Orders of the Day — Clause 2. — (Imposition of Standstill After Increase of Prices or Imple- Mentation of Award, but Before Publication of Board's Report.)

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 12:00 am on 10 July 1967.

Alert me about debates like this

Photo of Mr Charles Fletcher-Cooke Mr Charles Fletcher-Cooke , Darwen 12:00, 10 July 1967

It would take a long time to do so. I assure the hon. Gentleman that the effect of the Amendment is to stop the pounce-back. That being so, we shall revert to what is more in consonance with natural justice, namely, that people shall already know what they have or have not to do before, rather than after, they have done it. That is why by the Amendments we wish to remove the power of the pounce-back.

I know that the First Secretary's justification for this is that it would otherwise encourage people to jump the gun, to fail to notify, to do these things—I will not say secretly, but quietly, and that they would then be in a better position than those who have observed the moral obligation, as the right hon. Gentleman puts it, to ask his Department before they do this, because those who observe his request are liable, since it has come to the notice of the right hon. Gentleman, to have the old procedure invoked against them—that is, a specific Order or a general Order under Section 7 or Section 13 of the 1966 Act—whereas those who do not observe his request and who simply do it will be in a better position.

Superficially that is an attractive argument. I will put the counter-argument that it will cause more ructions and dissent than if the right hon. Gentleman had omitted to take this power. I well remember a wise trade unionist, the late Lord Dukeston, who was formerly General Secretary of the General and Municipal Workers Union, telling me that what really provoked strikes and labour disputes of a bitter kind was not so much denying rises in wages as taking away rises that people had already got. That is what causes the great trouble, as it did in 1926, 1931, and at other times. The removal of the enjoyment of wages already granted, rather than the denial of an increase in wages, causes labour disputes.

That is exactly what the "pounce-back" Clause enables the First Secretary to do. A body of workers may well have been enjoying for eight weeks or more a rise in wages. Then, by the operation of the rather complicated machinery in the Clause, the First Secretary issues his direction and specifies a date three months previously. Then the wages must go back, after they have been enjoyed for eight weeks and after various hire purchase and other commitments have been entered into, not merely on the strength of a promise of an increase in wages, but on the strength of wages actually received during that period. I cannot imagine a situation more likely to produce industrial unrest.

I ask the First Secretary to consider whether, in his attempt to achieve a principle of fairness, he will not, by reducing wages that have been enjoyed for two months or more, be producing unrest and trouble that will put the whole of the voluntary system, the whole of the public support for the policy, into such disrepair that the last state will be much worse than the first.

It is for this, among other reasons, that I ask my hon. and right hon. Friends to support these Amendments, because it will produce a better system if we revert to the principle that it is only against those whom Orders have been made, and who know what they have to do, that this machinery should apply, and not by, this retrospective operation, which means that those who may not even know what they are supposed to do, but have, nevertheless, done it, find that they are subsequently hit on the head.