The Conservative government shows every sign of feeling let off the leash and enjoying every minute of it.
Radical measures it would have had trouble getting its former Liberal Democratic colleagues to support are now coming off the press almost daily. This week we had new ideas on the NHS, the BBC and much else. Among the most controversial are the plans announced on Wednesday to tighten trade union law. Inevitably these have elicited huge protest from the trade unions themselves and from the Labour Party many of them support. Are these tougher union laws justified or do they amount to a vindictive attack on their political opponents by the Conservative Party?
The new proposals have been widely seen as the most far-reaching changes to union law since those introduced by Margaret Thatcher’s employment secretary, Norman Tebbit, in the 1980s. Most of the reforms concern what unions can and cannot do in pursuit of industrial action:
- Strikes will be illegal unless they follow from a strike ballot in which at least 50% of those eligible to vote have bothered to turn out to do so.
- In key public services such as health, education, fire, transport, the energy sector and border security, 40% of those eligible to vote will have had to have backed strike action for it legally to go ahead.
- Following successful ballots, union leaders will have to call any strike within four months or else be required to conduct the ballots again.
- They will have to give employers two weeks’ notice before engaging in industrial action .
- Employers will be given the legal right to employ strike-breaking agency staff during any strike.
Some union leaders have said these measures will make striking almost impossible and have also asked why such tougher laws are needed now. After all, the number of strikes is far fewer than it used to be. Between April 2014 and April 2015, 704,000 days were lost to industrial action compared with an annual average of around 13 million in the 1970s. In the private sector, only about a sixth of workers belong to a trade union and even in the public sector the figure is only just over half.
But it is recent public sector strikes that seem to have motivated ministers to act. In particular strike action in schools, which cause obvious difficulties for working parents, have tended to be called after very low turnouts in ballots (though the recent Tube stoppage in London was supported by a turnout in the preceding strike ballot by over 80% of workers involved).
The employment minister, Nick Boles, said: ‘People have the right to expect that services on which they and their families rely are not going to be disrupted at short notice by strikes that have the support of only a small proportion of union members. These are sensible and fair reforms that balance the right to strike with the right of millions of people to go about their daily lives without last-minute interruption.’
But the requirement for such high percentages of those voting (and, in the public sector, those voting in favour) has drawn a wry remark from Frances O’Grady, the general secretary of the TUC, who pointed out that these laws were being pushed through by a government that itself secured only 24.3% support of those eligible to vote for it at the recent election. Others have argued that if ballots are so important, why can’t certain forms of industrial action that are currently banned altogether (such as secondary action) become lawful if workers vote in favour of them in sufficient numbers?
Other proposals include consulting on whether unlawful or intimidatory picketing should become a criminal rather than merely a civil offence; and union actions will be put under much greater regulatory scrutiny from the certification officer, who will be given powers to fine unions up to £20,000 for breaches.
The Aslef leader, Mick Whelan, said of the package: ‘It smacks of Germany in the 1930s, when trade union leaders and activists were rounded up and imprisoned, and in some cases executed.’ While many may think this comparison a little far-fetched, there is no doubt that trade unionists see these proposals as a very real attack on their ability to organise and even the Financial Times described government action as ‘aggressive’.
But there is a further proposal that is causing even more controversy. This is that, in future, trade unionists should be required to opt in to paying a levy into their union’s political fund rather than, as now, to opt out. Of the 6.5 million trade unionists in Britain, 4.5 million belong to unions affiliated to the Labour Party, and much of the £25m raised by these unions from the opt-out political levy goes to fund the Labour Party. Everyone knows that if trade unionists are required to make the effort to opt in rather than make the effort to opt out, much less money will be raised.
The Prime Miniser has defended the new proposal on democratic grounds. He said: ‘I think there is a very simple principle here. If you want to give money to a party it should be an act of free will, not something that is taken out of your pay packet without you being told about it properly. If this wasn’t happening in the trade unions, the Labour Party would be saying this was appalling misselling.’
Unions, however, see it as quite simply a way for the Tories to cut Labour off at the knees. Paul Kenny, the general secretary of the GMB union, said: ‘It is clear the Tory Party high command intend to make the Labour Party bankrupt by cutting off the main source of funding that they have relied on since the 1930s’. The reference to the 1930s may have had a particular political point to it because the Tory prime minister of the day, Stanley Baldwin, resisted backbench pressure to use the law to restrict Labour Party funding precisely because he believed it necessary for the party to be adequately funded if it was to serve its democratic purpose.
What has particularly incensed Mr Cameron’s opponents is that there had been an implicit agreement that no action would be taken that would affect the funding of any one political party without a wider agreement affecting the funding of all political parties. It was such an agreement that Nick Clegg, the former LibDem leader and deputy prime minister of the coalition government, tried and failed to secure. Harriet Harman, Labour’s acting leader, condemned the proposal on the grounds that it wasn’t accompanied by any new restrictions on hedge funds giving money to the Tory Party.
The new union laws, are backed by the government as bringing democracy and order both to industrial action and to union spending on political action. But to the trade unions and to the Labour Party they are seen as quite simply a vindictive attempt to curb the ability of ordinary working people to organise themselves in their own interests. Which do you think is true?
