Inducement of, or Threat to Induce, Breach of Contract

Part of Orders of the Day — Industrial Relations Bill – in the House of Commons at 12:00 am on 16 February 1971.

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Photo of Mr Geoffrey Howe Mr Geoffrey Howe , Reigate 12:00, 16 February 1971

The hon. Gentleman has raised that point before. It would be difficult to see how that could amount to inducing in that kind of way.

I come to the more general point underlying the Clause. There is no question of any censorship being imposed on the Press by this or any other provision of the Bill. The Press and the other media operate, as they have done in many other ways, subject to the ordinary law of the land, and part of the law of the land is that they should have regard to the rights of other people. As my hon. Friend the Member for Rutland and Stamford (Mr. Kenneth Lewis), said, people commenting in such public media take care not to commit slander or libel. They take care, for example, not to induce breaches of commercial contracts, quite aside from contracts of employment. If anyone in the Press were to seek to induce people to break commercial contracts in this way, he would be liable. Those concerned have a remedy within civil law and people in the Press have to avoid infringing a whole range of civil rights.

Our modest objective here is that an employer or society is entitled by and large to regard contracts, including contracts of employment, as intended to be honoured to the extent that both sides should give due notice of their intention to determine, that the right to have a contract honoured in that way is a right which should not be interfered with to the extent to which it has been interfered with under existing legislation, and that the protection from such interference is protection to which the nation or the party whose contract is being broken is entitled against anyone who seeks to interfere with it. It is a simple proposition, and we go beyond it and say that if the person who seeks to interfere with a contract of employment is a trade union or an official acting within the scope of his authority, he may induce people to break that contract.