Industrial Relations

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons am 12:00 am ar 4 Rhagfyr 1973.

Danfonwch hysbysiad imi am ddadleuon fel hyn

Photo of Mr Paul Rose Mr Paul Rose , Manchester, Blackley 12:00, 4 Rhagfyr 1973

During recent weeks the House has witnessed remarkably unseemly postures by the Government. The Chancellor of the Exchequer last week performed feats to which perhaps even Mr. Uri Geller would not aspire. The right hon. Member did not bend metal but he certainly bent the facts when he blamed the incompetence of the Government over the economy and industrial relations in a period of four years on what was, at that time, four nights without overtime by the miners.

The Prime Minister's contortions are not merely verbal. He crawled on his knees to lick the oil from the boots of the sheikhs while simultaneously kicking the miners in the teeth. That puts him in a class of his own. His contortion is to suggest that the fault does not lie with the Government. But the former Secretary of State for Employment was responsible for the Industrial Relations Act. Perhaps even more responsible was the former Solicitor-General, who had so much to do with its drafting. It is the direct result of their activities in 1971 that we now face the present situation. The former Solicitor-General is now the chief window-dresser for the Government's bankrupt stock. We know his record with regard to the consumer.

Today Sir John Donaldson has come under attack. It is right to recall that he is no more than a paid servant of an institution and a code of law which, from the start, was doomed. It was doomed to exacerbate tensions and heighten bitterness in industrial relations. The hon. and learned Member for South-port (Mr. Percival) is wrong because the bitterness is as strong today as it ever was.

The late Nye Bevan had something apposite to say about the organ grinders and monkeys, and that is the attitude I take. As Parliament is supreme, it is up to Parliament to right a wrong. If a wrong has been done, as I believe it has, that can be put right by the House.

Let the Government not say that they were not warned about the situation. I remember that my right hon. Friend the Member for Blackburn (Mrs. Castle), my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Walton (Mr. Heffer), my hon. Friend the Member for Doncaster (Mr. Harold Walker) and I repeated over and over again from the Opposition Front Bench warnings of the sort of things that would come to pass if the Bill became law. I remember the first time that I addressed the House on the subject, when I said that the heartland of the case against the Bill was that The existing agencies are to be placed within the context of the National Industrial Relations Court. … It is the injection of this legalism into the hitherto voluntary framework of industrial relations … that is perhaps the most objectionable feature of this irrelevant and irresponsible assembly of trans-Atlantic abstractions".—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 19th January 1971 ; Vol. 809, c. 934–35.] That was a reference to Taft-Hartley and Lindrum-Griffin.

The bitterness injected by the Bill was already becoming evident. Since then we have had some curious spectacles. We have seen the NIRC being over-ruled by the Court of Appeal, and the Court of Appeal then being over-ruled by the House of Lords on what was basically an issue whether trade union officials are agents of their members or whether they are policemen expected to keep their members in line. The Transport and General Workers' Union, which, unlike the AUEW, did go before the NIRC, suffered as a result to the tune of £55,000. In addition, perhaps to the advantage of my profession, it must have incurred hefty legal costs as well. We had the farcical spectacle of the Official Solicitor in another case being summoned to get the courts off the hook on which the Government had impaled them. It was the fault of the Government. We saw men going to gaol although we were told time and time again during those debates that that would not happen because of the Act.

We were told, ironically, that it would strengthen trade unions and negotiations. In fact, it has led to fragmentation, to spurious breakaway bodies which seek to compete on a terrain where the unscrupulous have a registered advantage as against genuine trade unions.

Many thousands of pounds are now being spent on footling and futile litigation. Recently in another place there was a hearing lasting about three weeks caused by a breakaway body in the Post Office. There is another case in the pipeline that is likely to last just as long.

That is why even people such as Lord Robens rejected what he termed the icy, iron precision of the law. He said that flexibility and pragmatism could not be reflected in a court, however informally constituted. Incidentally, one hon. Member seems to think that if only Sir John Donaldson would wear a wig and gown all would be saved. That was irrelevant.

Somehow the Government seek to turn the criticism from the Frankenstein's monster they deliberately created three years ago on to those whom they sought to enmesh in the tangled web of the Industrial Relations Court. Having apparently protected trade union funds by Section 154, under which they are not to be used in furtherance of a trade dispute, they then permitted the courts to use the law of contempt to vitiate that very protection, so that the unions are no longer protected when the law of contempt is invoked against them. If Hugh Scanlon is in breach of the letter of the law, the NIRC has acted contrary to the spirit of the law, unless—and this may well be the case—the spirit was always intended to allow for just that sort of punitive and vindictive action against lawfully constituted bodies which were not prepared to act out a rôle for which they were never formed.

The NIRC—has—nobody suggests that it intended this—sequestrated funds that were not so much those of the AUEW as of the Labour Party. Whether or not that was the intent, it is the result, and the Government should do something about it.

There is no breach of law in refusing to register or refusing to attend a civil hearing if one is prepared to accept the consequences. My hon. Friend the Member for West Ham, North (Mr. Arthur Lewis), for whom I have a great deal of respect on a wide range of issues, has been somewhat ill advised to suggest that trade unions are breaking the law when in fact they are asserting a right under the law—the right not to register and not to attend a court. There is nothing wrong in that. It is not breaking the law.

The consequences of that action are accepted.