A FORMER Greek finance minister who was forced out amid the bailout negotiations will speak at a conference in the city this weekend.

Yanis Varoufakis will take the stage at a public meeting organised by the Public and Commercial Services (PCS) union at the Trades Union Congress (TUC) annual conference in Brighton on Sunday.

Mr Varoufakis, who is known for his casual dress sense and love of motorbikes, played a central role in the negotiations between the recently elected Greek government and its European creditors and has been a leading voice against the politics and economics of austerity.

He will be joined on the platform by John McDonnell, Jeremy Corbyn's Labour leadership campaign manager, PCS general secretary Mark Serwotka and Green MP for Brighton Pavilion Caroline Lucas.

Mr Serwotka said: "We are absolutely delighted to be welcoming Yanis Varoufakis to the TUC.

“He is an outstanding economist and has been at the forefront of challenging the necessity for and the politics of austerity, not only in Greece but across Europe.

"The election of a majority Tory government makes it essential that we step up the fight for the alternative to austerity and economically damaging cuts to living standards being imposed on workers, and sick, disabled and unemployed people."

Varoufakis was forced to resign as Finance Minister in July, the day following the no vote in the bailout referendum.

Before the vote, he had declared he would resign if Greeks voted yes.

In an interview, he said: "I’m not going to betray my own view, that I honed back in 2010, that this country must stop extending and pretending.

“We must stop taking on new loans pretending that we’ve solved the problem, when we haven’t, when we have made our debt even less sustainable on condition of further austerity that even further shrinks the economy and shifts the burden further onto the have nots, creating a humanitarian crisis.

“It’s something I’m not going to accept. I’m not going to be party to."

At the TUC conference, the union will be raising the need to step up opposition to austerity; for co-ordinated industrial action over pay and for proportional representation in our electoral system.

The free-to-attend meeting is at 8pm in the Brighton Dome Corn Exchange in Church Street.