Trade Unions

Debate between Lord Balfe and Lord Clinton-Davis

Thursday 19th November 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, for putting down this Motion. I am sure that we welcome this debate at this important time. Perhaps I, too, could begin with a few declarations. I am the parliamentary adviser to BALPA, the pilots’ union, a majority of whose members I am pleased to say vote for the Conservative Party. I am also the president of the British Dietetic Association, a TUC-affiliated union, and I believe that the majority of its members do not vote for the Labour Party. In neither of those instances was this a matter for my being appointed to the role. Both those unions wanted to demonstrate that they were not dominated by one political party.

I should declare another interest. Since the age of 16, I have been a member of a TUC-affiliated union. For a good portion of that time, I was a member of AUEW-TASS, which I still think of as one of the finest unions that this country ever had. I am now a member of the Unite retired members section—like the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, we are most of us, I suspect, in retired members sections—but I still look back with fondness to AUEW-TASS and in particular to its leader, my good friend Ken Gill, who would not have found a place on the Benches opposite for reasons that we will not go into.

Some 30% of trade union members vote for the Conservative Party. We have increasing evidence of this; we have done surveys and we have looked at polls. I was for five years the envoy of the now Prime Minister and then leader of the Opposition to the trade union movement, from the end of 2007 through the election to 2012. Indeed, when I came to this place, he said to me, “This has nothing to do with your distinguished service in the European Parliament; it is your service on behalf of the party”.

[Lord Clinton-Davis]

When the noble Lord was in the European Parliament, did he hold those views at that time? Have they rather altered in recent days?

[Lord Balfe]

Like anyone who has known me for many years—of course, I knew the noble Lord when he was the Member for Hackney in the other House and as a distinguished commissioner—he will know that I have always had a wide range of views, which is why I was such a good friend of Ken Gill. Those views have evolved, as have all views, but they have not fundamentally changed: I am still standing here today on these Conservative Benches saying that I am proud to have been a lifelong member of a TUC-affiliated trade union.

I make the point about the Conservative Party—it is no secret; it is nothing new. The members of unions have always voted in large part for the Labour Party but in significant minority for other parties. Many of them do not vote at all; they actually mirror the population remarkably closely—much more closely than we might like to think. I am pleased that the Conservative Party has recently appointed Rob Halfon, its deputy chairman, to resuscitate the official trade union body within the party.

So we are at a bit of a crossroads, but one positive point that I want to repeat for the Minister is that one of the great achievements of the trade union movement has been the Unionlearn programme. It was recognised many years ago that active trade unionists are often the first people who are in touch with people, particularly migrants who have come to this country, who have first-class skills but who often lack English language skills and sometimes numeracy skills.

I was very impressed when visiting one or two of the Unionlearn projects to find out that while there was a problem with English as a foreign language, there was often no problem with numerical skills. I was told by one or two of the tutors that the people they were tutoring were much better mathematicians than the person who was doing the tutoring. Of course, mathematics is an international language, unlike written and spoken languages. There are now some 30,000 Unionlearn reps in this country and almost a quarter of a million people in work are benefiting from the Unionlearn scheme. It is to the great credit of the Government that they have continued to support this scheme and I would like the Minister in her response to mention and endorse the fact that they will continue to support the scheme.

I saw the noble Lord, Lord Monks, frowning slightly. Of course the scheme has evolved, but the basic support for the principles of scheme is still there. It is there because the scheme benefits employers as well as employees. It is to the advantage of an employer to have a workforce that can read the health and safety notices; to have a workforce that has a sufficient command of the language to talk to other people on the shop floor who may also not be of a UK/English background but need to communicate in a common language. Courses in English, maths and technical studies are the backbone of the Unionlearn programme, and they have been extremely useful.

There is also a pay-off in economic return. If you improve the efficiency of workers, you improve their earnings, you improve the tax take and you improve the profits for the firms. It is not a charitable institution but one that is useful for benefiting the economy.

I have good news. Just under eight years after I first asked to meet Len McCluskey’s predecessor as secretary of the T&G, I received an email yesterday saying that Mr McCluskey would very much like to meet the Lord Balfe. I have of course replied and said that I would be delighted to meet him. I wonder what that can be about.

It is totally self-defeating for the Labour Party to try to monopolise the unions, because unions need friends on both sides of the House. As the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, said, unions play an important part in the economy. It is important for them to have friends across the political spectrum. If I was to give them one message it would be to stop backing just one horse because occasionally that horse might not win the race. You need friends on all sides of the House. My challenge to the unions is to settle down, to stop being totally dominated by one political party and to look across the House. Then they might find that they have more friends when they have difficulties with impending legislation.