Exiting the EU and Workers’ Rights

Debate between Clive Lewis and Melanie Onn

Monday 7th November 2016 Commons Chamber

[Clive Lewis]

That is a really important point. What we did not hear from the Secretary of State was any promise or guarantee that employment legislation will not, once it comes out of international law, simply go into secondary law. We want to see it in primary law, and our concern is that once it goes into secondary law, the Government will use statutory instruments to undermine employment law and workers’ rights, and that is not what we want to see.

Let us carry on. I am talking about the Foreign Secretary, who described the weight of EU employment legislation as “back-breaking”. Then there is the Secretary of State for International Trade who dismissed the idea of protecting workplace rights as “intellectually unsustainable”. Then there is the Secretary of State for Exiting the EU who spent years attacking employment rights embodied in EU law as “unnecessary red tape”.

[Melanie Onn]

Does my hon. Friend also recognise that the former Minister for Employment, the right hon. Member for Witham (Priti Patel) went so far as to call for the UK to

“halve the burdens of EU social and employment legislation”

after Brexit?

[Clive Lewis]

The list is lengthy.

Let us go back. Who spent years attacking employment rights embodied in EU laws as unnecessary red tape before undergoing his recent makeover into an ally of the working class, insisting that it is only “consumer and environmental protections” that he regards as unnecessary? As an aside, it is worth emphasising that those protections are as important to the quality of life of working people as employment rights, but they are not the topic of today’s debate.