Labour’s ‘New Deal’ for workers ignores a key fact – many of our low-paid workforce are here illegally
THE Tory party seems to be out of ideas.
Other than clinging on to office.
And now the Labour Party is trying to get some ideas of its own.
It’s just a shame none of them will work.
When Keir Starmer became Labour leader he announced that his government would accelerate the UK’s transition to a carbon-free economy.
He claimed that it would cost a mere £28BILLION a year.
The policy was impossible and the cost too high.
But Starmer said it anyway.
Then earlier this year — perhaps to his credit — he ditched the pledge.
It seemed that he and his money experts had a talk and realised their great green policy would plunge Britain into the red.
Now it is the turn of Labour’s economic policy to come under the spotlight.
At the party’s 2021 conference, that famous economic brain Angela Rayner proposed a “new deal for working people”.
Perhaps no one had told her that the “new deal” whose name she borrowed is said to have lengthened the Great Depression in America by seven years.
In any case, Rayner promised her “new deal” and her party pushed on with the idea.
The party has promised to update trade union rules to be “fit for a modern economy and empower working people”.
Which is the sort of thing that sounds nice and absolutely any party could say.
The problem is that in their effort to restart the UK economy, Labour is more likely to crash it, as usual.
Business leaders have already said that the new rules embolden the trade unions and will kill British business.
Labour’s plans will make it easier for unions to arrange walkouts and give workers the “right to switch off” after work.
Which means that you might be able to log off at 5pm and that’s that.
Which is strange for a party talking about a “modern economy”.
Like it or not, one of the things about the modern world is that you CAN’T just log out of it.
Being connected by our devices can be a curse.
But it is also one of the things that is making the modern economy run.
Labour seems to be wanting to apply 19th-century rules to the 21st century.
Instead of “empowering” people, they will make them unemployable.
But, of course, Labour is just trying to keep the unions onside.
The unions whose dues keep the Labour Party afloat.
Yet they want any new arrangement to go even further in favour of the workers and this week blasted the Labour Party for what they suspect is an attempt to row back on the party’s “new deal”.
One of the ideas floated by Rayner and co was that of banning “zero hours contracts”.
This great bogey-man of both parties is another completely bogus idea.
In the modern economy there are lots of people who work on zero hours contracts.
Many are perfectly happy to do so.
Uber drivers, fast-food deliverers and others are often very happy to work between other jobs and provide more income for their families.
It is a key part of the “modern economy” that Labour says it wants to get up to speed with.
But after bashing the idea of such contracts, Labour has now started to backtrack on the promise.
Maybe they looked at the facts.
In any case it seems that the Labour Party accepts that zero hours works for some workers and you can’t make it illegal.
Cue the unions screaming red murder.
The Unite union’s general secretary, Sharon Graham, has blasted the reported row-back.
In fact, she yesterday described the party’s new proposals as “unrecognisable from the original proposals produced with the unions”.
Sounding like a proper old Scargillite, she went on: “All unions must now demand that Labour changes course and puts the original New Deal for Workers back on the table.”
Will the moderates in the Labour Party win, or will the unions win?
My bet would be on the unions.
No meaningful plans
So perhaps it is time to lay out a truth that neither side is brave enough to discuss.
None of this matters.
Why? Because all the kerfuffle is about defending the rights of workers who live in this country and pay taxes here.
Yet every year now this country imports a historic number of illegal workers.
All of whom are willing to work on the black market and who are perfectly happy working at rates below that of the average British worker.
Labour has no meaningful plans to bring down migration.
So here is what will happen.
And we know this from America.
The political left and the unions will fight with each other.
At some point they will come up with some piece of legislation that hurts business but is meant to protect employees.
They will then discover that the workers don’t exist anyway.
Because they’ve been undercut by people who have no union and who want no union.
Welcome to left-land logic.
We’d better get used to it.