MPs held a debate in Westminster Hall today about zero hours contracts. Actually, to be specific, Labour MPs held a Westminster Hall debate today, which Jo Swinson replied to as the employment minister. Adjournment debates aren’t often that newsworthy, but what made this debate noteworthy was that it marks another example of the Conservatives failing to respond to a social phenomenon, instead leaving a vacuum for Labour to stamp their own argument on it.
What do the Conservatives think about these contracts, under which workers are not guaranteed a set number of hours per week? You could probably guess that MPs on the right would say there is a compelling argument for labour market flexibility in a country with a comparatively generous welfare safety net. A free market argument would be that it is better that light employment regulation enables more people to stay in the labour market when harsh conditions mean jobs are more difficult to come by.
But this is all guesswork because we haven’t heard any such case from the Tories. Instead, zero hours contracts have become a Labour issue, with Andy Burnham saying Labour should ban them. Vince Cable has announced a review into possible abuses of the contracts, but that and Jo Swinson’s reply today was the most we’ve heard from anyone in government, and Cable and Swinson are of course both Lib Dems. The way the Labour party is focusing on this issue while the Tories try to pretend it doesn’t exist reminds me of the way the party has approached food banks: deep down most Conservatives believe in a strong society that responds to problems government either causes or is rubbish at sorting out, but it took so long for the party to work out what to say about them that it is now nigh-on impossible to take any other view than that they are a result of an Evil Tory Government.
Like the ‘bedroom tax’, zero hours contracts even have a scary name that means their supporters struggle to make a good argument for them without using that off-putting framing. If someone had seen the row coming, they might have framed these contracts as ‘flexi-contracts’, but again it’s too late to do that.
The opposition MPs did not hesitate to point out that the grand committee room wasn’t exactly heavy on the Tories today. But why should the party wait for Labour to brand certain issues? If the Conservatives don’t think the contracts are a bad thing, then they should be bold and jolly well say so. It’s not as though refusing to talk about an issue is really an effective method of making it go away: the way Labour backbenchers have hammered away at food banks shows that this is certainly not the case. This isn’t to say that there aren’t problems with the contracts, or even that they’re necessarily a good or a bad thing, but it is a failure on the part of the Tory machine to not respond at all.
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