Trade Union Bill — House of Lords, 2016-01-11
Topic: Labor
David Edward Lea (Labour, Centre-left): My Lords, I hope I will not go too far down memory lane, but I would like to make a point of contrast between what we are discussing here and what we have often discussed in the trade union movement, which is about taking a more constructive position on the new world economy. Some months ago, some of us carried out an exercise with the TUC and UK members of European works councils with trade union and employer members. Frances O’Grady, Chuka Umunna and my noble friend Lord Monks were there, along with representatives of big companies, employers and workers, discussing investment, skills et cetera. It occurred to me during the course of the afternoon, listening to the various contributions, to ask how what we have been trying to do in that sense squares with the positions of the ideological fundamentalists of Conservative Central Office at present. How do those two things square? They do not. I will give another example. We have growing inequality, which, as you can see around the OECD, correlates with less collective bargaining. Growing inequality is the opposite of what we want, so do we need more collective bargaining? Yes or no? The answer is yes, but does the Minister think the answer is yes? If we have this correlation between growing inequality and less collective bargaining, it would not be a bad idea to think it has something to do with organising and having this constructive relationship I suspect that the reason these things do not add up together is that there is some type of schizophrenia inside the Conservative Party—the same schizophrenia that I think we have with the "pull up the drawbridge" position on the European question. How can we remove this sort of misunderstanding, which I think is part of our mutual problem? Some speakers opposite have tried to imply that it is we and the trade unions who have walked away from social partnership, social dialogue or whatever you like to call it, but there is no evidence for that at all. It is the Conservative Party which has recently backed itself into a silo—today’s fashionable word Let me just remind the House of one little bit of history. In 1998 we arranged, for the first time ever, a meeting at the TUC with the leaders of the Conservative Party. William Hague led the team, and George Osborne was there. A number of colleagues who are here this evening were on the trade union side—my noble friends Lord Morris, Lady Donaghy, Lady Drake and Lord Monks, as I recall. Although it was partly subliminal, the message was a very important one: we were saying that we accept your legitimacy, as the Conservative Party, as part of the body politic in this country and that you should acknowledge ours. I am not quite sure that we are now seen as legitimate. We are perhaps in a better state than we were 100 years ago in our relationship—it has been a long journey since the Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists—but where are we now? Does the Conservative Party really want to go down the track of trying to delegitimise us by setting up a caricature of trade unionism? The caricature has us as An Enemy of the People—I am referring there to a play by Ibsen, in case anyone thought I was quoting Mao Tse-Tung How does that fit with all the rhetoric about the need to work together to increase our world market share? Answer: it does not. Some Members seem to want to conjure up an idea that we are so lacking in intelligence that we do not understand that public services are part of our living standards, and that people do not realise that when there is a strike in the public sector.