Tories in threat to torpedo unions
Conservative ministers planning to break ‘stranglehold’ on transport and education
THE Conservatives are threatening to launch a double-pronged attack against trade unions in an effort to break their stranglehold on the public.
Grant Shapps, the Transport Secretary, told The Sunday Telegraph that the Government was poised to draw up laws requiring minimum numbers of rail staff to work during a strike. The law would make any industrial action illegal if those levels were not met.
The intervention came as a ballot of 40,000 Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers (RMT) union members was due to close on Tuesday, with Mick Lynch, the body’s general secretary, having warned that a strike would “bring the country to a standstill”. The Transport Salaried Staffs’ Association, which has vowed to coordinate with the RMT, has threatened the biggest disruption since the General Strike in 1926, over job cuts and pay freezes.
Separately, Nadhim Zahawi, the Education Secretary, is planning to loosen the grip of trade unions on schools. Mr Zahawi is examining plans to bolster the rights of teachers who choose not to join unions. He wants to amend the Employment Relations Act to enshrine the rights of teachers to be accompanied to grievance and disciplinary meetings by an external lawyer or representative of a body other than a union. Currently the law only requires employers to allow staff to be joined by a trade union representative or colleague. Government sources suggested that many teachers join unions simply to protect themselves in the event that they face allegations of abuse.
The move, confirmed in a written parliamentary answer to Steve Baker MP, would reignite hostilities between the Government and teaching unions, following rows over the opening of schools during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Rail firms’ plans to minimise disruption in the event of a strike include freight trains being given priority over passenger services to head off potential food and fuel shortages.
Mr Shapps accused unions of treating strikes as a first rather than last resort. He said railways were already on “financial life support” because of the fall in their use as a result of the pandemic.
Citing a pledge in the Conservatives’ manifesto to “require that a minimum service operates during transport strikes”, Mr Shapps said: “We had a pledge in there about minimum service levels. If they really got to that point then minimum service levels would be a way to work towards protecting those freight routes and those sorts of things. We very much hope they will wake up and smell the coffee.”
Pushing ahead with a strike could put more members of the public off train travel altogether, Mr Shapps suggested.
A government source added: “The unions have got to tread carefully. If they do call people out in massive prolonged strikes … they will do enormous damage to their members’ jobs. Rail is now a choice, not a necessity.”
In an interview with this newspaper, Mr Lynch said he had “no doubt” that more RMT workers would vote for the strikes than against them, causing a “national dispute”.
A poll commissioned by Edapt, which provides legal support to teachers, suggested that support for teaching unions had reached a new low, with only 30 per cent of those surveyed satisfied with the support they get from their union.
The poll, by the Teacher Tapp app, of almost 7,000 teachers, found that 28 per cent would prefer not to be a member of a union if alternative support was available – up from 24 per cent in 2020.
It is 10 months since Boris Johnson published proposals to rewrite sections of the Northern Ireland Protocol in order to resolve the problems ministers believe are harming businesses and threatening the Good Friday Agreement.
Now, amid the stalemate prompted by this month’s Stormont election, Brandon Lewis believes that the EU will be responsible for indefinite chaos in Northern Ireland unless it agrees to renegotiate the protocol – or the Government pushes ahead with a plan to override the document with domestic legislation.
Asked, in an interview with The Sunday Telegraph, whether he was concerned that the absence of an executive in Northern Ireland could be indefinite if Brussels fails to give ground, the Northern Ireland Secretary responds plainly: “Yes.”
Sitting in the Northern Ireland Office’s corner of the Treasury building in Whitehall, Mr Lewis adds: “I made this point to the EU myself before the elections. My view was, it was much easier to get a deal before the elections than afterwards. The idea that it was going to be easier after the elections was a crazy one from the EU.
“When Stormont wasn’t there for three years, the Government had to spend three years trying to get the parties to negotiate with each other and agree a programme of government, and also with both the Irish and the UK Government.”
Now, though, the key to restoring the executive is out of the Government’s hands, Mr Lewis suggests, after the Democratic Unionist Party insisted that it would refuse to re-enter a power-sharing arrangement until the problems with the protocol are resolved.
“The DUP are refusing to nominate because they’ve got a mandate through the election, as the largest party in unionism, not to nominate until the protocol is resolved.
“And at the moment, the protocol, which the EU claims is to protect the Good Friday Agreement, is the very document putting the Good Friday Agreement most at risk.”
The EU insists it has put forward “far-reaching and impactful bespoke arrangements” to smooth the flow of goods from Great Britain to Northern Ireland. But Mr Lewis and Liz Truss, the Foreign Secretary, are adamant that the protocol must be changed to lift the burdens on businesses that have stemmed from the agreement.
If the EU fails to renegotiate the document, the UK’s plan to unilaterally override the protocol will be the only way to restore power-sharing, says Mr
Lewis – given that the DUP’s objections are the only hurdle preventing the formation of a new executive.
“Restoring power sharing is about all the parties in Northern Ireland being happy to nominate and Sinn Fein are keen to [get] on with that,” he says.
Mr Lewis has become a lightning rod for attacks from ex-soldiers on the Conservative benches becoming increasingly furious at repeated delays to the fulfilment of the Government’s pledge to give veterans of the Troubles “the protections they deserve”.
In one exchange, Mark Francois, a former defence minister, shouted across the Commons chamber: “Where’s your bill, Brandon?”
Now, after years of wrangling over how to end the hounding of British veterans, the Northern Ireland Secretary will stand at the Commons dispatch box on Tuesday to present the Bill he believes will solve the problem.
Details of the legislation published last week were sufficient for Johnny Mercer, one of Mr Lewis’s fiercest critics over the issue, to praise the “good legislation”, for which the
‘You’ve got this kind of narrative that’s completely false about the actions of the Armed Forces’
minister deserved “huge credit”. Speaking ahead of the first debate on the Bill this week, Mr Lewis says: “I understand their frustration. They want to deliver for those who served with honour for their country. I do as well. And I have felt strongly about that from the beginning of this.
“Equally as the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, as somebody who has met these victims and victims’ groups, we want to deliver for the victims and survivors in Northern Ireland as well.
“The legal complexity of delivering both those things was worth taking a bit of time to get it right.
“And I think we have now, and we can deliver, something that we as a Government can be proud of.”
An outline of Mr Lewis’s proposals was first published last summer, when it prompted widespread criticism over his intention to introduce an effective statute of limitations that would end all prosecutions for incidents up to April 1998, when the Good Friday Agreement was signed.
The Northern Ireland Troubles (Legacy and Reconciliation) Bill would apply to both military veterans and terrorists.
It will mean every death during the Troubles being investigated by a truth and reconciliation-style commission. But in a change to the proposals last
‘The protocol, which the EU claims is to protect the Good Friday Agreement, is the very document putting the Good Friday Agreement most at risk’
summer, immunity awarded by the body must be earned by military veterans and terrorists.
Only by co-operating with the body, or having a track record of previously co-operating with the authorities over the Troubles, will individuals be immune from future prosecution.
The Bill will also stop civil legal cases being brought against terrorists and veterans, as well as any historical inquests, on the basis that the commission would instead take over the inquiries.
Mr Lewis reveals that, once the Bill receives royal assent, the moratorium on civil cases will apply retrospectively, from the Bill’s formal introduction last Wednesday. He warns that issuing new proceedings now would be pointless.
“Anybody who thought they were putting in a civil case after introduction is already too late ... The ‘stop point’ of that was Wednesday.”
Separately, on Tuesday, Mr Lewis is expected to declare that former IRA members have no protection from the “on the run” letters sent to republicans under Tony Blair’s administration.
“One of things I’m going to make very clear next week [is] they have no basis in law,” he says. “If you’ve got an ‘on the run’ letter, it means nothing.
“If you don’t engage with this body, and this body gets the evidence, we’re going to come after you and we’re going to prosecute you. So if you’ve been sitting in comfort for the last 20 years, you can forget that.”
It is estimated that 3,500 people were killed in the conflict and the new Independent Commission for Reconciliation and Information Recovery will document all those deaths. Killings will be selected for a full investigation where families of victims demand it or else the deaths were deemed not to have been properly looked at at the time. The focus on documenting all deaths is partly based on Mr Lewis’s concern that the disproportionate hounding of British veterans in recent years has “re-written history” to create a false narrative about the balance of wrongdoing in the conflict.
“The focus has been [unequally] placed on a very small number of cases, which means there’s been effectively a rewriting of history and we need to put a stop to that as well.
“The problem is after the Good Friday Agreement, the narrative battle ... has been dominated by what was effectively dissident republicans and you’ve got this kind of narrative that’s completely false about the actions of the Armed Forces.
“[The] reality is that British forces were there to protect people, whereas the terrorists were going out to harm people. There’s a big difference and that’s why there can never be a moral equivalence.”