Orders of the Day — Trade Union Reform and Employment Rights Bill

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 7:45 pm on 17 November 1992.

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Photo of Angela Eagle Angela Eagle , Wallasey 7:45, 17 November 1992

I wish at the outset to declare an interest. I am in the process of becoming sponsored by the Confederation of Health Service Employees, a trade union for which it was my privilege to work for seven years before coming to this House. The modest sums involved in such sponsorship never go into the pocket of the hon. Member concerned.

The Bill is the sixth piece of legislation since 1979 designed to regulate industrial relations. Indeed, we have been in a state of almost permanent legislative revolution of which Chairman Mao would have been proud. While the Government have used the rhetoric of freedom and fairness as justification for their actions, their real agenda has been the systematic destruction of rights at work, coupled with the deliberate weakening of trade unions' ability to resist. Their aim has been to deregulate the labour market and to bring back exploitative cheap labour to these shores. In that aim, they have certainly succeeded.

The Government will tolerate the existence of trade unions so long as they are impotent. They will allow a theoretical right to strike while ensuring that that right is so couched in a plethora of complicated rules and regulations as to render it practically impossible. If the unthinkable should happen and a strike should occur, the Government have sanctioned victimisation by selective dismissal to dispose of the miscreants. They have replaced bargaining in the work place with fear.

There are, in the Government's bizarre view of the world, no bad employers—only evil trade unions which manipulate their members by forcing them to go on strike against their will. Myths about the behaviour of trade unions which live on in Tory demonology have little or no bearing on reality, yet they have provided the Government with scant justification to dash headlong into legislative assault and battery, of which the Bill is another example.

The myth persists on the Government Benches, for example, that trade union leaders force their members, like some sort of conscript army, to go on strike. After seven years of working for COHSE, I assure the House that the truth is exactly the opposite. The Government concluded that, by forcing trade union members to ballot, they would almost destroy industrial action. Even so, 92 per cent. of ballots have resulted in a yes vote.

Even when the shameless Conservatives were unable to justify their next turn of the screw, we found the former Secretary of State for Employment declaring in a press release after his Green Paper had received the thumbs down: Governments must be prepared not only to listen but to lead. Sometimes it is the duty of Government to take action which is in advance of opinion. When we strip away the hypocrisy and doublespeak with which the Conservatives always deploy their argument in such debates, it becomes obvious that their legislative attacks are handsomely rewarded when the money from their paymasters in the City and business floods into Tory party coffers.

That is unregulated compared with the stringent laws governing trade union donations for political purposes. The Government have tightened up on those. Perhaps we would obtain more information about their sordid backroom deals if the Tories published their accounts in a regular and accessible way, as trade unions have done for years, even long before they were obliged to do so.

I invite the House to contrast the Conservative party's over-zealous legal regulation of trade unions with its attitude to fraud in the City, which is clearly a persistent and serious problem. The Cadbury committee, which recently investigated the matter, concluded that the guiding principles should be, first, that self-regulation—