Trade Union Funding

David Anderson Excerpts

Wednesday 29th February 2012 Westminster Hall

[Mr David Anderson (Blaydon) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure, Mr Owen, to serve under your chairmanship.

Can we just think about the people that we are talking about? They are public servants who represent millions of public servants, whose only role in life is to deliver quality services for the people we are fortunate to represent. These people are not the enemy within.

I agree with what the hon. Member for Harlow (Robert Halfon) said about the Tory party’s track record not being anti-union. The Tory party supported Solidarnosc in the early 1980s, but it did not support the shipyard workers in Sunderland when it destroyed the Sunderland shipyards. The Tories supported the Union of Democratic Mineworkers, but they did not support it while they were destroying the British coal industry. The Tories then forgot about them and put them on the dole along with the other 200,000 miners who lost their jobs because of the Tories’ policies. Only last week the Prime Minister had some trade unions into No. 10 to talk about the health reforms. The one thing those three examples have in common is that the Tories liked those groups as long as they were doing their bidding. When the unions are doing the bidding of their members, somehow they are no longer friends of the Tory party.

I am proud to have been a member of a trade union for 43 years. I have been at the sharp end. Unlike most people here, I have not just read about this. I was an elected lay official for my union, released from work for 15 years by Newcastle city council to represent a membership of 7,000 and a work force of 16,000. My hon. Friend the Member for East Kilbride, Strathaven and Lesmahagow (Mr McCann), who spoke earlier about industrial relations, has got it absolutely right: we have lost sight of what industrial relations means. It is about developing a relationship with people and between management and the unions. Most of the time is spent avoiding problems. It is about building relationships, so that we can say, “Look, we need to go and see these people, because if we do not see them, things will go off the rails.”

There are huge examples. I spent many hours with home care workers, encouraging them to take redundancies or to take ill health retirement. That was a huge step for them, but they put their faith in me and that helped my authority in being able to respond to the cuts being imposed on them. I did thousands of disciplinaries and grievances. I was involved in appeals, social security appeals and industrial tribunals. If I had not been there doing that, those people would have been unrepresented. It is somehow being argued that taxpayers should not be doing this and that the unions should fund it all. If the unions fund it all, as the Tory party knows, no union in the world could have sub levels high enough to do that. It would also lose the hands-on experience of people who were working on the ground and at the coal face—I literally worked at the coal face—who try to make things better for the people they employ and the people they represent.

Where has this debate come from? We all know that this debate has not come from the employers, because I work closely with the public sector employers in Gateshead, such as the council, the college and the hospital—I see the chief executive on a regular basis—and not one of them has said to me, “Let’s get rid of facility time.” We have some strong, hard relationships. As we sit here today, the unions in Gateshead council are sitting with the management trying to work out how they make 350 people redundant with as little damage to the people and the service as possible.

It would appear that the truth is that the hon. Member for Congleton (Fiona Bruce), who led this debate, was not strong enough to control her officers, because her officers have control of whether members have time off. If the council and the officers do not agree that the trade unions have time off, it does not happen. If she was not strong enough to control her officers, that is a fault with her and her administration, not with those who represent the people on the ground.

We know where this has come from: it has come from the storm-troopers of the TaxPayers Alliance. If we are talking about storm-troopers, we all know what Hitler’s attitude was to trade unions: get them out of the way, lock them up and destroy them. I am sure that no Member would support anything that Hitler or the people he represented did, but that is the slippery slope that we are on with this debate.