Tory union-busting is a full frontal assault on Scottish devolution

The new Tory anti-strike legislation is so duplicitous it’s built on a bigger pyramid of lies than Brexit. The Conservative Government is constructing a false case that its union-busting laws are merely about enforcing minimum service levels in the public sector which are simply in line with European standards. Lies.

The chicanery hardly surprises given the project is fronted by Tory Business Secretary Grant Shapps. That’s Shapps who denied he had a second job as a “multimillion-dollar web marketer” under the pseudonym Michael Green after he became an MP. This week Shapps had to deny he’d doctored a picture on social media. He’d posted a photo of himself, with Boris Johnson removed. Twitter wits had fun with cracks about Stalin and memory holes.

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The anti-union legislation gives employers the right to issue "work notices", instructing who can strike. Unions can be sued to bankruptcy, and workers – like nurses – sacked for striking without permission.

Listing France, Spain, Italy and Germany, Shapps said the legislation “will bring us in line with modern European countries”.

Well that’s a double-gaslighting right there. Firstly, the Tory Party – a bunch of raving Europhobes in its current incarnation –claiming to want to emulate European standards is as believable as me calling Grant Shapps a paragon among politicians.

But worse, the legislation is in no way in line with European standards. Let’s do that weird thing and listen to someone who knows: Nicola Countouris, professor of labour and European law at University College London, and director of the research department at the European Trade Union Centre.

Countouris told Radio 4 that in most European countries minimum service levels are established via “collective agreements”, in other words the employer and the union sitting down and setting standards together. In UK terms that would be a council and teaching union, for example. Scandinavian nations have no such legislation at all.

In France, Countouris says, there’s a guarantee of “continuity” of public services but those rules don’t “regulate strike action. Even there, when there are such rules, they are really very minimal, they don’t interfere with the right to strike.

This is a fundamental aspect of every other European system that has minimum service rules that are in compliance with international standards set by the International Labour Organisation. A fundamental principle of those standards is that any minimum standard levels should not interfere with the exercise of the right to strike.”

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Countouris says the Tory legislation looks like it will lay the ground for the Government setting minimum standards rather than the employer – like the NHS for nurses – resulting in “draconian sanctions” for workers and trade unions. In Italy, minimum service levels are set by an independent commission. In the UK, Countouris says, restrictions on the right to strike are already “very strict so we have at the moment one of the strictest systems of industrial action”.

In terms of mass gaslighting, let’s not forget that public sector unions aren’t striking for the hell of it. They’re striking because years of Tory austerity have whittled public services to a nub and workers have seen wages collapse. The Tory Government also makes an utter mockery of meaningful negotiations with unions.

Tory Health Secretary Steve Barclay has the damn cheek to say any NHS pay increase is dependent on greater “productivity and efficiency”. In other words: work harder, you lazy nurses and doctors. Wham – up goes the gas. Remember this lot exhorted us to clap for the NHS not so long ago. Today, A&E doctors declare patients dead in waiting rooms in front of their families and strangers.

Health Secretary Steve Barclay has said that an NHS pay increase is dependent on greater 'productivity and efficiency' (Image: Newsquest)

Why should the Tories give a damn though? After all, Rishi Sunak finally admitted yesterday that he goes private for his healthcare. Wealth is a great insulator from reality. Our multi-millionaire PM is also accused of abandoning Tory pledges on workers’ rights … by the Government’s former jobs tsar. Matthew Taylor’s recommendations on making it easier for men to take paternity leave, allowing workers to request more predictable contracts, and a single regulator of employment law were all included in the 2019 manifesto. Taylor says “there comes a point when repeated delay starts to feel like an abandonment”.

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The union-busting laws also undermine devolution. They erode workers’ rights in Scotland as well as England. Roz Foyer, STUC general secretary, said the legislation was “an assault on devolution”, and strengthened the case for devolving employment law to Holyrood.

“The Tory Government cannot hide their flagrant contempt for our movement,” she said when I asked her about the legislation. “This is an immoral and potentially illegal move that will only serve to galvanise working people. They’re pathetically trying to make unions the bogeyman to hide from their colossal failures on the cost of living crisis. It’s a Tory-led coup d’état on our working rights, designed to denigrate the living standards of working people who refuse to be subservient. It won’t work, and unions the length and breadth of the UK are mobilising to reject this all-out assault on our ability to protect those who most need it.”

If you think Foyer’s phrase ‘coup d’état’ is overblown, perhaps check the history books for the kind of regimes which crushed trade unions in the last century. If ever there was a way to trigger a general strike, then this is it. Perhaps that’s what the Tories want? A last throw of the culture war dice in the hope of causing so much division they cling to power.

We hear endlessly of freedom from the Tories – that’s their biggest gaslighting weapon. Freedom of speech! Freedom to take back control! But real freedoms are few and far between in this country; there’s no freedom from poverty, no freedom to be healthy or eat well, to raise your children to achieve their full potential. Trade unions are fighting for those freedoms. And the Tories want the freedom to crush them for it.