The hon. Member for Bosworth (Mr. Adam Butler) finished his speech with an analogy and a reference to the law. He will forgive me if I do not make a further analogy. In the remaining time I shall concentrate on what the Secretary of State said and on what the Attorney-General might wish to say later. I do not wish to be discourteous to the hon. Member for Bosworth, to whom I listened with great care.

The Secretary of State began his speech with a review of the past. I found considerable fault within that review. I am not the only hon. Member who felt that way.

We were reasonably gentle with the Secretary of State today. After all, it was his maiden innings in his new post. But he will know that he has a task before him in which he will be well advised to discard a great deal of the tired history which he gave us today. We all want the right hon. Gentleman to succeed in his task. Party differences apart, there is no right hon. or hon. Member on the Opposition benches who does not wish the Secretary of State to succeed, because most of us take the old-fashioned view of Ministers of Labour. My right hon. Friend the Member for East Ham, North (Mr. Prentice) referred to the time when a Minister of Labour was in a special position among the members of his Cabinet, in that he was the chief conciliator in the State. What has been wrong over the past few years is that Ministers of Labour, under whatever name or title, have moved away from this useful tradition.

I say that the right hon. Gentleman should discard all this faulty history and start afresh. For example he told us, and through us the country and the trade union movement, that there was common ground on the need to introduce legislation of this kind after his Government were elected in 1970. That is not so. The country had been preoccupied for many years with what were called territorial disputes—in other words, disagreements among members of different trade unions about who should do which job. By the time that the present Government were framing their legislation we had passed through that period successfully. In recent years, disputes of that kind have become a matter of history. The situation was put right by the trade union movement, which saw to the solution of the difficulty through individual unions, the General Council of the TUC and, not least, its immediate past General Secretary, Mr. Victor Feather.

The Secretary of State has been given a great deal of faulty history by his Department. He must unlearn it and have a real look at the situation. He will find that the legislation framed by his Government after they were elected in 1970 was historically unnecessary and merely followed a commitment which his party had given its members at a number of Tory Party Conferences. On our television screens in recent years we have all seen people at those conferences going to the rostrum to attack the trade union movement—[Interruption.] I notice the hon. Member for Brighouse and Spenborough (Mr. Proudfoot) laughing. It is quite probable that he took part in some of those tirades. If he did not, he has probably had to sit through a number of them waiting to speak in other debates.

Nothing was more dangerous and futile than the inflammable propaganda against the trade union movement which the Tories worked up before the 1970 election. Thus, they became the prisoners of their own propaganda when they began framing their legislation.

Their other fault was in sending one of their Ministers to the United States of America. It was his proud boast that he toured 13 States studying the Taft-Hartley legislation. He came back thinking that it was the last word in industrial relations legislation. It was the tirades at the Tory Party Conferences and the Government's desire to imitate the Taft-Hartley legislation which produced the Industrial Relations Bill, and it was recognised immediately to be likely to result in nothing but trouble.

I come now to my second correction to what the Secretary of State had to tell us. He said that those of us who demanded the total repeal of the Act showed thereby that we did not want to put anything in its place. When he has learned a little more about his new job he will realise that that is poppycock. We were voicing nothing more than the responsible statement of the General Council of the TUC, which said that it wished to see the Act repealed but at the same time it wanted new legislation introduced to provide the advantages and protections to trade unionists and working people that we have desired for many years. It will not merely be re-enacting what the present legislation contains. It will be improved legislation, including the right to reinstatement, which a Labour Government would put on the statute book at the same moment as they would repeal the present Act.

I turn now to the third statement made by the right hon. Gentleman.