Trade Union Bill — House of Commons, 2015-11-10
Topic: Labor
David Henry Rutley (Conservative, Centre-right): It is an honour to speak on Third Reading. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Minister for Skills on his hard work. He has worked tirelessly on this very important Bill, which is vital in terms of accountability and transparency Like many Members of the House, I was fortunate enough last week to meet a delegation from Macclesfield of good, hard-working union members. They are very sincere in their support of their fellow union members. They rightly pointed out that unions do a lot of work to support members and others in the workplace. However, not all union leaders share those motives and some strikes can cause major disruption, so the Bill is important. I stress again that its importance is in terms of accountability and transparency. Who should be fearful of those principles in relation to the practices in the Bill The Bill will ensure that union members have the right to better information about any industrial action a union proposes to take. It ensures that union members have the right to be consulted in another ballot, so that saying yes to action in the winter does not necessarily still mean yes the following summer. The union will have to ask members if they want to opt in to political levies, and then ask them again if they want to be opted in some five years later. These are reasonable proposals and reasonable policies This is a profound and timely shift of power in favour of the public and of the grassroots in the union movement—Conservative democracy and accountability in action once again. We Conservatives have a democratic mandate to introduce the reforms. We are accountable to the electorate for following through on our manifesto commitments. Union leaders must now be held to a higher level of accountability when planning action that could lead to serious disruption to important public services It is only right that ballots for industrial action should need to reach certain thresholds of support among union members, particularly when such action relates to public services. It is right that the fear of intimidation at the picket line should be removed, which will protect the public and their services from any excessive zeal by an unrepresentative minority within the union movement. If such people are not unrepresentative, why do they fear the threshold? This is about accountability to union members and to the British public Of course, the hard left has always had a foothold in the Labour party, and now it has the whip hand. That far-left whip hand, Labour’s new leadership, has been busy building up momentum behind its agenda. That is Momentum with a capital M by the way: Momentum for real change—on the Labour Benches, that is—is a movement inspired by militant trade unionists who want to do to the country what they now have the momentum to do in the Labour party I talked earlier about how the shadow Chancellor wants to encourage more militant approaches and no doubt wants to inspire militant trade unionism. Conservative Members have been hearing that, and we have to finish the job of trade union reform that we started in the 1980s and carried on in the 1990s because there are leading Labour Members who saw the industrial strife of the 1970s and 1980s as a dry run for where they want to go next. They will not protect the regular members of trade unions and the public, but Conservative Members will, and that is why I support the Bill.