Member

The Labour Party’s Green Paper, A New Deal for Working People, endorsed by the Labour Party conference in 2021 and 2022, committed the party to regulation of industrial action law which complied with international law. The situation is that the supervisory bodies of the ILO since 1989 and of the European Social Charter since 1991 have repeatedly found that the UK’s ban on secondary action is in breach of the respective treaties that I have mentioned. The ILO most recently proclaimed this in 2024, in the report from the Committee on Freedom of Association on the P&O Ferries scandal. The European Social Charter body most recently repeated the same conclusion in its cyclical report on the United Kingdom in 2023. In my respectful view, this situation of international law-breaking by the United Kingdom is simply not tolerable for a country that purports to uphold the rule of law. Therefore, I beg to move.