Trade Union Bill
Debate between Lord Balfe and Lord Lea of Crondall
Lord Balfe (Con)
My Lords, I am advised that at the beginning of each week’s proceedings I should declare my interests as president of the British Dietetic Association and unpaid parliamentary adviser to the British Airline Pilots Association, which I duly do. I also give my warm thanks to the Minister, particularly at this point because in the course of the next couple of days she is probably not going to be too happy with some of the things I say. On this set of amendments, though, she might be.
As I read them, the amendments seek to exempt the expenditure from being counted as political expenditure; they do not ban the money being spent. My personal view is that the use of political funds has more or less got completely out of hand. Recently, noble Lords will have received from an organisation called HOPE not Hate, which was set up to combat racism, a glossy four-page booklet saying that we should vote against the Government’s views on electoral reform. I challenged this with the Charity Commission, which came back with some very wishy-washy arguments, to such an extent that its chairman has offered to look at the issue again.
I query how far these things are being pushed. In fairness, people do not join a trade union to campaign for whatever happens to be the favoured cause of the national executive of that union; they join, quite rightly, for social protection.
Lord Lea of Crondall (Lab)
I remember that HOPE not Hate was very interesting at the time on the question of the electoral register. My question is: does the noble Lord accept that if he has a go at the trade unions, he has to have a go at the fact that an organisation such as the Institute of Economic Affairs can get charitable status? Do we not need a level playing field, and ought we not to freeze where we are until we have looked at what constitutes one?
Lord Balfe
I certainly agree that we need a level playing field. In the past, noble Lords have been treated to my views on political funding, which is out of line with regard to all the parties. I do not think that public money should be used for political funding, and there should be a severe limit on how much can be donated to parties, so we agree on that.
This clause, however, as I understand it, is not aimed at preventing unions contributing; it merely asks that they be exempt from contributing from their political funds. Personally, I do not accept that argument: if there is going to be a political fund, that is what it should be used for. I fully accept the work done by the trade union movement, which the noble Lord, Lord Hain, has outlined; it was considerable. I was a part of it at that time and I remember slightly more members of the Conservative Party than he does, but I will concede that they were not a majority at any point.
I also counsel that some of the arguments put forward by the noble Lord on the Front Bench were not strictly about political funds. The Minister will know that in the last few weeks I have introduced her to no fewer than 10 trade unions, all from what we would call the moderate wing of the trade union movement, and only one with a political fund—and that one not affiliated with the Labour Party. There is a consensus in certain quarters that a political fund is not necessary to defend the legitimate interests of unions’ members. That is possibly why the majority of unions do not have political funds. In short, they can do what they want to defend their own trade union members within their general fund. It is only when they want to step outside that and organise what I would call extramural activity, which is not often closely connected with the aims of their individual members, that we run into this sort of problem.
This is probably the only speech that I shall make that is helpful for the Minister, but I hope that she will resist this amendment and that the unions will continue to use their political funds for this. They should not be exempt.
Lord Balfe
Perhaps I can help my noble friend by saying that the Conservative Party has a democratic structure where the local bodies have a much higher degree of autonomy than in the Labour Party, in which everything is centralised. I doubt that CCO knows how much money Cambridge Conservatives, of which I have the honour to be president, has, because we are not required to divulge it. All donations have to be declared, but a different structure exists.
Lord Lea of Crondall
Is the noble Lord aware of the adage that what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander?
Lord Balfe
I am aware of all those sayings, and I see some of the difficulties that noble Lords opposite mention, but when I was secretary of the Royal Arsenal Co-op political fund, we had to submit full accounts to the central board, which detailed far below £2,000 in expenditure, so I really do not see the great difficulty in submitting these returns.
Trade Union Bill
Debate between Lord Balfe and Lord Lea of Crondall
Lord Lea of Crondall (Lab)
My Lords, it is getting late in the evening and I do not know whether we will get anywhere near the debate on check-off, but there are some similarities and some dissimilarities from this sort of question in a later clause. The Minister sent us a very courteous letter today about listing the bodies which will definitely be classed as within the public-sector umbrella on check-off. We have two timescales in which to give more thought to this; one is the longer-term timescale, naturally, between now and Report. Between now and Thursday, the go-ahead for some standardisation of which body is in which category in the public sector raises the question of terminology. The point has been made already, but I would like to put it slightly differently —that this is a game not of definitions but of looking at the Government’s criteria for their own judgment of which bodies they want to fall within scope.
Lord Balfe
The noble Lord mentioned a letter, and I understand that a letter has been placed in the Library. Could the Minister follow the good example of the noble Lord, Lord Bates? When he circulated letters, he did so directly to all the people who were involved in the debate on the Immigration Bill. When I discover that letters are in the Library, it is not exactly much help. But I thank the noble Lord for mentioning it.
Lord Lea of Crondall
I suspect that I got one because I have an amendment down in the group on check-off—I do not know. These procedural points arise, and I suspect that the problem of reaching beyond the public sector is one that really cannot be looked at without any crossover, with regard to facilities. On the other hand, it would be much better to have the debate on check-off on Thursday; then we can all have time to think about the jigsaw between them.
Trade Union Bill
Debate between Lord Balfe and Lord Lea of Crondall
Lord Lea of Crondall (Lab)
My Lords, I hope I will not go too far down memory lane, but I would like to make a point of contrast between what we are discussing here and what we have often discussed in the trade union movement, which is about taking a more constructive position on the new world economy. Some months ago, some of us carried out an exercise with the TUC and UK members of European works councils with trade union and employer members. Frances O’Grady, Chuka Umunna and my noble friend Lord Monks were there, along with representatives of big companies, employers and workers, discussing investment, skills et cetera. It occurred to me during the course of the afternoon, listening to the various contributions, to ask how what we have been trying to do in that sense squares with the positions of the ideological fundamentalists of Conservative Central Office at present. How do those two things square? They do not.
I will give another example. We have growing inequality, which, as you can see around the OECD, correlates with less collective bargaining. Growing inequality is the opposite of what we want, so do we need more collective bargaining? Yes or no? The answer is yes, but does the Minister think the answer is yes? If we have this correlation between growing inequality and less collective bargaining, it would not be a bad idea to think it has something to do with organising and having this constructive relationship.
I suspect that the reason these things do not add up together is that there is some type of schizophrenia inside the Conservative Party—the same schizophrenia that I think we have with the “pull up the drawbridge” position on the European question. How can we remove this sort of misunderstanding, which I think is part of our mutual problem? Some speakers opposite have tried to imply that it is we and the trade unions who have walked away from social partnership, social dialogue or whatever you like to call it, but there is no evidence for that at all. It is the Conservative Party which has recently backed itself into a silo—today’s fashionable word.
Let me just remind the House of one little bit of history. In 1998 we arranged, for the first time ever, a meeting at the TUC with the leaders of the Conservative Party. William Hague led the team, and George Osborne was there. A number of colleagues who are here this evening were on the trade union side—my noble friends Lord Morris, Lady Donaghy, Lady Drake and Lord Monks, as I recall. Although it was partly subliminal, the message was a very important one: we were saying that we accept your legitimacy, as the Conservative Party, as part of the body politic in this country and that you should acknowledge ours. I am not quite sure that we are now seen as legitimate. We are perhaps in a better state than we were 100 years ago in our relationship—it has been a long journey since the Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists—but where are we now? Does the Conservative Party really want to go down the track of trying to delegitimise us by setting up a caricature of trade unionism? The caricature has us as An Enemy of the People—I am referring there to a play by Ibsen, in case anyone thought I was quoting Mao Tse-Tung.
How does that fit with all the rhetoric about the need to work together to increase our world market share? Answer: it does not. Some Members seem to want to conjure up an idea that we are so lacking in intelligence that we do not understand that public services are part of our living standards, and that people do not realise that when there is a strike in the public sector.
Lord Balfe
I point out to the noble Lord that the general secretary of the TUC, Frances O’Grady, has been within the past year to a group meeting of the Conservative Peers—I do not know whether she has addressed the Labour Peers—and we are still awaiting an invitation for our Prime Minister to address the Trades Union Congress. Perhaps that could be facilitated; perhaps the general secretary of the TUC could be invited to the Labour group of Peers.
Lord Lea of Crondall
I do not think that the Bill has helped to facilitate it; that is all I can say.
The issue is that we are now not being seen as part of the great happy family, which was the idea, but delegitimised, which is my thesis. I am trying to get someone to point out whether that is true or not with some evidence. The Bill seems, with one provision after another—beginning with my noble friend Lord Monks, everybody has gone through the list—to be intended to reduce the number of members, the size of any political fund and so on. That is the effect. If that is not intended, someone has not done their arithmetic properly in designing the Bill. I should be interested to hear whether the Minister thinks that I have got that wrong, and why.
Organising is inherently more difficult at present than when we had lots of big workplaces and there was a higher trade union density. That is true across the OECD. Where we are at the moment was summed up in a Financial Times editorial: the Government are crossing the road to pick a fight with the trade unions. Why? One reason might be political advantage—perish the thought. If the idea is not to cut the legs off the trade unions or the financing of the Labour Party, the Government have a very funny way of going about it.
On the point about check-off, the Government seem to think that because some private sector companies are working to government contracts, they can somehow reach into the private sector and tell them how to organise check-off. This has certainly been mentioned to us as what is happening at Sellafield and Dounreay. Even before the Bill has passed, the Civil Service has written to companies saying that this is how they have to go, and they have to step into line as if they were in the public sector. I would like that to be looked into, if it has not, because we are told that that is what is happening.
The reason I find that rather strange is that, having been a member for some years of the central arbitration committee judging recognition claims, I know that if you get recognition, you have a collective agreement—in Sellafield or wherever it is—and it is a natural part of the agreement that you do check-off. Unless the Government have some ideological reason in mind for doing it, I do not think they should interfere with or intervene in voluntary arrangements that suit both parties.
I shall say a couple of sentence about party funding. A joint approach on this is an idea whose time has come. There are naturally the usual caveats, but we know that there is something weird about the attempt to go back to 1927, after the General Strike. Contracting in was repealed by Attlee in 1945 and was not revisited by Churchill or Thatcher. I therefore have some sympathy with what the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, is trying to do, but there are cherry-picking problems in this. I do not think it is possible to assume that an individual and a union with 1 million members are the same thing. It is clear that there are trade-offs, but the time has come to investigate because there is mutual interest at present, which there has not been until now, to do something along that line.