Employment Rights Bill

John Cooper Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 21st October 2024 Commons Chamber

[John Cooper (Dumfries and Galloway) (Con)]

We have heard some electrifying and remarkable maiden speeches today. I rise to speak as a former member of a trade union. I do not miss the subs going out of my pay packet; it did little for me. This is no mere Bill, but a time machine that could take the whole country back decades. The unions are gonna party like it’s 1979. For your benefit, Madam Deputy Speaker—you were not there—1979 was the winter of discontent when the unions bit back, the rubbish piled high in the streets and a Labour PM was soon out with the bins.

With this hastily assembled Employment Rights Bill, Labour is feeding the union alligator that may yet eat it, too. That is because the Bill lacks balance, assuming that all employers are robber barons intent on exploiting workers. The Prime Minister has talked of growing the economy and cutting red tape, yet now we see the reality: proposals that will frighten firms away from taking on new staff and burden them with still more rules and regulations.

My constituent Rory, a forward-thinking dairy farmer, has written to me about Labour’s pledge

“to make Britain the best place to start and grow a business.”

Like me, he sees fine sentiments, but the Bill risks the opposite effect. There is even an expensive new layer of bureaucracy: the fair work agency, whose costs will be borne by business and passed on to the public. The people’s tape is deepest red.

The Bill makes it easier for militant unions to infiltrate workplaces, and it strips out sensible curbs on their power. Strikes will hit the public harder without Conservative safeguards such as those that guarantee minimum service levels. An impact assessment of the Trade Union Act 2016 indicated that it would cut strikes by about 35%.

[Perran Moon (Camborne and Redruth) (Lab)]

Will the hon. Member give way?

[John Cooper]

No, I have waited 40 years for this. Much of the 2016 Act will be tossed into picket line braziers, and as ever it is the public who will suffer. The plan to make union funding of Labour opt-out, not opt-in, is another back-to-the-future move. It is naked opportunism from the Labour party.

The Bill will be hardest on small and medium-sized businesses, the backbone of the economy. We must not forget that they are run by people who are themselves workers and strivers. Napoleon disparagingly called us a nation of shopkeepers. With legislation as skewed as this, Labour risks shutting the shops and turning us into a nation of strikers and their union rep handmaidens. This skimpy Bill is so heavily skewed that it resembles the blade in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum”, leaving employers strapped in red tape between the ever-present pit of insolvency and the slice, slice, slice of costly, pro-union, anti-growth legislation.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Caroline Nokes)]

I call Lorraine Beavers to make her maiden speech.