John Cooper

I rise as a former member of a trade union, and the harsh lessons I learned then are what concern me about this Bill. As a low-paid journalist on a local paper, I had hoped that the union would go in to bat for me. Instead, it was more interested in Cuban socialism and collective bargaining, more concerned about traducing Mrs Thatcher’s legacy than the tribulations of a junior reporter, more interested in funding the Labour party than supporting me and my newsroom colleagues. That is why I am backing amendments such as amendment 292, which seeks to defuse what has been called a subscription trap, where inertia is used to allow political donations taken from members to tick up year in, year out. Is this the clean money of which the hon. Member for Coventry South (Zarah Sultana) spoke? In the Business and Trade Committee we have heard that good relations are possible between employers and trade unions. Of course they are—not all union reps are agitators, any more than all bosses are grasping exploiters of the workers. But stripping out existing protections, as this Bill does, risks tilting the law too far in favour of the unions, making strikes more frequent and more damaging thanks to, for example, lower notice periods. We know that the unions are already restive; just ask the Secretary of State for Scotland, unable to attend an event with, ironically, the Scottish Confederation of British Industry in his own office because he would not cross a picket line, and he has had to cancel at least one other event as the pickets strike on. If a Cabinet Minister is already at the unions’ mercy, what chance do the general public have? We have heard about positive trade union benefits, but it is not all sunlit uplands. One rail union refuses to let bosses use email for rotas, insisting on fax machines— I imagine I am one of the few Members who remembers those. Another left passengers inconvenienced when it ordered members not to use a footbridge as it had a skim of snow on it no thicker than the icing on a cake. They must be licking their lips at clauses that remove previous thresholds for strike action such as the 50% turnout requirement and the 40% support requirement. I think the public will support amendments that would keep existing benchmarks as modest guardrails, not to crack down on unions but to limit the damage that hotheads might inflict. This skimpy Bill, cobbled together with indecent haste to meet Labour’s “first 100 days” deadline, bears all the hallmarks of a thank you note from Labour to its union backers. If it passes, the unions are going to party like it’s 1979. However, Labour Members pocketing supposedly pristine union donations should have a care, because that 1979 winter of discontent saw the public lose patience with a Labour Prime Minister captured by the unions. History does not repeat precisely, but this does look awfully familiar.