Queen’s Speech

Lord Balfe Excerpts

Wednesday 11th May 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords, I too welcome the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Guildford. As some noble Lords will know, from time to time I get up and talk about the need for this House to reform itself. The Bishops’ Benches show that you can have temporary peerages, you can time-limit them and you can limit the numbers. I am not saying that we should all join the established Church to get in here, but I point to the fact that it is possible to make changes.

I shall start by declaring an interest. I am president of BALPA, the pilots’ union, and have been a trade union member literally since I left school at 16. I want to talk about some of the things that we overlook. One of them is that we have a very odd idea of what constitutes a trade unionist. If you ask the average person, particularly the average Daily Mail reader, they will point to someone who is male, stroppy and communist, and who probably has a bit of a chip on their shoulder. That is about as wrong as you can get. The average trade unionist today is a woman in her 40s who will never, in her entire trade union life, go on strike. This person is also paying her dues each week to an organisation, the Trades Union Congress, where 33% of her colleagues vote for the Conservative Party. We and the Government need to remember this. The key thing we need to remember is that those in the trade union movement are our partners in prosperity, not our enemies.

We also need to remember that many of them are not particularly poor. I have spent all my life among the richer end of the trade unions. The union for the Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers’ technical and administrative support staff, known as AUEW TASS, had the people who designed Rolls-Royce engines. It had some of the most highly skilled people building for Britain and dealing with the defence industries. In my time here, I have dealt with hospital consultants. I wonder how many people here realise that there is a hospital consultants’ trade union affiliated to the TUC, but there is, and it does valuable work.

There are many others, of course. There is the British Medical Association. I once pointed out to David Cameron that it is a far more vicious and hardworking trade union than Bob Crow and the RMT, which some people think was the epitome of difficult trade unionism. I tell you; if you want to meet a difficult bunch of trade unionists, go down to the Department of Health. It is packed full of them, as many Ministers with blood all over them from all parties can tell you.

I make these points because, looking at one particular group—BALPA, the pilots’ union—we have a lot to offer. I am sorry that the Ministers replying to the debate are not in reverse order, because the noble Baroness, Lady Vere, knows of my interest in these matters. Things such as the Jet Zero strategy, which presents a credible pathway to decarbonising the aviation sector, need input from professional organisations, because the trade unions also want to decarbonise the aviation sector. The point I make to Ministers is that you need to get them in and work with them. You need to put them on the councils that are looking at these things and moving the whole industry forward.

I also ask the Government to put a bit more urgency into looking at the mutual recognition of pilots’ licences. When we left the EU, we left a huge number of jobs uncompleted. One of them was the reciprocal endorsement of licences between the previous EU and the present UK. There is still a lot to sort out there, and I ask the Government to take that on board.

Finally, I ask my own Government here to take on board the continued absence of the promised Bill to improve workers’ rights. If you want to send a positive message to the people who go out to work every day to make this a prosperous country, to produce the goods we need and to lead the high technology, you need a Bill that includes flexible working rights, protection against pregnancy discrimination, and a measure for keeping tips as part of a bill. I never understand why we have this antiquated American system and do not just add 10% or 12.5%, get it in and give it out to people; there are perfectly good precedents all over the continent.

I welcome what the Government have to say about ferries and minimum pay, but please make sure that the Bill is tough enough. We do not want a ship coming into port and the company saying, “But we’ve paid the minimum wage ever since the ship was three miles out from the port. Of course we didn’t pay it before then; it was in international waters”. If we are to have this Bill, please make sure that it works. Some of us on this side will be looking carefully at that.

Let me end on a positive note. The Conservative Party has a very good record on trade unions. One of the best Ministers of Labour in the history of this country was a man called Walter Monckton, who was Churchill’s Minister of Labour. Churchill gave him an easy instruction. He said, “The unions worked hard to win us the war. You must work hard as Minister of Labour to keep them onside for Britain”. Walter Monckton did. He is still spoken about occasionally by people in the generation beyond mine as being a most successful Minister.

I am asking the Government to look at a complete change—no, not a complete change, because they are not hostile. I find that they are indifferent, which is often the problem. I ask them to look at and take a positive attitude towards bringing on board the huge number of people working for the prosperity of our country, one-third of them already voting for us. They are there. They are the low-hanging fruit of the next election, ready to be collected by a Government who respect their skills and realise the work that they are doing to make our country better, to build back better and to give us a better economy and a better country.