Draft Trade Union Act 2016 (Political Funds) (Transition Period) Regulations 2017

Debate between Nigel Huddleston and Angela Eagle

Wednesday 25th January 2017 General Committees

[Ms Eagle]

We have here a particularly mean and nasty part of a grossly mean and nasty Act of Parliament. It was put in place deliberately to make trouble for trade unions, because the Conservative party does not like the voice of working people being heard and being effective, not only in Parliament but in the workplace. What the Conservative party fails to realise is that it is in all our interests for trade unions to do a proper and good job in protecting people at work, because that civilises all the norms in our society. The Government’s motivation in coming up with the legislation and persisting in forcing these kinds of statutory instrument through the House in this way is plain and obvious for all to see.

[Nigel Huddleston (Mid Worcestershire) (Con)]

I have to take issue with the hon. Lady’s comments about representing working people. My wife is a member of a trade union, my father was a trade union shop steward, I come from a working-class family and I went to a comprehensive school; there are many Members of all parties who do their best every day to try to represent working people. When we party politicise things in this way, it does none of us any good. Will she please appreciate that?

[Ms Eagle]

This Government party politicised the entire issue, and they have a history of doing that over years. I will not go into that because you will rule me out of order, Mr Stringer, but it is in the history books that opting out was brought in during the aftermath of the general strike to punish trade unions for having the temerity to stand up for their members’ rights then. What we are seeing now is a similar process.

We all know that opting in reduces participation. We know the Government accept that: we in Parliament all agreed to change pensions so that there is auto-enrolment, because the Government want more people to enrol in workplace pensions. We legislated for auto-enrolment to maximise participation.

The sole point of the particular section of the Act with which this statutory instrument is connected is to reduce participation in political funds, so that there is less money available to trade unions to campaign on issues that are important to them in the workplace—health and safety, wages and the conditions that millions of people up and down this country rely on in their jobs—so that the casualisation, the move to zero-hours contracts and the deregulation of our labour market can carry on without effective barriers to that. That is part of the motivation behind this short statutory instrument. I have never seen a smaller and more innocuous-looking statutory instrument that has been designed to cause so much havoc.

If we were feeling generous about the Conservative party’s motivation in proposing the transition period, I suppose we might think that it is just totally ignorant of how trade unions work, but we know that it is not. The Conservatives consulted the unions, the certification officer and the TUC, although in a very unsatisfactory way, but they completely ignored every aspect of that consultation, which drew attention to the practicalities. The unions are being forced by law, like no other organisation in this country, to put themselves through hoops for arbitrary reasons of political expedience, I suppose, to change how they operate. That is because the Conservative party, which has always been opposed to trade unions having a political voice, happens to think that it can get away with being even more opposed to trade unions having that voice, so that there is less resistance to what the Conservatives want to do to working people in this country in the next few years.