Jacques Delors foresaw the perils of austerity. How we need his wisdom now | Mark Seddon

At the EU he was a lone voice against hyper-globalisation and its rust-belt economics. The era of Brexit and Trump needs his internationalist spirit

" Mark Seddon is a former UN correspondent for Al-Jazeera English, and speechwriter for the UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon

During the darkest days of Thatcher's de-industrialising, high unemployment, beggar-thy-neighbour dystopia of the early 1980s, there was one European leader who offered hope to the beleaguered ranks of industrial workers in the "rust belt" of former mining, steel, engineering, fishing and shipbuilding towns. For the decade from 1985 to 1995, Jacques Delors, as president of the European commission, not only helped fashion the modern-day EU and its single currency, he refined a new and much more purposeful social dimension: a "social chapter" designed to protect the rights of people at work.

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