Lord Dykes
Main Page: Lord Dykes (Crossbench - Life peer)
Lord Dykes (Non-Afl)
My Lords, it is a great privilege to follow the noble Lord, Lord Morris of Handsworth, with all his knowledge and experience, and his reputation for being a sensible and moderate trade union leader over the years. Other senior trade union people are represented in this debate, mostly Peers on the other side, who have contributed some excellent thoughts to the debate.
I want briefly to add my thanks to those of others for the maiden speeches of the noble Lord, Lord Livermore, and the noble Baroness, Lady Primarolo. They have shown their capacity and skills in different ways, with the noble Lord, Lord Livermore, as a much newer Member of this Parliament. I was scandalised on his behalf by his example of the recruitment agent being so discouraging. That was only a few years ago; engagingly, the noble Lord is still extremely young. Many decades ago it would have been a different but still quite shocking story. I am glad he retold it to the House. The noble Baroness, Lady Primarolo, showed her enormous experience over the years, not only in a ministerial capacity but as an excellent and successful Member of Parliament and, of course, in the Speaker’s Chair in the other place. It is important to hear again the excellent remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Monks, and I thank the noble Lord, Lord Mendelsohn, for his speech, particularly when he strikingly reminded us that he was a successful businessman and therefore may be inclined, in the lore and practice of the tabloids nowadays, to be automatically anti-union. Not a bit of it, and we are grateful to him for his contribution.
I was glad that I had a chance to take part in the excellent debate on trade unions launched by the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes of Cumnock, on 19 November last. We reminded the House that the present Government were proposing draconian new restrictions on the right to strike in Britain, a right enshrined in our deep democratic traditions since the turn of the 19th century. Controversial restrictive ratios were to be imposed on unions to secure what could be called a “proper strike ballot result”, which is a total distortion of what legislation should do.
I had to emphasise then, as did others in the debate, that these reactionary new proposals are included in the Bill now before us, presented by an Administration with some 37% of those voting in the last general election supporting it, or around 24% of the total electorate. I can think of no worse source of advice on ratios and percentages for election procedures in whatever bodies, and indeed in national elections. There is a great lack of justification in this recent list of some rather dodgy “manifestoitis” Bills, but this piece of legislation shows sheer brutality in the parliamentary context of the need for moderate politics. I do not recall a Government in any EU country introducing such a restrictive package as this on what is a flimsy and inadequate basis of support. In fact, they could not do it because, unlike us, they are lucky enough to have the benefit of written constitutions and a constitutional court system that keeps any Government on the virtuous path of not abusing legislation in the manner of our unreliable three-line whipping system in the other place, which carries a Bill through without proper discussion. Other countries require coalitions, usually under PR voting systems, if a party has the support of fewer than 50% of those voting, with the main exception being France, where I also live. It is the only other country with a simple majority system, but at least there is a 50% requirement for round one, which provides some mitigation, although not much, between the total number of seats and the genuine percentage of the public voting.
The right to strike and to protest are fundamental in any truly democratic society. We can hardly say that there have been too many strikes in Britain in recent years—quite the contrary. In Germany, the Chancellor of even the Christian Democrats would routinely address the annual conference of the equivalent of the TUC, which is virtually unthinkable in this country because of the gaps, divisions and, indeed, hatreds fostered by thoughtless people in various political organisms. I agree with the moderate and sensible TUC leadership when it asserts that this wretched Bill also ignores international standards. That is a very worrying factor.
We are in a society where modern welfare capitalism, which we were used to yesteryear, has receded more and more against the onslaught of relentless US-style brutal capitalist behaviour, scarring our formerly green and pleasant land where the only things that matter are the chief executive’s remuneration and shareholder profits. We need to restore the balance between the different legitimate sections of modern society, and to restore a harmonious link between the very large number of decent business employers and trade unions.
The Bill will allow employers to bring in agency workers to break strikes. That is such a provocative proposal as to alienate broad sections of moderate opinion on these matters. A wartime emergency might possibly justify such a controversial move, but surely not in normal times when social peace is a natural priority. The wholly illegitimate new threshold figures for strike action will make it far more difficult for ordinary workers to ensure that they are protected by a framework that allows normal organisational activity to protect their jobs, aspirations and the quality of their daily working lives. I have been told on good authority that when ILO senior officials in Geneva were notified of these plans, they reacted with surprise to say the least, and they are normally very guarded in their comments.
The Government have blandly ignored the idea of voters abstaining in a general election as being like a no vote, but say exactly that in the case of abstainers in a strike vote in the Bill. The Bill is also much harsher on public sector workers based on some flimsy arguments. That affects women more since the proportion of women in the public sector is much higher. I cannot understand the intrinsic vindictiveness in these proposals, apart from the woeful reminder they provide of the hatred that the supporters of a certain Prime Minister in the past felt towards union members, described in one of the worst phrases in the history of British politics as “the enemy within”. Nowadays we see very little disruption through industrial action, so harsh has daily working life for millions of people become. People fear losing their jobs in case they cannot get another one. In the days when Harold Macmillan was Prime Minister, unemployment fell to 180,000, which is like saying there was no unemployment at all. The number of days lost has fallen very strikingly and is, I believe, some 10% of the total of lost days in the 1980s.
Why are the present Government so reluctant to modernise union and employer procedures by encouraging electronic and workplace ballots? Companies and other entities use them, and even the Tories used electronic balloting for elections, as has been pointed out by other speakers.
There are many other aspects of this very questionable Bill which we will need to examine in Committee line by line, and perhaps some of it through a Select Committee procedure, as has been suggested by the noble Lord, Lord Tyler. We need that even more because consideration of the Bill in the other place was woefully inadequate. For example, there are some onerous new requirements for supplementary information to avoid legal challenges by employers, which would perhaps have the effect of prolonging disputes unnecessarily, thus increasing the danger of a hardening of attitudes. Clause 8 will need meticulous inspection, while the danger of Clause 9 is that unfair extra burdens will be put on the police, thus increasing tension between them and union representatives. ACAS, too, is apparently worried—I am only guessing, but that is the hint which has been dropped—that the positive side of workplace consultation good practice, which often helps to lower the temperature, will be upset by the new unfair imbalances in relations between employer and employee.
We need to look very carefully in Committee at the planned upset in check-off arrangements, which are often very helpful to employees. The Minister in charge of this is a very moderate and highly respected individual, capable of moderate thinking even about this dangerous Bill. The Government need to think again about many sorry aspects in this sad and reactionary measure. It surprises me that it is being introduced. It harks back to the days of right-wing warfare on the unions. We need a more modern approach, consensus and co-operation, as there is in Germany and other countries. Do the Prime Minister and his ministerial colleagues have the imagination to make the really big changes that will allow this Bill to go through? I hope so.