John Cooper

John Cooper

Conservative — Dumfries and Galloway

Speaking in the House of Commons on 21 October 2024

Debate

Employment Rights Bill

Contribution

No, I have waited 40 years for this. Much of the 2016 Act will be tossed into picket line braziers, and as ever it is the public who will suffer. The plan to make union funding of Labour opt-out, not opt-in, is another back-to-the-future move. It is naked opportunism from the Labour party. The Bill will be hardest on small and medium-sized businesses, the backbone of the economy. We must not forget that they are run by people who are themselves workers and strivers. Napoleon disparagingly called us a nation of shopkeepers. With legislation as skewed as this, Labour risks shutting the shops and turning us into a nation of strikers and their union rep handmaidens. This skimpy Bill is so heavily skewed that it resembles the blade in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum”, leaving employers strapped in red tape between the ever-present pit of insolvency and the slice, slice, slice of costly, pro-union, anti-growth legislation.

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