Trade Unions

Lord Murphy of Torfaen Excerpts

Thursday 18th July 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Murphy of Torfaen (Lab)]

It is always a great pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Lane-Fox, who made a wonderfully relevant and important contribution to this debate—as did my noble friend Lord Jordan when he opened this debate with a very important speech. He referred particularly to the ILO, and by chance I was in Versailles yesterday. I had forgotten that, as well as the peace settlement in 1919, the Treaty of Versailles set up the ILO. It is quite fitting that we should commemorate that great body today.

I have been a member of a trade union all my life —for 47 years I have been a member of the Transport and General Workers’ Union, now Unite, as well as other unions: USDAW, NATFHE and the National Association of Co-operative Officials, which is now long gone. I came from the industrial valleys of south Wales, where being a member or supporter of a trade union was part of life; everybody was. My father was a member of the South Wales Miners’ Federation and later the T&G. Some 250,000 men worked in the pits and tens of thousands in the steelworks. Eventually they went, followed by the big factories such as—in my former constituency in south Wales, for example—Lucas Girling, the great car manufacturer, and ICI Fibres, which had started life as British Nylon Spinners. My noble friend Lord Morris is of course aware of those two great industries there. Between them, in a relatively small Welsh valley, those two industries had nearly 10,000 members of a trade union, nearly all in the Transport and General but in others as well. That has changed dramatically.

What has come through in this debate today is the changing face of work. Listen carefully to what my noble friend Lord Whitty told us: there are still people in this country who live on not just a minimum wage but a poverty wage. There are people who still need what trade unions give in protecting their pay, conditions of work, pensions, holidays—all the things the trade unions were originally formed to do and did extremely well when we had the big industries and great solidarity between workers. But it is different, and much more difficult to organise, in the current situation. The noble Baroness, Lady Lane-Fox, told us how difficult it was; others will as well. The task—the challenge—is as great today as when the trade unions were originally formed.

The other issue I raise with your Lordships is the importance of the trade unions in shaping our society over the past 100 years. When I first joined the Labour Party in the 1960s, many of our councillors, our Members of Parliament and our Ministers were long-standing members of trade unions. They brought huge wisdom and experience with them to their respective representative roles. As a consequence of that, and of the trade unions being part of the 1945 Labour Government 20 years earlier, the world was changed.

The Labour Party would have been nothing without that link with the trade union movement and as a result we had great figures, two of them, by chance, Welshmen: Jim Griffiths, who introduced the welfare state, and Aneurin Bevan, who introduced the National Health Service, both leading members of the South Wales Miners’ Federation. Of course, we also had the work of Ernest Bevin, who my noble friend Lord Morris referred to, not just as Minister of Labour but as Foreign Secretary. He is widely regarded as one of the finest Foreign Secretaries this country ever had. He came from poverty in the West Country and effectively ensured that NATO was introduced: he was a founder of NATO, with the United States, and a great Foreign Secretary. We forget the role of the trade unions in improving our world and improving our country at our peril.

I do not know what Mr Boris Johnson thinks of trade unions—we will soon find out, I am sure—but I hope he will reflect that it is better to have trade unions on your side, it is better for a big company to have a good working relationship with trade unions, because it works, and it is better to have government working in tandem with the trade union movement. I point to just one example, in Wales. For 21 years now in that country, which has had its own devolved Administration—its own Government—there has been a regular working relationship with the trade union movement, the Wales TUC, and with the big trade unions, and the smaller ones, for that matter. There have been no strikes and no public sector disputes, because of the significant link in that country between the trade unions and the Government. It is not a party link, far from it, but a link that meant the Government saw trade unions as part of the social fabric, not as enemies of the people. I sincerely hope Mr Johnson will take the same view. He might also, by the way, tell us what the Government intend to do with the report Matthew Taylor produced two years ago. The Taylor report came up with some very interesting suggestions, the Government responded and then nothing happened. We live in interesting times, but these times will still be shaped by the trade union movement’s huge significance for our people.