Trade Union Bill

Lord Bew Excerpts

Wednesday 20th January 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Cormack (Con)]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, has a good way with words. In fact, however, he demolished the argument in favour of the Motion before us today. I speak as one who has very real sympathy with the noble Baroness and her colleagues in regarding the Bill as being significantly deficient. If ever a Bill needed the constructive attention and detailed scrutiny of your Lordships’ House, it is this Bill. But the problem with the ostensibly very sensible proposal of the noble Baroness is time. That was hinted at in the concluding words of the noble Lord, Lord Tyler.

I say to the noble Baroness that there is a better way forward. I believe there should be not a committee of this House, but a Joint Committee of both Houses to look at political party funding. It could not conceivably report within five or six weeks; there are a whole lot of issues to be examined. Of course, it need not sit indefinitely, and a reasonable timeframe would be to say that it had to report by the end of May or June. The work done by the committee of the noble Lord, Lord Bew, is not absolutely complete, although I agree with the general thrust of his committee’s arguments. It is wrong to single out one political party if we are looking at the funding of parties in this country. Frankly, to suggest that the Bill is not singling out a political party is disingenuous.

I joined the Conservative Party and have been a proud member of it for some 60 years, because I always thought it was a party of fairness. I am a one-nation Conservative, and I do not believe that this Bill marches well with what I understand as one-nation conservatism. I believe, very strongly, that we need reform on the trade union front. I have no objection to looking carefully at ballot arrangements; although, as colleagues mentioned last week, when we are doing that we have to bear in mind the enormous popularity of police commissioner elections—and our failure to invalidate those because they did not cross a threshold. But that is not the subject of this afternoon’s debate. Here, we are looking at funding, and I believe that the best way forward, frankly, is to proceed with this Bill and to seek to amend it where appropriate. It would not be entirely inappropriate to have an amendment that delayed the implementation of this part of it until there is a more comprehensive agreement on political party funding. That would be a measured, sensible and very fair approach to this issue, in the tradition of one-nation conservatism.

The Bill cries out for your Lordships’ attention, however, and I hope that that attention will not, in any part of your Lordships’ House, be overtly partisan. The trade unions have a very important part to play in our economy. There were times when they exceeded their powers and authority, and there are those in the trade union movement today who would do that again. But that is not what we are talking about. We are talking about trying to have a fair construct which deals with the position of the trade unions in this first part of the 21st century. It is not unreasonable to say that people should make a conscious decision before they make a contribution to a political party. But I think it quite wrong to single out one particular party and its main source of funding, particularly at a time when we have also decided, in our wisdom—or lack of it—that Short money needs looking at.

We have to examine this matter in the round, so I say to the noble Baroness, who made a very good and persuasive speech, that I cannot support her this afternoon because, bearing in mind the complexity of the subject, I do not think that the timetable that she has put before your Lordships’ House is reasonable or practical. I think we should get on with this Bill; in the best tradition of your Lordships’ House, seek to amend it; perhaps consider whether there is merit in implementing certain sections of it at different times; and try to persuade the powers that be that there should indeed be a Joint Committee of both Houses—as your Lordships know, I believe passionately in the supremacy of the elected House—to look at the whole issue of party funding and to try to come to a fair and equitable solution which applies, as what I would call the Bew recommendations apply, to all parties and, so far as possible, in all circumstances.

This afternoon’s Motion is not the way forward but there are great issues to debate as the Bill proceeds through your Lordships’ House.

[Lord Bew (CB)]

My Lords, the debate this afternoon—not on the Bill as a whole but on the Motion—revolves around two opposing truths. The Opposition, I think quite correctly, claim that the 2011 report of the Committee on Standards in Public Life, Political Party Finance: Ending the Big Donor Culture, which has already been referred to many times, has to be taken in the round and that the idea that you can extract one element from it is an entire misreading of the logic and structure of the report. That I have no doubt about—it has to be taken in the round. The committee makes it clear numerous times in the report that that is its view. To take one element, whether it be the role of trade unions or of business in party funding, and to deal with it separately is not in the spirit of that report. That has to be conceded. I have been sitting late at night reading the report from many different angles over the last few days, as noble Lords may imagine, and I can see no other possible reading of it.

On the other hand, the Government say that they have never claimed to be implementing the report. It is worth remembering that it was published with two dissenting minutes raising substantial matters—one from Dame Margaret Beckett from the Labour Party and the other from Oliver Heald, the Conservative Party representative on the committee. I say in passing that the Conservative dissenting minute, which raised a number of substantial and serious points, does not challenge the idea that the issue should be dealt with in the round. It absolutely accepts that point. None the less, the Government do not claim to be implementing the report. Indeed, if we are talking about the element that we are dealing with today—the role of trade unions—I accept that the Government’s proposals are quite distinct from the proposal in the report from both trade unions. So the Government are not even cherry picking; they have a different agenda, which they are pursuing. It is being debated and the issues are to be put before the people in the country. So there are two competing truths here, neither of which it is possible to dispute, and it is very difficult to see an easy way through.

On the terms of the Motion—the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, has already hinted at this, and certainly the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, has done so—I feel that there really is a question over what can be done in five weeks. Since the publication of the report, there has been a very scratchy history of progress or non-progress. Indeed, if we go back to Sir Hayden Phillips’s report of 2007, we see, again, that there has been no real progress. So why do we suddenly believe that an issue that characteristically we have been stuck on in this country will be resolved in five weeks? I find it hard to believe that that can possibly be the case. There is a serious issue there. It does not mean that the concerns that have been raised are not serious, but there is a really serious issue about the terms of this resolution and its practicality.

I also feel a certain frustration with the idea that suddenly progress can be made. After the general election, I wrote to all the parties about their manifesto statements in this area. Only one party, the Conservative Party, replied. It was not a particularly encouraging reply and I can recall no other replies. But that fact alone makes me think that we will not make great progress on this in five weeks. I would regard it as a huge achievement if even one of the issues could be resolved. For example, in Dame Margaret Beckett’s dissenting minute she argues that the Co-operative Party and its arrangements are implicitly treated unfairly in our report. I would regard the sorting out of that, which is one tiny element of a massive structure of problems, as a huge achievement within five weeks, so I am sceptical about the timing implied by this resolution.

I have a comment and a word of warning to all the parties in our system. One thing that is happening is that, almost unconsciously, the conception of Parliament as involving the representation and management of interests is changing. That conception was widely held for a long period in our history, whether those interests be trade union, labour or business interests. We are now moving towards a conception of Parliament as being about the fostering of individual human rights. Those who support the Bill will actually say that certain provisions are designed to enhance the human rights and freedom of choice of trade union members. I understand that that is a possible argument. But matters will not stop here. We are a different place in the way that these matters are now discussed and it is impossible that wider questions about big donor culture and the role of business will go away. Many senior Conservatives have implicitly and explicitly accepted that, as the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, has done in his speech. They have expressed their concern about that matter. That is so important because it goes to the heart of perceptions of trust in modern British politics and the inherent difficulty that my committee has with respect to these perceptions of trust.

The noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill, has rightly reminded us several times that we should not be too obsessed with public opinion polls about the level of trust in Members of Parliament and that what really matters is the actual level of trustworthiness. She is absolutely right to say that many of these polls should be taken with a pinch of salt. We have no reason to believe anything other than what my predecessor Lord Nolan said 20 years ago—that standards are not actually in decline in our Parliament or our public service. I would go further today. There is every reason to believe that standards are actually higher, as a result of the recommendations made by Lord Nolan, the much greater transparency that there now is in our public life, the role of IPSA in dealing with issues around MPs’ expenses and the fact that we have in this country the most transparent system for party donations in the OECD. Now that I have said that, some Member of Parliament will be in the papers having done something rather foolish in the next three or four days. None the less, there is no real reason to believe anything other than that Lord Nolan was right and that the many reforms that have been made in terms of transparency have improved the situation.

However, we are in a position where 80% of members of the public believe that people give money to political parties because they expect a tangible reward, such as being made a Peer, and 80% of the public believe that they will not accept party funding. Today’s poll from the Electoral Reform Society has only 77% of the public believing that people give money to political parties expecting a peerage. We can be reassured by that 3% drop in cynicism, but I am not particularly reassured.

There is a huge difficulty in making progress on this because 80% of the public also say that it is a very important part of the proposal made by the Committee on Standards in Public Life that there should be some system of state funding for political parties, but the £25 million envisaged at the moment is something the public will not accept. That is absolutely the case. It is why I am doubtful about taking five weeks to make progress. We are stuck with these issues because they are really difficult, but we cannot evade them—this is the point I am trying to argue with as much vigour as I can. A recent book entitled Ethics and Integrity in British Politics by Nicholas Allen and Sarah Birch, published by the Cambridge University Press, points out that 87% of the public believe that standards are lower than they once were. As I have said, I do not really think that there is strong evidence for that. The use of Lord Acton’s famous quotation that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely has now become a credible cliché although it has been completely stripped of the precise meaning he gave it in 1887 to deal with the cruel abuses of power that he was talking about. It has now become a kind of journalistic mantra which creates a problem, and indeed research by the Edelman Trust supports that. It backs up our own report on comparative perceptions of the political class in Europe, which showed that 3% of the Dutch and 3% of the British have actually had experience of corruption, but only 49% of Dutch people believe that it is widespread in their society while 69% of British people believe it to be so. We have a malaise in public opinion that goes well beyond anyone’s empirical experience.