Part of the debate – in the House of Commons am 12:00 am ar 4 Rhagfyr 1973.
In that case I will not pursue this any further.
I tell the Government, that the way in which someone in this high office conducts himself is part of the case we have to examine, and the Attorney-General must not merely skate over these things without giving us precisely related statements on the political implications of the legislation as well as the pure letter of the law.
The right hon. and learned Gentleman knows very well, as do the Government, that it has been the tendency of this Government, and of the Prime Minister in particular, to engage in various policies, to enact a code and then to face the trade unions and say to them, "If you do not accept what we have said in this code you are breaking the law".
The Prime Minister is trying it with the miners. We had almost to coerce him the other day, on a Thursday afternoon, into an admission that the miners had not broken any law whatsoever in refusing to work overtime. It is the repeated technique of this Government, led by the Prime Minister, knowing that the British people are law abiding, to use this kind of propaganda, to confuse what is legitimate activity of an organised working class group with breaking the law, to try to make it appear that everybody opposing the will of the Prime Minister is thereby opposing the whole law-making process if he adopts towards legislation attitudes not acceptable to the Government. This has been a growing tendency.
If they think that that propaganda will work with the people of this country the Government have another think coming. They are gravely mistaken. People are seeing through what they are doing. This is not the first period in British industrial history when Tory Governments have tried to create the impression that the law is what they say it is when they have framed legislation and administered it in a way deliberately directed against the industrial working class—when they allowed an immense increase in the cost of living and said that people could not have wage increases because the law said they could not. None of this will wash.
This is an historic debate.
My right hon. Friend the Member for East Ham, North, who initiated it, has done a service to both industry and the country. The country knows that this legislation is futile, useless and hostile to the best interests of industrial relations. The sooner it is swept away the better it will be for everybody.