Trade Union Bill — House of Lords, 2016-02-10
Topic: Labor
John Stephen Monks (Labour, Centre-left): My Lords, perhaps I may jump in. The procedure is a little muddled but I think that it makes sense for the general points to be made and for the Minister to reply at the end, provided that she replies to all the points made by my Front Bench colleagues I thank the noble Lord, Lord King, for the trailer for this speech, in which I shall talk about Amendment 68. The reason we have a bit of teamwork going on is that in 1984, when the noble Lord, Lord King, was Secretary of State for Employment, the then Government, under Mrs Thatcher, considered this very issue Opting in was on the agenda, possibly, but they decided to ask the TUC to come up with a transparent scheme to ensure that people have the right to opt out. I call it the King-Murray agreement; Len Murray was the negotiator and I was his assistant and scribe on the job. They reached an agreement on opt-out, of which I have a faded copy from 30-odd years ago. We undertook to remind members about their right to opt out and to give them the procedure whereby they could do it. It was done by an information sheet, as it was called then, and we did it. As I say, that was 32 years ago, and we have never had any complaint in the TUC that this agreement has not been carried out, from members, from government—from either of the two major political parties—or from employers As has been mentioned by my noble friend Lord Collins, unions already have to ballot every 10 years on whether it is legitimate for them to have a political fund at all, and they have done that four times since 1984, most recently in 2014. If we are going to go down the deregulation route of two out for one in, then this is one of the ones that should go out at some stage. However, we are still doing the ballot and we have never lost one. Indeed, as my noble friend Lord Collins said, we have actually put on some extra funds. I am expecting that the Government will say that the King-Murray agreement has not been honoured in full by the unions—I have seen the letter to which reference was made earlier. But the fact is that it has been carried out, and it has been carried out in various ways: by inclusion on the membership form, which more than half the unions do, and by reference on the union website. I dug out a copy of the Unite exemption form that I printed from the website, which makes it extremely clear. Unite, UNISON, USDAW and the GMB—the four largest unions, and 90% of the affiliated trade union membership of the Labour Party—provide it in a very prominent place on their websites, and with references to it in union journals and communications. Thirty-two years on, unions are still carrying out that agreement Have there been any problems? None that I know of, and I have been around all those years, since carrying the bag into the office of the noble Lord, Lord King, for Len Murray. If there are any problems, and we are very ready to listen to those, we will take them up. If any union is not doing what it should be or what the four large unions are already doing, we will take them up on that; we will tell them what is at stake and that they need to get into line My amendment seeks to provide for the drawing up of a code of practice on contracting-out—an updating of the King-Murray agreement, because obviously information sheets are not quite the same thing in the age of digital technology, websites and so on. In that way, much more cheaply, efficiently and effectively, and without any accusations of political partisanship from the Conservative Party, we could sort out any problems there are that the Government know about and we do not. That was the wise course taken by Mrs Thatcher and the noble Lord, Lord King, in 1984. They did not want to hit the Labour Party—and they could easily have done so at that time—or the funding base, but they did take on a particular issue, to which we responded Despite the nice way that the Minister often puts it, I believe that the only possible explanation for this measure, a return to contracting-in, is an attack on Labour Party funding, the impact of which will be measured by the Select Committee. It is also, by the way, an attack on unions not affiliated to the Labour Party, which the noble Lord, Lord Balfe, has been championing, that have developed political funds since 1984 and get caught in this particular cross-fire, and quite unfairly too Contracting in was introduced after the General Strike in 1927, and it poisoned the trade union mind, so much so that the very first thing that the Labour Government of 1945 did was to repeal it and go back to contracting out. I think it was Hartley Shawcross who said, at the other end of the corridor, "We are the masters now"—not a very pleasant thing to say, but that gives some sense of the bitterness that there was around the question of opting in. So I ask the Government to follow the examples of Winston Churchill in the late 1940s, who warned against interfering in the other parties’ funding mechanisms without agreement, and of Mrs Thatcher in the 1980s, to eschew any suggestion of political malice and to show some statesmanship.