Does anyone here like Bob Crow (RMT leader)?

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As title.

I think he's an overpaid thug that disgustingly luxuriates in a council house whilst on £130,000/year and a ludicrous is relic of the 1970s. But he is right on the EU.

Anyone else?

mixed opinions.

Apparently he recently made a gaffe that Britain should pull out of the EU to prevent British jobs 'going to foreigners'.

If thats true, i would have thought you and him would be natural allies.

FYI. there is no bigger industrial thug than a umbiquitous company running roughshod over an un-unionised staff.

He is also an anti-nationalist.

But on the EU: he's right. We literally cannot discriminate against UK jobs going to a Latvian or a Hungarian, but many of the other EU countries do not take the same approach to denying jobs to other EU nationals that we do (in many EU countries, they will tell you that they won't employ you because you're foreign and their jobs are going to their own nationals). At a time of considerable youth unemployment against our own people, the EU policy is an insanity.

In essence, what the UK is doing is consciously making its own unemployment problem worse for its own people by leaving it open to competition to most of Europe.

Immigration in respect to jobs is a good thing in a time when there are plenty of jobs that need filling, or in circumstances where those skills cannot be found in the UK, though I would suggest also that work permits would be a better solution to most. We have to uncouple the ability to go and work somewhere for a specified period of time and the right to live somewhere.

Immigration is a bad thing in a midst of an economic depression, when there are not the jobs there even for the locals (for several reasons), or when the jobs can easily be fulfilled by locals.

It's as simple as that, really.

The EU open door immigration policy benefits the rich and it benefits large employers. It does not benefit the ordinary working man in this country and it leaves many people on welfare that don't need it.

The anti-EEC/EU view used to be extremely common on the left, especially in the 1970s and 1980s in the UK. I cannot understand why it is not more so - there are several left-wing anti-EU parties out there and there are plenty of left-wing anti-EU types out there (some of whom vote UKIP). The Socialist Party in the Netherlands, the former NO2EU in the UK, elements of the Socialist People's Party in Denmark, True Finns in Finland (yes, they're a conservative nationalist party, but they're also pretty left-wing economically), the Maltese Labour Party (although it's taken a much more pro-EU line since membership, it campaigned against joining the EU and there are still lots of anti-EU people involved with the party). The Left Party in Sweden was against EU accession and still campaigns for Sweden to leave the EU. In Norway (which isn't in the EU), the Socialist Left Party also was against EU membership in the 1990s.

The constituent parties of No2EU had no prior track record of anti-EU activism which made it difficult to tell whether they had seen the light about the EU or they were just bluffing about the EU as a springboard to getting the far left elected.

I come from a political background so I am aware of this. My mother thinks that Neil Kinnock was responsible for turning the Labour party pro-EU to appease the public following their disastrous election result in 1983 when the Conservatives had a poster highlighting Labour policies which were identical to those in the Communist party, including opposition to the EU.

It baffles me why the anti-EU view is so weak amongst the left nowadays. In the late 1990s and early 21st century it was understandable that opposition to the EU mostly came from those traditionally in the Tory fold because they were the people who were most clued up about the EU. The lower classes weren't and largely viewed the EU as an abstract and minor issue rather than the powerful monster that it really is. Nowadays information about the EU and its horrors are common knowledge.

Does his mum like him?

I think if you vote on a strike, and you don't get a majority, and you still strike you are a s**t unionist.

You know who doesn't want to strike? Grafters, especially migrant workers.,

Not true. The Liberal Party has always been anti-EU and has campaigned against the EU, for a start. In fact, I did actually wonder why the Liberal Party actually joined NO2EU as they're completely out of step with all the other parties in the coalition as, on the face of it, they seem centre-left rather than far-left, though I note that they support Stop the War Coalition.

Upto 4 years ago the Lib Dems wanted to join the Euro Grauniad link

According to Wikipedia William Gladstone, who was Liberal Prime Minister (1868–74, 1880–85, 1886, and 1892–94)

The Liberal party has been Eurosceptic for some time but only in the past few years has it committed to withdrawal from the EU - hence the term track record that I used. I agree with you that it was out of step with the other parties in No2EU and I was surprised to find it had entered this coalition.

Something I have also picked up on is that there extremely few Muslims in the No2EU far left component groups. After factoring out Respect which is a recent development held together by one person, the Muslim left alliance virtually ceases to exist outside of the Labour party.