P&O Ferries and Employment Rights

Peter Grant Excerpts

Monday 21st March 2022 Commons Chamber

[Peter Grant (Glenrothes) (SNP)]

I commend the hon. Member for Sheffield, Heeley (Louise Haigh) for her outstanding speech to open the debate, as well as my hon. Friend the Member for Paisley and Renfrewshire North (Gavin Newlands) for his long campaign for legislation to be introduced banning fire and rehire.

The actions of P&O are morally reprehensible and may well turn out to be unlawful, even criminal. I hope those processes are carried out as quickly as possible, but even if the entire board of directors goes to jail, even if they are fined so much that the company goes into liquidation, it will not put a single plate of food on the table in front of the children of any one of the 800 people who have been treated so despicably. They are the ones who matter now. The workers have to be reinstated immediately, but even if they are, P&O and the parent companies in Dubai must be held to account. It must be made clear to them that this Government, the Scottish Government and all the Governments of Europe will not have any truck with a company that treats people so appallingly.

It was mentioned earlier that despite claiming to be losing money, P&O managed to pay dividends of £270 million. Even at £50,000 a person, those 800 employees could have been kept on for six years; it is equivalent to £337,500 per person. Instead of going to the employees though, that money went to the owners. A big chunk of it went to one of the richest and most powerful men in the United Arab Emirates, and therefore in the world—a man who was found in a UK court of law to have probably kidnapped, abducted and imprisoned his own daughters, one of whom accused him in court of torturing her to punish her for running away. Who thought it was a good idea for that person to be allowed to own a controlling interest in a company that is responsible for the livelihood of thousands of British workers, and to allow that individual to have a stranglehold on trade between Britain and Northern Ireland? Who thought it was acceptable for that sort of person to be involved at all in running businesses in these islands? Well, some people obviously did. That’s the free market for you.

We have to ask ourselves what the Government’s response would be to seeing all the ships tied up suddenly, with no notice, people’s plans being cancelled and lorries stuck on the quayside because of trade union industrial action. We would not be here today debating an Opposition motion condemning P&O. We would probably be here debating emergency Government anti-trade union legislation. If this chaos had been caused by the trade unions, the Government would have moved a lot more swiftly and a lot more fiercely against them than they are prepared to do against wealthy Arab oil sheiks. I wonder why that is.

Earlier, a Conservative Member, who is no longer in his seat, wondered why P&O thought it could get away with this action. I wonder. What could it be about six years of rhetoric about the sunlit uplands of a post-Brexit, deregulated, free-for-all Britain that made a big company think it might get away with it? After six years of being told, “We need to get rid of all the red tape that holds back businesses,” and a former Prime Minister actually saying that workers’ rights were one of the things that needed to be looked at post Brexit, I wonder what made P&O think that Britain was a good place to start trampling on the rights of its workers.

The Secretary of State, who, to his credit, turned up for the debate—a lot of his Cabinet colleagues would have run away and hidden—wants to rename the ships. May I suggest that, as a tribute to the legacy his Government are following—the trampling underfoot of centuries of hard-won rights for employees and trade unions—at least one of those ships should be renamed the MV Margaret Thatcher?