Lord Morris of Handsworth
Main Page: Lord Morris of Handsworth (Labour - Life peer)
The Earl of Sandwich (CB)
My Lords, I am unusually tempted to come into this debate, but it has had an international character and I will not delay the Minister for more than a minute. I support everything that the noble Lord, Lord Judd, said about civil society all around the world and the importance of trade unions, and I was very cheered by the noble Lord, Lord Hain, bringing me back to the 1994 elections in South Africa and all the work that he did and churches and trade unions alongside each other. I could not resist saying something about that, having been on the staff and the board of Christian Aid and seeing at first hand how the churches were woven into society.
Nor can I resist having a go at the Conservative Party and taking it back to those days when my father was a Member of Parliament for 21 years for the Conservatives. When they ousted him for being against the Common Market, they sent him up to Accrington. There, he needed to take a loudspeaker to the factory gate because trade unionists were behind gates and could not be approached, except through a megaphone. The Conservative Party has come a long way from there, but it is significant that today it is still catching up with everyone else.
Lord Morris of Handsworth (Lab)
My Lords, I support Amendment 69 because one of the greatest challenges that we face in our workplaces today is not strikes or boycotts but the new evil that is confronting our country: radicalisation. Anyone who thinks that radicalisation stops at the factory gate, or the gate of the bus garage, has got it wrong. It permeates our social activities and, indeed, our industrial activities. Therefore, we have to find a response to that evil. It can indeed pass from generation to generation and that is the prime objective. It means that we need strategies. We need to win the arguments and chart a new direction. But it also means that we have to find positive alternatives, which means winning the battle not just at the factory gate but inside the factories. That battle has to be built around people of like minds—people who find such ideologies totally unacceptable.
This is not just about leaflets and slogans; it is about the actions inside the workplaces—the one-to-one discussions, the meetings that are not advertised. Those are some of the tactics and approaches. Most of all, it is about the provision of education to those of positive thinking and progressive minds. We have to win those hearts and minds, young and old. We have to take charge of the education facilities that are offered in some workplaces. We must make sure that the political objectives are very clear for those people who want to be part of a progressive system.
I ask myself, how on earth do we arrive at these objectives if there is no resource to fight a counterargument and win the hearts and minds in a positive way? You cannot write it off on the basis that it is a political objective and use the political funds, because the Certification Officer in a new role may want to have a word to see exactly how the funds are disbursed. The amendment in the name of my noble friend Lord Collins is saying that we have to face many challenges but if we see them all as political objectives, we will have neither the resource nor the opportunity to make a real difference in changing hearts and minds, but more importantly, in changing actions and behaviour. For those reasons, I support Amendment 69.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Business, Innovation and Skills and Department for Culture, Media and Sport (Baroness Neville-Rolfe) (Con)
My Lords, I am grateful to noble Lords for this lively debate, which builds on the debate we had on our second day. I particularly thank the noble Lord, Lord Collins, for his knowledgeable comments on some important union campaigns and for his Tesco tales. I always like the opportunity to commend the forward-looking work of USDAW. But I do not agree with the noble Lord’s suggestion that such campaigns would be stopped by the sort of transparency we suggest here. The campaigns may be worthy and legitimate, but they are political in character so they should be paid for out of the political fund, and that would include the important campaigns the noble Lord, Lord Hain, described and the noble Earl, Lord Sandwich, supported. I am with my noble friend Lord Balfe on this issue. They are legitimate activities, but members should know about and choose to opt in in support of such political causes.
We want in this Bill to give members more information about what unions are doing with their money so that they can make an informed decision on whether to contribute. We also want to ensure that a member’s decision to contribute to the political fund is done with their explicit consent. My colleague the Minister of State for Skills has set out his evidence to the Select Committee, which is of course considering these clauses. Indeed, we debated Clause 10 in some detail on the second day in Committee.
I should like to comment on Amendments 69, 70 and 71. A key part of our reforms concerns the provision of information. We have seen that some unions do not provide any detail about how their political funds are used in their returns to the Certification Officer, and I do not see how we can expect union members to make informed choices on this basis. Some unions, which I commend, already provide details about their political funds, so I do not see how making this position more consistent across all unions would be problematic. To pick up on the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Oates, the Bill uses the current six categories of expenditure that unions use to establish a political fund and require reporting against them. For example, as has been said, one category is payment to or expenses for a political party. That is a straightforward and I believe necessary piece of information for a union member.
We are not imposing new requirements on what counts as political funding; we are asking that union members be made aware of them. Unions are membership organisations run by and for their members. The Government have therefore always sought to strike a balance between trade union autonomy and the imposition of statutory requirements on the internal operations of what are essentially voluntary organisations.