In these turbulent times, it’s good to know there’s one thing we can count on: Keir Starmer’s consistent inconsistency. The Labour leader is at it again, breaking yet another of his past pledges: this time on workers’ rights. In 2021 Sir Keir’s party pledged to create a single status of ‘worker’ in employment law to stop gig economy giants like Deliveroo using the category of bogus self-employment to undermine conditions.
But the Financial Times reports that the party’s policy documents – agreed at last month’s National Policy Forum – now pledge only to consult on ‘a simpler framework’ for differentiating the self-employed from workers. This new policy would create a system that ‘could properly capture the breadth of employment relationships in the UK’ and ensure workers can still ‘benefit from flexible working where they choose to do so’, the newspaper says.
Labour is also said to have refined a pledge to give workers full employment rights from ‘day one’, adding an explicit carve-out for probationary periods in which workers could still be sacked. The left are, predictably, furious. As Andrew Fisher, the author of Jeremy Corbyn’s 2017 manifesto, pointed out: ‘”We’ll consult on doing it” is obviously a dilution from “we’ll do it”‘.
Still, some in Labour appear impressed by Starmer’s shenanigans. For Anas Sarwar has now rowed back on his support for the SNP’s Gender Recognition Reform Bill, despite having claimed it was ‘right’ to vote for it just six months ago. He yesterday refused three times to say if he would back it again and instead suggested that ‘We still have work to do to make sure that we are protecting single-sex spaces based on biological sex [and] I think the government should reflect that they didn’t go far enough and accepting amendments.’
Anything you can do, we can do better…
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