Trade Union Bill (Third sitting) Debate
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James Cartlidge
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Trade Union Bill (Third sitting)
James Cartlidge Excerpts(9 years ago)
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James Cartlidge (South Suffolk) (Con)
Q 250 Thank you for coming in today. I want to focus on the point about identification. Mr Hall, you said that it may be of benefit to be able to identify who to speak to and know who is the organiser. Is that not currently the case, in your experience of dealing with disputes?
Deputy Chief Constable Hall: I think it is generally the case that you can find out that detail, but I would not say it is always the case. Certainly, when we attend, our ability to find who is supervising the picket line and discuss and negotiate with them about the way the picket is conducted enables people to continue to cross the picket line if they wish to do so and enables those on the picket to approach vehicles or individuals trying to cross the picket line. It is always helpful if we can fairly quickly identify who that supervision is. Generally we can do it, but that is not always the case.
James Cartlidge
Q 251 To follow up, I am not trying to pass comment on whether the parts of the Bill that deal with social media are right or wrong, but you use social media for investigations at the moment. People can commit offences using social media. That is currently the case.
Deputy Chief Constable Hall: Yes, it is, and we certainly investigate, all across the country, offences that have allegedly been committed across social media. What we do not do is to censor or vet tweets and social media messages before they are sent out. Once things have gone out, however, we may investigate. Clearly, we could do that in an industrial dispute, as we could in any other area of business.
Ian Mearns (Gateshead) (Lab)
Q 252 On social media, I do not think that this appears in the Bill, but it was certainly referred to in the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills consultation document on the Bill. The consultation document referred to having to give notice of use of social media in support of a picket, and it referred to having to give notice of the content of social media used to support a picket. That concept is interesting, because if you have to give notice of content on Twitter, you potentially introduce the question of secondary and/or wildcat tweeting in support of picketing. Have you got any comments about that?
Steve White: Goodness gracious me. That fills me with dread and fear, I have to say, in terms of having to vet tweets in advance—crikey! I do not think that that is anything that we want to be getting involved with. I am sorry; I just find that quite bizarre.
Deputy Chief Constable Hall: I think I agree. I do not know how we would manage that. I do not know that it is appropriate for us to do that, because we do not do it in any other area. How we would manage that, I really do not know. I think our only role would be when things have been sent out. If people are potentially committing a criminal offence by sending those out, there is a role, potentially, for us to investigate those, as there is with any other use of social media.
Julie Elliott
Q 293 Thank you. Can I clarify one other thing you said? You said that officials of trade unions were tacitly approving the tactics deployed. Can you tell me which trade unions were doing that? We have the general secretaries of the big trade unions involved in your company here later today giving evidence, and we would like to put that to them.
David Palmer-Jones: The ones that I met, together with Merseyside—the customer—were Unite, GMB and UCATT.
James Cartlidge
Q 294 Commissioner Dobson, in your earlier remarks you said that nothing in the Bill will worsen relationships in your view, but there are safeguards in it that will be of benefit. Do you welcome the threshold for action, which is one of the most important parts of the Bill?
Commissioner Dobson: I do welcome it, but it is important for the Committee to recognise that I cannot think of an industrial dispute with the Fire Brigades Union in recent years where that threshold would not have been met, so I do not think it would have had any practical impact on previous disputes.
James Cartlidge
Q 296 Just on what you said to my colleague Mr Argar about examples of intimidation, you said that in 2010 access was stopped to a fire station in an emergency.
Commissioner Dobson: Access was stopped for our emergency fire crews—our contingency service. They were stopped from getting on to our fire station. In 2010, our plan was to deploy emergency fire crews from fire stations, but we had such difficulty in getting the emergency fire crews on to the fire stations because of the picket lines and striking workers who were barricading themselves on to fire stations. In one instance, they took a dog on to the fire station to stop emergency crews getting in.
James Cartlidge
Q 297 This was while there was a fire?
Commissioner Dobson: No, this was during the strike. During the fires, we had some instances where the striking workers followed emergency crews to incidents, damaged fire engines en route and tried to intimidate the emergency workers, while they were trying to deal with an incident. In some cases, they were trying to deal with actual fires and they were being obstructed by striking workers.
Jo Stevens
Q 298 I have a question for Mr Dobson. You have talked a lot about examples of intimidation during the 2010 dispute, and you also said that you had a private meeting with Mr Carr. You will be aware that the impact assessment for this Bill drew on the Carr review to justify what is in the Bill. I am sure you are also aware that Mr Carr was unable to make any evidence-based proposals or recommendations for change because of the lack of a significant body of evidence to support any recommendations for change. In your meeting with him, did you give him the examples of intimidation that you have described?
Commissioner Dobson: I did, yes.
The Chair
Stephen Doughty
Q 325 May I finish my question? Mr Taylor, are you surprised that there appears to be very little Government interest in what is a significant part of their own legislation? What do you think the reasons for that might possibly be?
Byron Taylor: That is a very interesting question. As I said at the start of my evidence, as far as I am concerned, this is a partisan attack on Her Majesty’s Opposition and forms part of a broader attack on civil society. If you look at the concerns being raised about charities’ political campaigning or what is being said about the BBC—it is a deeply partisan attack. It is deeply damaging to our society, and I have real concerns.
I return to the Committee on Standards in Public Life hearings in 2011. Those of you who have read the transcripts will know I gave evidence to that Committee. The argument put forward by the Conservative party and the Liberal Democrat party at that point was that there should be individualisation of political fund payments. The Committee took the majority view that
“such a condition would be a disproportionate intrusion into the constitution of the relevant trade unions”.
That is a really important principle to me—freedom of association and the right of trade union members to come together, form a trade union and determine their own rules and constitution. The Bill is interfering directly in that human right, which I think Amnesty and Liberty made reference to yesterday.
James Cartlidge
Q 326 I want to raise a specific technical point. Mr Taylor, you said this is an attack on funding and that funding will go down. Surely, if people have to opt in, funding will only go down if they had not wanted to opt in in the first place.
Byron Taylor: Funding will go down because people have busy lives and the trade union movement is then required to contact every single member to require an opt-in, when many people already believe they are opted in.
James Cartlidge
Q 327 But if they have been happy with that donation, your donation levels will not be affected.
Byron Taylor: Many people are happy to contribute to the political work of their trade union. It is a fairly well-established principle among trade union members that they pay to the union, and in return they expect good advice and representation.
James Cartlidge
Q 328 But you seem to be saying, “If we actually ask people whether they want to contribute, we’re worried we’re going to find out some of them didn’t want to.” You are admitting that.
Byron Taylor: No, I am absolutely not, because we have not put it to the test yet.
James Cartlidge
Q 329 Then funding will not go down, on that basis. If they are all happy punters and happy to contribute to the Labour party, your funding will not go down.
Byron Taylor: You are saying this is not about the Labour party, and that is your immediate problem, because what we are talking about is the opt-in to the political fund of the trade union movement. What is going to happen is that trade unions are going to have to spend an excessive amount of time and resources re-contacting all of their members to ask them to sign back into the political fund in written form. This is a really important point: it is being proposed that everybody will have to do this in writing. In an electronic age when people should be allowed to communicate via telephone, internet or other forms of communication, this Bill is proposing that everybody has to sign a piece of paper. That will drive down participation; we know that for a fact.
James Cartlidge
Q 330 Forgive me. You talk about people’s rights. You are suggesting that your funds are going to go down. That must mean that some people who are currently contributing would not want to be contributing. In other words, by defending that, you are defending the fact that someone should involuntarily be contributing to a political party against their rights. You are talking about rights; you should surely accept that point.
Byron Taylor: When people join a trade union, there are things that go with being a member of a trade union, including its political work. Let us go back to the history of the opt-out, and 1913, and the legislation and why it was primarily introduced. The opt-out was introduced in 1913 to ensure that those workers who were working in closed-shop arrangements, who did not want to participate in the political activity of the union, had a chance not to do so. In a closed-shop arrangement, union membership was part of the contract of employment, and therefore, they had to join the union, so it was always seen as a way of protecting a very small minority of people who did not want to participate in the political activity of their trade union. We are now in a situation where the Government are trying to change that and say that everyone has to opt in. When people join a trade union, they join the collective and they participate by the rules of the collective. I am unaware of any other membership organisation that an individual can join where they can opt out of a portion of the rules of the organisation they are joining. This is really strange.
James Cartlidge
Q 331 For my last point, I will simply repeat the point that I made, because it is fundamental. If they are all happy donating, you will not be losing any funds when they are asked whether they wish to opt in to making a donation.
Byron Taylor: Do you mean a donation or a contribution to political funds?
James Cartlidge
Q 332 We all know what we are talking about.
Byron Taylor: I am not sure I do, but I would like to come back to what happened in 2008 with the Office of Fair Trading. The Conservative party lodged a complaint on this very matter with the OFT through Jonathan Djanogly MP. The OFT ruled:
“In the present case, we do not consider that trade union members are obviously vulnerable to deceit resulting from the way in which unions collect contributions to the levy. The levy has featured prominently in political discourse and news reporting for a very long time. We would expect to take action if we had evidence that large numbers of consumers are unknowingly entering into an unwanted financial commitment from which they are subsequently unable to extricate themselves. We do not at present possess evidence to this effect in relation to the political levy on trade union members.”
This has been a feature of political debate since the late 1940s. There was the Donovan commission in the 1960s. Look at the reviews of party funding that occurred in the 1990s and in 2004, or the Hayden Phillips review in 2006, or the Committee on Standards in Public Life in 2011. The question that comes back is always, “Where is the evidence that some kind of deceit is being practised?”, because it simply is not there.
If we are going to question the purpose of the legislation, may I draw reference to the Conservative Minister of Labour from 1924?
James Cartlidge
I was minus 50 then.
Byron Taylor: You may have been minus 50, but this legislation was produced in 1913, so it is totally relevant. He said, in a private memorandum, that the
“major part of the outcry against the political levy is not motivated by a burning indignation for the trade unionist, who is forced to subscribe to the furtherance of political principles which he abhors. It is based on a desire to hit the Socialist party through their pocket…we should not delude ourselves as to our intent.”
My question is: what has changed for the Conservative party?