Is Angela Rayner really being sidelined in this government, having been steamrollered by the rush for growth championed by Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves? That is a hypothesis which has been put forward many times in recent months, but it is not true to judge by the reaction of businesses to the Employment Rights Bill.
The CBI – which gave the impression that it couldn’t get rid of the Tories fast enough after Boris Johnson’s Peppa Pig fiasco – is not the least bit impressed, with chief executive Rain Newton-Smith complaining: ‘The government has been commendably open to seeking feedback from industry about these plans,’ but that it ‘has not translated into meaningful change to several key areas where the legislation locks in an irreversible direction of travel.’
In other words: you gave the impression that you were listening to us, but you then ignored us.
Particular areas of grievance for the CBI, as well as the Federation of Small Businesses, are the demand that employers offer guaranteed hours to workers currently employed on zero-hours contracts, and an increase in the awards that employment tribunals are allowed to make against employers. It is feared that the creation of a Fair Work Agency will also lead to a large boost in the number of cases coming before tribunals.
There are parts of the government’s growth agenda which do not conflict with Rayner’s views – notably on planning, where Rayner has been only too enthusiastic about declaring war on Nimbys. But when the drive for growth does conflict with the demands of Rayner and her trade union friends, it seems that it is she who is winning. Indeed, she seems to be succeeding in driving her agenda with No. 10 rather more successfully at the moment than Ed Miliband is pushing his net-zero ambitions. She has got pretty much everything she wanted into the Employment Rights Bill – and is insistent that the only obvious casualty, the ‘right to switch off’, will be introduced at a later stage. That the government has introduced many measures as amendments rather than including them in the original published bill suggests a certain amount of movement in her direction.
Is that because of her own persuasive powers, though, or is it because she is the most senior cabinet representative of a far bigger force: the unions, which still bankroll Labour in spite of Tony Blair’s efforts to derive more of its income from individual members? One measure in the bill says it all. Unions will no longer be required to write to their members once every ten years to ask them whether they would like to opt out of donating some of their membership fees to the Labour party.
Imagine if employers were deducting money from their employees’ pay packets and donating it to the Tories. Somehow, I don’t think the government would tolerate that – still less would they allow employers to get away with it decade after decade without even asking their employees.
The last Conservative government never did take on the unions – other than with a piece of legislation demanding minimum train services on strike days, which was never enforced anyway. Now Labour is back, the unions are rampant again – and it is their interests which are taking strong priority over Starmer and Reeves’s stated aim of promoting growth.
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