This launch could be subtitled - ‘swimming against the tide’ - that is, trade unions swimming against the fashionable flow of liberalisation, deregulation and of market driven solutions to problems.

As you know, swimming against the tide can be tiring and even dangerous but that is what unions are having to do day in, day out at the moment - even in the European Union where the social model has been a central piece of the construction of the Union.

It is a point of intense disappointment that the UK Government has appointed itself as the high priest of liberalisation with the result that trade unionists have been in despair, as our Government has appeared systematically to oppose every recent positive European initiative in the social field.

The Government fought to the last ditch to resist the Information and Consultation Directive only acquiescing when a clear majority of other member states was about to prevail.

The Government has orchestrated a blocking minority of member states in order to deny proper protections to some of the most vulnerable members of the workforce who work through agency arrangements. Migrant workers, many of whom are employed on that basis, will be amongst those who remain acutely at risk of exploitation until that protection is introduced.

A lobbying effort of remarkable intensity has been mounted to seek to keep the individual opt-out from the safeguards provided by the Working Time Directive and weaken its protections, despite the powerful evidence that any such framework exposing individual workers to employer pressure is inevitably going to lead to abuse.

And now the Government’s intention to render the Charter of Fundamental Rights as having little more than declaratory status with no practical capacity to support and strengthen workers’ rights is carefully explained to a CBI audience, with the additional explanation that ‘the interests of business have been put at the heart of (the Government’s) negotiating position on the EU Constitutional Treaty’.

Meanwhile those trade union leaders who have been seeking to encourage active member interest and participation in the forthcoming European elections face the ground cut-away from underneath them as the social dimension of the European Union, on which so much trade union support has been based, appears to be under attack from our own Government.

The trade union Movement - and I am convinced the peoples of Europe - will only back a constitution that nurtures the European Social Model, balancing the dynamism of free markets with protection for people at work, consumers and the environment from the destructive forces that unregulated capitalism can unleash. We need to strive to create a people’s Europe that is more than a business arrangement to suit boardrooms.

The next battle is on the proposed services directive which aims to provide an overall legal framework for the free movement of services within Europe’s single market.

We want to see the single market improved but not at the expense of sustainable development, better jobs and greater social cohesion.

Opening up European service markets to free movement must be accompanied by adequate protection of employment and labour standards and renewed commitment to the European coordination of national social security and pension systems. This is essential to ensure that workers affected by the single market are protected and that the free movement of services does not generate social dumping.