Angela Rayner’s Employment Rights Bill, hurtling its way onto the statute books, threatens to turn Britain’s economy back 50 years.
Then, the all-powerful trade unions brought the nation to a shuddering halt, offering a foretaste of what is to come over the next few years as Labour’s Bill will light the match for widespread strikes.
The potential damage to an already stuttering economy, weighed down by the Chancellor’s growth-sapping £40 billion of tax rises, doesn’t bear thinking about.
Passage of the Bill – a project long cherished by former union chieftain Rayner – would be a shattering blow to the bitterly won reforms of the 1980s.
Margaret Thatcher’s embrace of lower taxes and the free market, and her crushing of union power, ushered in decades of rising living standards and prosperity.
That Tory legacy, unchallenged by the 1997 Blair-Brown government, is set to go up in flames, like an oil drum brazier on a picket line.
We have already seen how Chancellor Rachel Reeves’s award of inflation-busting pay rises to railwaymen, NHS staff, employees across the public sector – without any productivity agreements – have done nothing to assuage the greed of some workers.
Resident doctors are leading the charge, their sense of grievance and entitlement stoked by the rabidly Leftist union, the British Medical Association.
Barely a day now passes without union groups threatening to bring vital sectors of the economy to a standstill, from oil rigs and trains to healthcare.
As a young financial journalist in the 1970s, I witnessed firsthand the appalling damage done to Britain by unchecked union power.
As inflation soared after the 1973 oil embargo imposed by Arab countries, the Labour government was bombarded with demands for double-digit pay increases.
Binmen let the streets of London pile up with rat-infested rubbish, and quaysides were stacked with essential imports waiting to be loaded onto lorries, as dock workers joined in the chorus of strikes. It would be wrong for me to suggest that anything so calamitous is approaching.
The cold embrace of the IMF seems a long way off. However, the spectre of a general strike, which Angela Rayner’s Bill brings us closer to, will jangle nerves in boardrooms and the Treasury alike – as it will in homes across the country.
Many commuters hold bitter memories of shivering at stations and being unable to get to work as rail staff went on strike last year. Similarly, nurses and junior doctors undid the post-pandemic goodwill when they cancelled appointments and left accident and emergency wards skeleton staffed while they banged the drum for absurdly high pay rises.
Those strikers were paid off by Starmer on coming to power, and inevitably they are now grumbling for more. There appears to be no understanding among our union brothers and sisters that the UK faces dire budgetary problems, a legacy of the shocks caused by the pandemic and the war in Ukraine.
Reeves added to the woes with her tax on employment when she raised National Insurance Contributions on businesses.
The result has been predictable, with 276,000 more people unemployed and a return to stubborn, above 2 per cent, inflation.
The Employment Rights Bill, which allows for bullying strike powers and attacks flexibility afforded by part-time work and zero hours contracts, will be the latest blow to business confidence. And Labour wonders why its growth mission has failed.
For Rayner, extending the right of trade unions to strike by lowering the 50 per cent turnout rule for ballots and allowing instant notice of industrial action, is her reward to a union hierarchy that helped her rise up the greasy pole.
In her biography, she boasts: ‘I was mouthy and would take no messing from management.’ Let’s see if she takes any ‘messing’ from the public on whom she is about to inflict her socialist agenda.
The Deputy Prime Minister and her party are embarking on a course that will add to business costs, sap the willingness of companies to invest and devastate efforts to reboot the economy.
