Part of the debate – in the House of Commons am 12:00 am ar 4 Rhagfyr 1973.
Earlier in the debate my hon. Friend the Member for Penistone (Mr. John Mendelson) gave the House a little history of the engineers. I recall that in his "Life of Gladstone", Philip Magnus told how, on 10th May 1864, the then leaders of the ASE, the forerunner of the present engineering union, met Gladstone to discuss the possibilities of investing in Government securities. They so impressed Mr. Gladstone that the following day he made his memorable statement that working men deserve the vote.
There are few certainties in politics. However, I can promise the Prime Minister that he will not receive any deputations from the leaders of the present engineers seeking to invest their money with him. We have reached the sad state of affairs in which agents of the Government are scouring the country, confiscating funds which the leaders of the present engineering union have invested. I see that my right hon. Friend the Member for Jarrow (Mr. Fernyhough) has re-entered the Chamber. It was from Hebburn, in his constituency, that £100,000 was taken. The small urban district council at Hebburn will now have to borrow money at a rate 5 or 6 per cent. higher than that at which it borrowed the money from the AUEW. Who will pay the difference? Is it to be charged up to Sir John Donaldson? Surely the ratepayers of the constituency will not have to pay what would be a pretty substantial sum as a sort of fine because of the judgment of Sir John Donaldson? This is a point of importance.
The lawyers have had a field day. They told us how wrong it was for anyone even to seek to defy the law. I shall not go into the finer points of it, but when I heard about the speech by the Lord Chancellor—a speech which has received 10 times more publicity than today's debate will receive—I began to wonder just where were we going. The Lord Chancellor said that :
for the first time in very many years the rule of law is threatened and is threatened openly. I think this country is facing moral and constitutional issues of the gravest order.
What utter piffle that is. What did the Lord Chancellor have in mind when he spoke about it being a long time since this terrible issue had confronted the British people? Had he, as a member of the Tory Party, in mind that it is the only political party which has ever threatened civil war in this country during this century against the constitutionally elected Government of the day. Was that what he had in mind when he spoke about a long time ago? The threat to which I refer happened within my lifetime and his.
Those of us who have put our names to a well-considered Early Day Motion are now indicated as people in the same category as Carson, Bonar Law and F. E. Smith—"Galloper" Smith—the leaders of the Tory Party of years ago. We object to this slur on our characters. We have carefully examined the only constitutional way in which a judge could be removed from office. That Early Day Motion was the beginning of what we hoped would be the setting up of a Select Committee of both Houses which would pass a motion which could result in the judge being removed from office. That would be the only constitutional way to remove the judge. The public may think that when monarchs were deprived of the divine right of kings this right was given to judges. It is an absurd situation.
I hope that a man vested with the great powers of the Lord Chancellor will not use those powers to cast a slur on a large number of hon. Members of this House.
I shall take the coincidence a little further. Following the attempted civil war in Northern Ireland the Tories in this House moved a motion of censure upon the Liberal Government four days after the ship the "Mountjoy", arrived in Larne. One of the members of the Liberal Government at that time was Winston Churchill, and he described the motion of censure as being like a vote of censure by the criminal classes upon the police. I think he had something there.
We are now facing a situation in which we are being indicted merely because we have tried to represent the view of millions of people in this country about the Industrial Relations Act. We have tried to show—and I do not think that it is now in dispute—that the entire trade union movement utterly detests the Act. I also claim that the organised employers are treating the Act with contempt—I do not use the word "contempt" in its legal sense. No employer who is a member of the CBI will touch the act with a barge pole. The Government themselves are treating the Act with more contempt than anyone else. In every dispute where the Government could have invoked the Act they have refused to do so. They have gone to the stage where, rather than invoking the Act, they will bring in a state of emergency. There cannot be much more contempt than that.
The Government did not inherit this Act. It is their own Act. Each time we ask questions about the Act we get the stock reply from the Prime Minister that the Government are willing to consider amendments from the TUC. What kind of childish politics is he playing? Once the TUC begin to suggest amendments the Government will say that this proves that the TUC accepts the Act in principle and merely wishes to amend parts of it.
The trade unions detest the Act, organised employers will not use it, and the Government treat it with contempt. Who is keeping the Act on the statute book? Is the Act being retained for use by 19th century zombies or by a few get rich-quick people who want to cash in on it? It is for the Government—not for us—to say on whose behalf the Act is being kept on the statute book.
Burke once talked about liberty being the basis of law and law being based on morality, but there is no morality left in an Act of this kind. The Government will not use the main provisions of the Act and they are keeping the Act on the Statute Book not for morality but out of pique, spite and viciousness in order to take money from the trade unions concerned. This is no basis for keeping the Act on the statute book. It is not for us to tell the Government how they should amend the Act. It is for them to show why they are keeping it on the statute book despite the fact that no one, including themselves, wants to use it.