests, including Richard Branson, I remember, I was rounded up after the dessert to take coffee with the Queen. We were standing in a group and all was going well until one of the Queen’s corgis took a romantic interest in my left shin and clamped itself to my leg.

What do you do? Swing your left leg like Jonny Wilkinson in the direction of the french windows?

Or stand stoically like a Guards sentry trying to take no notice of what’s going on, four feet below.

Or do you give the dog’s owner a sharp piece of your mind and say I will send you the dry cleaning bill tomorrow morning.

In the event, I opted to give the leg a vigorous shake - vigorous enough to provoke a yelp from the dog - and a sharp glance from the Queen. She was not amused.

Strangely, I never got another invitation.

I see your speaker last year was Olivia Judson, authoress of Dr Tatiana’s “Sex Advice to All Creation”. Well that story of the Queen’s corgi is all you are getting from me on sex tonight!

When accepting invitations to speak, you never quite know what you are to expect.

Take one of my former TUC colleagues. For four hours he journeyed up to a trade union event in a northern town to find an audience of 3, including the Chairman and Secretary! This was in a hall which accommodates 500.

He unwisely said to the chairman “Why are there so few people here? Didn’t you tell them I was coming?”

The Chairman replied “I didn’t but I’ll find out who did”.

Or take an uncle of mine. He was a freelance journalist who covered municipal affairs in the north of England sending in pieces to the Yorkshire Post, Liverpool Daily Post and Echo, the Manchester Guardian and so on.

One night, he was covering a council meeting in Pudsey when the Labour Council leader got up and moved that a new chandelier be purchased for the council chamber. The present one he said was a blot on the civic pride of Pudsey and he moved a budget of £1000 for a new one.

The Conservative opposition leader leapt up and said “another example of Labour wasting the tax payers money, I move an amendment - no more than £500 should be spent.”

In the chair was the mayor of Pudsey, who was a Co-op milkman. He leaned forward and said “ £1000 or £500 - I don’t give a bugger. But when we get it to Pudsey have we got any one here who can play it?”

It was a neighbouring mayor who gave a 20 minute speech when proposing the loyal toast. Afterwards, he was instructed by the Town Clerk on future occasions to keep it brief and simple. Next time, he said “The Queen - the less said about her, the better”.

I have a long, if indirect, connection with the industry. I grew up in Blackley, north Manchester close by the ICI dyestuffs works, then the area’s biggest employer.

In those days the river ran the colour of the dye that was being made that shift. The high water mark in the culvert was a bright green line I remember. It was only later that the children of Blackley discovered that not all rivers ran in technicolor.

In my childhood I sensed two things - the industry was very important; and it was not the healthiest place to be. I subsequently learned that wages were good but lives were short. This was a difficult industry - doing essential work but at a high cost.

And while there’s been huge progress since then in health and safety, cleaning up rivers, pollution control and the rest, this is still a difficult industry - still essential but still with risks and controversies.

Take the plans of the European Commission for a new system of Regulation. Authorisation and Evaluation of Chemicals, the REACH plan. “Poisonous” is the word which one European Commission official uses to describe the atmosphere that has developed between governments, companies and greens over this plan.

Initially there were hopes that REACH would usher in a new chapter of co-operation but so far these were dashed. I am a member of the new high level group along with Jürgen Strube, formerly the boss of BASF, which will meet to try to promote a wider measure of agreement. That is going to be hard.

It has not been made easier by the fact that some industry representatives, although conspicuously not the CIA, stand accused of opening the debate by grossly exaggerating the threat to profitability and jobs.

Environmentalists, on the other hand, are being charged with having unrealistic expectations that there can be a quick fix.

Yet we know that there are around 100,000 chemical substances in use about whose toxicity we know little.

We also know that the system for testing new substances is slow and bureaucratic.

And it is clear that, contrary to the nationalists and eurosceptics, this is an international problem clearly needing attention at the European and world levels. And because there is no effective system at the world level, then Europe was always going to take the lead.

This US Government, with its careless views on Kyoto and its denial of the science on global warming, was certainly never going to do so.

I have some big divisions in Europe’s unions. Unions in the chemical sector are rightly worried about the impact on jobs of REACH, especially since the CIA’s counterpart in Germany, claimed more than 2 million jobs were at risk.

But others, especially in engineering, are saying we want to know more about what our members are working with. What is in these compounds? What are the risks involved?

So in 2001, the European Commission called for the registration of basic information on about 30,000 substances, the evaluation of substances exceeding a production volume of 100 tonnes, and the authorisation of specific substances believed to be carcinogenic, mutagenic or toxic to reproduction, and also persistent organic pollutants. REACH would also switch responsibility for testing and assessing risk from the authorities to the industry.

Under intense lobbying pressure, these have now been scaled down and the estimated costs to the industry reduced from over 12 bn euros over 11 years to just over 2 bn euros.

But the controversies rage on - and the number of calm voices is small. I pay tribute to the CIA for being one of those calm voices and they get a better hearing than the noisier, wilder lobbies which are around.

In particular, I am pleased to see that the CIA has been ready with Greenpeace and others to develop common ground on the authorisation procedure. This has produced excellent results so far and I hope that it will continue. It has taken bold leadership by the CIA to make this progress so congratulations on achieving what was not an easy task.

“Well, keep it light” said Simon Marsh of the CIA when he asked me to give this address.

There are not a lot of jokes in the REACH debate. It is life and death from a number of perspectives if we get it wrong -literally as well as in jobs and competitiveness.

But it is important that this industry does not go into denial about the real problems that there are, that it does not throw its hands in the air, give up on Europe and say we will emigrate our new investments to the less regulated parts of the world where there is little or no concern for the environment.

We need too, to develop the mindset that there are big business opportunities in clean technology.

I was surprised to discover recently that Denmark, for example, now earns more from its exports of environmental technology, like windmills for power generation, than from agricultural exports. The main company concerned, Vesta, has grown to 6,500 employees. Germany has an environmental technology sector several times larger than the UK - and to be fair to the USA, so does California, although there is no thanks in that to the present Administration.

We should not always, Digby Jones style, moan about every regulation as a new layer of the red tape, stifling enterprise.

No doubt there is plenty of poor regulation and let us get it better.

But does anyone seriously believe that the environmental and health and safety improvements we have seen since I grew up next to the dyestuffs works would have happened without some tough regulation?

So my theme is a serious one to a serious organisation - and one which I have appreciated and respected over many years.

Of all the UK’s industries, this is the sector where trade unions are the best organised, have the greatest proportion of employees in unions, where generally, industrial relations are excellent, and there’s much constructive joint work.

As an industry, you have not been afraid of what in the EU we term social partnership - that is working together on common problems. Most British employers are much less comfortable with the concept, taking the view that the less they have to do with unions the better. It is disappointing to me that the CBI are not more enthusiastic for social partnership than they are.

The CIA has not been afraid to recognise the essential value of the European Union - and to say so publicly at a time when too many employers are keeping their mouths shut.

Make no mistake. There is a growing question mark about Britain’s participation in the European Union. The rise of eurosceptism, the uncertainty of the Government on big issues like the euro and the EU constitution, and the lack of a clear business lead on Europe at the moment, are all factors in this rise.

UKIP and the eurosceptics in the Conservative Party - the dominant sect in that formerly great party by the way - are having an easy ride. The Conservative Party have elevated the concerns about the fishing industry which is a tiny part of our economy, compared to chemicals, to a test of whether we can stay in. It’s ridiculous.

The constitution does not make big changes. It’s modest and practical. It even stresses sustainable development and the importance of scientific advance - very much the agenda of the chemical industry. I wish it had pushed further towards more common action. But the fact that it is rather limited is seen everywhere else in Europe as a victory for UK foreign policy. Only here in our island can it be misconstrued as a further threat to a 1000 years of independence - and not just by the likes of Kilroy-Silk, Joan Collins and Rupert Murdoch, at least 2 of which spend a lot more of their time living outside the UK rather than in it.

I acknowledge that British public opinion is predominantly hostile but I doubt that many realise what is at stake. People may not like the Constitution but nor do they want to leave the EU and they do not recognise that it may come to that.

A friend of mine got in a taxi recently and gave his destination as the European Commission’s office in Westminster. He was treated to a tirade about the evils of the EU and how it was bleeding the UK to death. As my friend was paying the fare, he said to the driver - “with views like yours, why don’t you emigrate?” The driver replied - “too right, next month, the wife and I are going to live in Spain” - what is where I believe Mr. Kilroy Silk gets his tan.

That is typical of the level of prejudice and ignorance that’s around.

And if the EU Constitution is not endorsed in a British referendum which the current Government is committed to hold, or if a Conservative Government repudiated the Constitution as it says it would, then what is the future for us?

In my view, it would become impossible for the EU to contain us.

Yet where’s the voice of British business in this debate? Where are the CBI? Are they speaking up for Britain in Europe? At the moment, they are on touchline, sometimes sounding more like that taxi driver than a constructive force for good.

Britain needs Europe and vice versa. And we need a business community that is not afraid to say so, powerfully and regularly. The chemical industry, where that need is acutely felt, is well placed to lead the business argument.

For example, REACH will apply to you whether Britain are in or out. But if we are out, no-one in Brussels will do more than listen to the UK’s interest. If we are lucky, they will listen politely. If not, they will just listen.

And what is true for REACH is true for a thousand other things - on the rules of the single market, on trade, on competition, on social policies and many other issues vital to this country’s success. British business would be uniquely short sighted if it allowed the nationalists and the nostalgics, the isolationalists and the media tycoons to dictate the European agenda for much longer. An agenda of Back to the Future is a step towards irrelevance. The chemical industry knows it and I hope the CBI will wake up and show that it knows it too.

The EU is a single market of over 400 million people in a small corner of the world; the world’s most advanced region in terms of social welfare, sustainable development and civic standards. To borrow Neil Kinnock’s phrase “What was the world’s 20th century’s bloodiest continent is now its most peaceful garden”.

Turn our back on that? Never. The CIA does not do that. I am impressed by its energy and calmness, by its professionalism and knowledge, by its relationships and diplomacy. I see them regularly on display in Brussels on your behalf where Judith Hackett is indefatigable, busy and adroit.

May you all long continue to wield influence - and may you all find the right path to sustainable development as well of course as sustainable prosperity.

Thank you.