INTERNATIONAL workers’ day, and it seems appropriate to consider the impact of Brexit on employment rights.

The difficulty in writing about this area as soon as you look closely at it, is that no-one really knows how leaving the EU will affect rights in the UK – whether that be workers’ rights, human rights, or the rights of disabled people. While some are written into UK law, and others are set to be preserved under the Great Repeal Bill, concern has focused on possible repeal or the danger existing rights are preserved as in aspic but the UK fails to move with the times as rights advance across the rest of the continent.

This was the pattern again when the Scottish Parliament’s Equalities and Human Rights Committee took evidence on Brexit last week. But the submission from Unison caught my eye. Written by the union’s legal expert Peter Hunter it strikes a more pragmatic tone.

Workers’ rights, he argues predate the EU. Many were achieved through popular social justice movements born in the 1960s and sustained by organised labour and industrial action. Progress over equal pay for gender-segregated jobs, for instance, advanced by a number of means. “Equal rights weren’t invented in Brussels and EU intervention, of itself, was not sufficient to bring equality,” he points out.

The risk of rights being repealed post-Brexit remains “massive”, he says, despite the uncertainty.

But Mr Hunter adds: “The EU has always been long on rights and short on remedy,” adding wryly: “If EU law had actually stopped 60,000 illegal pregnancy dismissals every year, then perhaps more women would have voted ‘remain’.”

There is a solution, the Unison man told the committee. The Scottish Government could – and should – go further than paying lip service to preserving EU rights. Instead it should make human rights binding and properly enforceable. Otherwise, rights agreed with the UN, or those guaranteed by the ECHR remain paper rights, “unknown and inaccessible to ordinary women and men”. It’s as realistic a response to the rights issues raised by Brexit as I have seen anywhere. I’ll be interested to see if the committee take it on board.