Shrewsbury 24 (Release of Papers)
Debate between Jim McGovern and David Anderson(10 years, 10 months ago)
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Mr David Anderson (Blaydon) (Lab)
I beg to move,
That this House is seriously concerned at the decision of the Government to refuse to release papers related to the building dispute in 1972 and subsequent prosecutions of the workers known as the Shrewsbury 24 and calls on it to reverse this position as a matter of urgency.
The debate is long overdue but I urge colleagues not to intervene unless they feel they have to, because there are a number of Members who wish to speak and time will obviously be limited.
Nineteen seventy-two was a momentous year for industrial relations in this country. A weak Government had twice declared states of emergency, first in February during the first miners’ strike for almost half a century, and secondly in August during the national dockworkers’ strike. Matters were made worse by the Government’s attempts to prevent unions from defending their members’ rights, wages and conditions at work. It was clear that of all the work forces in the United Kingdom, the building industry was a bigger mess than all the rest put together. Wages were low, there was no job security and exploitation was rife through a system known as “the lump.”
Jim McGovern
As I am sure my hon. Friend is aware, the Select Committee on Scottish Affairs, of which I am a member, has conducted an inquiry into blacklisting. Would it be fair to say that the Shrewsbury 24 would most certainly have been blacklisted after the strike in 1972?
Mr Anderson
I thank and forgive my hon. Friend for his intervention. There is absolutely no doubt about it: people were blacklisted. One real sadness about what we are discussing today is that 40 years on from that disgrace, similar things are still taking place. The Scottish Affairs Committee should be congratulated on the great work it has done in this area.
The lump was a system whereby people were paid cash in hand, meaning not only that no income tax or national insurance contributions were paid—so the state was robbed—but, vitally, that workers were uninsured against accidents or worse while they were at work. That was extremely serious. A building worker was dying every day on average on building sites across the UK and, in the three years before 1972, almost a quarter of a million industrial injuries were reported, with many more not being reported.
The Economy
Debate between Jim McGovern and David Anderson(13 years ago)
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Mr Anderson
I will come to what the hon. Lady’s party has had to say and pick up her point then.
It is little wonder that we are in a mess. We are told that even in the City of London—the heart of capitalism—job vacancies have fallen by 16% in a single month. In the past month alone, retail sales have dropped by 1.7% despite huge pre-Christmas discounts. The Engineering Employers Federation says that it expects a drop in its production from 2.2% to 0.9% next year. But do not worry—the Deputy Prime Minister, the leader of the hon. Lady’s party, tells us that he is going to crack down on top corporate pay. Does that mean that he will do what he and his friends in the Conservative party are doing to public sector workers—to nurses, doctors, firefighters and policemen—by putting a two-year pay freeze and a 1% cap on to private sector pay and the fat cats? Of course not. The Deputy Prime Minister tells us:
“I don’t mean the government starts going around setting pay rates in the private sector...I believe that people should be well paid if they succeed.”
Can he tell me where the nurses, the doctors, the firefighters, the police, the home care workers, the child care workers, and millions of others are failing?
Jim McGovern (Dundee West) (Lab)
As everyone is aware, the Prime Minister referred to last week’s day of action as a “damp squib”. I think that it was anything but a damp squib. Does my hon. Friend agree that if the coalition Government stay on the course they are on at the moment, there will be many more squibs and none of them will be damp?
Mr Anderson
I certainly hope that there is no need for any more squibs, damp or otherwise. It was absolutely wrong that people felt forced to go on strike last week, but they felt that they had no option because the Government were clearly not listening; I hope that they are now.
All in this together? What a laugh! Has Bob Diamond really become 5,000% more successful than his predecessor was 30 years ago? Of course not, but his salary is 5,000% more than his predecessor’s was in the early 1980s. The people who are running our public services are asking, “Where is the fairness?” At a time when other people are wandering around with massive pay packets, they are losing their jobs by the bucketful. Last week, in a throwaway line, the Chancellor dropped in the horribly disrespectful term, “headcount”, when he said that the headcount of job losses in the public sector would rise from 400,000 to 710,000. The headcount! These are men and women, flesh and blood—people with kids, with mortgages, with debt, and with holidays, cars and Christmas to pay for, and they face a future with no hope because this Government put the interests of the market before the interests of the people. It is economic madness driven by an ideology that does not care about the impact on real people.
Of course, the Conservatives will argue that this is all necessary. Perhaps we could accept that if it was actually working, but we see now that it is not. This year, in the north-east alone, 32,000 public sector jobs have gone, 1,080 of them at Gateshead council, with another £38 million cuts to come next year. We will have more people on the dole, poorer service delivery and more hardship all round. It is the classic Tory remedy, and we have seen it all before. Mervyn King may well be right—this might be the worst crisis in our history—but, sadly, the Tories are using exactly the same old methods to get out of it.
As my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Hall Green (Mr Godsiff) said, we need a real dialogue that puts the needs of ordinary people first, and not the demands of the market. We need to move away from the appalling situation that we are in yet again, where bankers and people in the money markets are acting like the arsonist who burns your house down and then comes back next week and offers to rebuild it for you and charges you twice the price for doing it. This is a challenge to all parties in this country, including mine. We need to go beyond the narrowness of the past 30 years and look to develop an economic system that ignores the markets and does right for the people of this country.