Lord Balfe
Main Page: Lord Balfe (Conservative - Life peer)(8 years, 9 months ago)
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Lord Monks (Lab)
My Lords, perhaps I may jump in. The procedure is a little muddled but I think that it makes sense for the general points to be made and for the Minister to reply at the end, provided that she replies to all the points made by my Front Bench colleagues.
I thank the noble Lord, Lord King, for the trailer for this speech, in which I shall talk about Amendment 68. The reason we have a bit of teamwork going on is that in 1984, when the noble Lord, Lord King, was Secretary of State for Employment, the then Government, under Mrs Thatcher, considered this very issue.
Opting in was on the agenda, possibly, but they decided to ask the TUC to come up with a transparent scheme to ensure that people have the right to opt out. I call it the King-Murray agreement; Len Murray was the negotiator and I was his assistant and scribe on the job. They reached an agreement on opt-out, of which I have a faded copy from 30-odd years ago. We undertook to remind members about their right to opt out and to give them the procedure whereby they could do it. It was done by an information sheet, as it was called then, and we did it. As I say, that was 32 years ago, and we have never had any complaint in the TUC that this agreement has not been carried out, from members, from government—from either of the two major political parties—or from employers.
As has been mentioned by my noble friend Lord Collins, unions already have to ballot every 10 years on whether it is legitimate for them to have a political fund at all, and they have done that four times since 1984, most recently in 2014. If we are going to go down the deregulation route of two out for one in, then this is one of the ones that should go out at some stage. However, we are still doing the ballot and we have never lost one. Indeed, as my noble friend Lord Collins said, we have actually put on some extra funds.
I am expecting that the Government will say that the King-Murray agreement has not been honoured in full by the unions—I have seen the letter to which reference was made earlier. But the fact is that it has been carried out, and it has been carried out in various ways: by inclusion on the membership form, which more than half the unions do, and by reference on the union website. I dug out a copy of the Unite exemption form that I printed from the website, which makes it extremely clear. Unite, UNISON, USDAW and the GMB—the four largest unions, and 90% of the affiliated trade union membership of the Labour Party—provide it in a very prominent place on their websites, and with references to it in union journals and communications. Thirty-two years on, unions are still carrying out that agreement.
Have there been any problems? None that I know of, and I have been around all those years, since carrying the bag into the office of the noble Lord, Lord King, for Len Murray. If there are any problems, and we are very ready to listen to those, we will take them up. If any union is not doing what it should be or what the four large unions are already doing, we will take them up on that; we will tell them what is at stake and that they need to get into line.
My amendment seeks to provide for the drawing up of a code of practice on contracting-out—an updating of the King-Murray agreement, because obviously information sheets are not quite the same thing in the age of digital technology, websites and so on. In that way, much more cheaply, efficiently and effectively, and without any accusations of political partisanship from the Conservative Party, we could sort out any problems there are that the Government know about and we do not. That was the wise course taken by Mrs Thatcher and the noble Lord, Lord King, in 1984. They did not want to hit the Labour Party—and they could easily have done so at that time—or the funding base, but they did take on a particular issue, to which we responded.
Despite the nice way that the Minister often puts it, I believe that the only possible explanation for this measure, a return to contracting-in, is an attack on Labour Party funding, the impact of which will be measured by the Select Committee. It is also, by the way, an attack on unions not affiliated to the Labour Party, which the noble Lord, Lord Balfe, has been championing, that have developed political funds since 1984 and get caught in this particular cross-fire, and quite unfairly too.
Contracting in was introduced after the General Strike in 1927, and it poisoned the trade union mind, so much so that the very first thing that the Labour Government of 1945 did was to repeal it and go back to contracting out. I think it was Hartley Shawcross who said, at the other end of the corridor, “We are the masters now”—not a very pleasant thing to say, but that gives some sense of the bitterness that there was around the question of opting in. So I ask the Government to follow the examples of Winston Churchill in the late 1940s, who warned against interfering in the other parties’ funding mechanisms without agreement, and of Mrs Thatcher in the 1980s, to eschew any suggestion of political malice and to show some statesmanship.
Lord Balfe
My Lords, it is 36 years since I last agreed with the noble Lord, Lord Wrigglesworth, and at that time we were both in a different party. Perhaps I could add a few things. First, I have stood here before and said of certain things that they were in the manifesto and that we should respect the manifesto. This is one of the things in this Bill that is not in the manifesto, and I echo something that I think that my noble friend Lord Cormack said: if I were starting from here I would not have a Bill. But we have a Bill and it reflects some of the commitments in the manifesto.
Perhaps I could add to my noble friend Lord King’s history book something a bit more up-to-date. I was fortunate enough to be expelled from the Labour Party in 2001, and I was even more fortunate to be rung up by the present Prime Minister’s office in 2007 after he became leader. He asked me to go to see him and I wondered what this was all about, because I had done no deals when I joined the Conservative Party. He said to me, “We have got far too distant from the unions. I would like you to get a link built between the trade union movement and the Conservative Party”. For five years, I worked away at that endeavour—with, I think, some success. The unions are never going to be the best friends of the Labour Party but there is no reason for them to be the enemies.
Noble Lords
Lord Balfe
Sorry, the Conservative Party—it is probably true of the Labour Party as well if you look at it.
Baroness Smith of Basildon
I say to the noble Lord that old habits die hard.
Lord Balfe
There is no need for there to be a huge gap between us. One of the points that I put forward when I was working for the Conservative Party in conjunction with the 2010 manifesto was a suggestion that instead of contracting in to the political levy, one should be enabled on the box to tick any political party to receive part of the political levy donation—any party represented in Parliament, to prevent money going to fascists and the like. That was rejected by a very senior person who is still in the Cabinet, who said to me that it would be unfair unless we had an overall settlement of the party funding issue, because it would mean impacting on one party without having an overall effect.
I have made my views clear in this House before: I do not believe in public funding of political parties. But this is not public funding. I do not queue up to get my hand in the gravy bowl to give money on the basis of the number of votes or things like that. In fact, if it were left to me, I should set a quite low limit of probably no more than £2,000 a year on donations to political parties. I happen to be suspicious: if people put more than £2,000 in, I say, what on earth are you after, then?
We could look at the issue of contracting in or out, but only in the context of a reform of the system. The noble Lord, Lord Wrigglesworth, is absolutely right. Anyone who has had anything to with the trade union movement knows that three months is a ridiculous timespan. It is just not administratively possible, any more than it is possible to convert to not giving away plastic bags in three months: you cannot do it. I am afraid that this clause in the Bill is not motivated by anything other than a desire to take a partisan stand. One of our strengths in the House of Lords is that we can be a little more independent than in other places. I am very unhappy with this as a system, and the whole way it has been put forward is wrong. I am not against the principle of contracting in as part of an overall reform, but this is not the way to do it.
The whole political fund thing of course went wrong. As my noble friend Lord King probably knows, it was brought in because they thought that if they gave the unions a chance, all the union members would vote against political funds. If I remember rightly, the trade union movement got a chap called Bill Keyes to organise political funds, and he did brilliantly: he almost doubled the number of unions with political funds. Not a single ballot has ever been lost. This could bounce back the other way if we pursue this particular reform. It is neither fair nor democratic, and we should think very carefully before we upset the democratic apple cart.
I speak from this side of the House, from a party that is not affected. But we in the House of Lords, an unelected Chamber, to an extent have the strength to ask the Government to please go away and think again. We are not asking the Minister to give concessions tonight, because we realise that this is complex, but as it stands this is a very partisan move. I do not think that it has a place in a trade union Bill, and it is not in the manifesto. I appeal to the Government to think carefully and to at least allow a version of the noble Baroness’s amendment on to the book to give a decent amount of time so that this can be done properly.
Lord Cormack
My Lords, as one who has never been a member of the Labour Party, I entirely agree with the forceful plea made by my noble friend Lord Balfe. I very much hope that this does not come to a vote on Report, but I have to give notice that if it does, unamended, I will almost certainly vote against it, because it is intrinsically unfair. If one tries to stand for anything in public life, it should be for fairness. Of course my noble friend cannot announce concessions tonight, but I appeal to her to listen very carefully indeed to everything that has been and will be said.
The way forward, if there is to be legislation, has probably been hinted at in the extraordinarily important speech made by my noble friend Lord King of Bridgwater. As he said, he negotiated in good faith with the then leaders of the TUC and an agreement was reached, which clearly has been honoured. What is not clear—my noble friend himself made it abundantly plain that he did not know—is whether it has been honoured more in the breach than in the observance or more in the observance.
I am prepared to give the benefit of the doubt until it is proved otherwise, on the same basis that a man or woman is innocent until proved guilty. But if it does transpire that this has not been honoured as scrupulously as the noble Lord, Lord Monks, believes it has been and should have been, and if it is considered that there should be any legislation on this, it is the enacting of that code of practice that should follow. We should not have what is proposed in this Bill—and we most certainly must get rid of this utterly iniquitous three months. It is quite wrong. The noble Lord, Lord Wrigglesworth, made a very effective and telling speech on this.