King’s Speech (4th Day)

Lord Monks Excerpts

Monday 22nd July 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Monks (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a real pleasure for me today to welcome the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Vallance, and welcome him to this House. It was a very interesting and inspiring speech in many ways. I also congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Petitgas, on his speech. While I am paying compliments, I will mention my fellow former TUC general secretary. We are developing our own union, and it is a real pleasure for us to be in a debate that is about pro-worker and pro-union legislation for the first time for very many years. When have debated these things in this House, it has always been the other way around, with the tide flowing against unions.

It was almost a rite of passage for successive Tory Governments to load new limits on to unions and to impose expensive red tape on many of our activities, complicating our lives and making it much more expensive to administer the unions. The Conservative Party recognised that anti-trade union legislation did not cost much—so you could say you were doing something—and through that gesture it pleased the party faithful. It cheered them up. But it was also a green light to corporate greed and excess in too many board rooms. As the union power faded, so the bad behaviour on the part of too many employers grew.

Positive employment legislation is not just for workers and unions; it is for better employers, too, as has already been said in this debate today. The better employers are scared about being undercut by the unscrupulous, and the new proposals will generate some much-needed levelling up in that area, as well as perhaps in other areas.

History provides some important lessons here. It was Stanley Baldwin, a Conservative Prime Minister in the 1920s and 1930s, who was concerned about excessive employer greed and rising inequality and decided to promote collective bargaining. We owe a great debt in the union world to what Stanley Baldwin did. If only his more recent successors had followed his example and shown the same degree of wisdom, the country would be in a better place. Collective bargaining will be encouraged by this Bill, and its revival is important to the nation’s future.

We all know that the Government must overcome a daunting set of problems. These include a fading industrial base and the continued shrinkage of world market share of many UK products and services. The gap between London and the south-east on the one hand and the other regions and nations of the UK on the other is getting worse. It is very difficult to bring them together more in the way that has been done in some other countries, between capital cities and the smaller and more remote areas. The hard truth is that at the moment areas of the UK resemble eastern Europe more than western European countries, and that is a big difference that we have to deal with. Levelling up will be hard, but it is important to try.

On employment relations, the employment Bill will be a very good thing for many reasons, but it could go a bit further. In the darkest years of the Second World War, Ernest Bevin, who was a union leader and became Minister of Labour and National Service, wrote a letter to the chairman of ICI. He was worried about constraints on output and the urgent need to boost production, and he suggested the establishment of a round table in workplaces that would discuss raising standards in both the quantity and the quality of the work being produced.

There was some follow-up in the form of joint production committees, but other countries were to take up that idea with much greater enthusiasm and adapt it to their own circumstances. In those countries, raising performance levels and market share became a joint mission. Skills, investment, good relations at work and respect became shared goals, whereas we were always a bit more confrontational and, despite valiant attempts, never quite managed to land that kind of culture. Let us remember that Theresa May dipped her toe in that water when she aired the concept of workers on boards, but that faded as she and her Government collapsed in the damaging aftermath of Brexit.

These are very good measures from the Government, and I am very pleased about them, but I hope that in due course they will go a bit further and promote our own version of a national partnership project. Other countries have managed to do it, and so can we.