Draft Important Public Services (Education) Regulations 2017
Draft Important Public Services (Transport) Regulations 2017
Debate between Alison McGovern and Chris Stephens(7 years, 9 months ago)
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Alison McGovern
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Evans. I intervened before to ask the Minister, for the purposes of the Committee’s information, if she could tell us what the genuine level of support for her candidature in her constituency at the last general election was. I am sure she will be thrilled to know it was a big 30%. The hon. Member for Dartford, who intervened before, did slightly better, reaching the dizzy heights of 34%. I imagine the Committee has now had its appetite whetted, to know what my own level of support in Wirral South was.
The people of Wirral South are extraordinarily fair-minded, passionate about social justice and get up every morning thinking, “I really hope my MP is speaking out on behalf of the myriad issues we care about,” but only 35% of them committed their vote to support me. None of us on the Committee can claim the true, justified mandate that the Minister seems to think is legitimate to require of public service unions. That is a ridiculous position for us to get into. It is a strange situation for us as democrats, as we no doubt all are in this House, to find ourselves casting forth our judgment on the levels of support that organisations must command for their positions, when we have found ourselves incapable and not up to the task of meeting this test ourselves. We have found it too hard.
There is a lot of discussion about hypocrisy in politics at the moment. I would never dream of accusing anybody here of being guilty of such a thing. At least, we must worry about the appearance of hypocrisy when we are unable to command the levels of support that we would ask of railway workers, tube workers, nurses, teachers and other public servants. They will understand the change that the Government are bringing in and fail to see how we could vote for it.
As my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough said, the idea, which has absolutely no precedent in our democracy, is that such a threshold should be applied with a justification of protecting important public services. The Government seem to have plucked that definition out of thin air. The regulations would apply such a test in a way that has never been done before. I never thought that I would have to lecture the Tory party in government about the importance of tradition and precedents in our constitution, yet here we are: strange things are indeed happening in this Committee today, are they not?
There is no democratic precedent for this manoeuvre; the Government are completely making it up as they go along. The Minister did give a justification: she said we need to rebalance the interests. I look at the economy in our country today and think that if a rebalancing of interests is needed, it is a rebalancing towards working people, not away from them. The reality is that wages have not grown over the past decade. Since just before the economic crash, people have been doing steadily worse and their wages have continued not to grow.
It is a simple truth in our economy that there are only two things that successfully raise wages: one of them is the law and the National Minimum Wage Act 1998 introduced by my party, and the other is a trade union membership card in the back pocket. Those are the things that raise wages in this country—that is what all the evidence says.
Chris Stephens
Is that not the real game here? The Government have been caught out. They think the best way to stop teachers deciding to take national industrial action on pay is by imposing the 40% rule.