THE Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Bill beginning its process through the House of Lords yesterday must be derailed.
Even the government’s own Regulatory Policy Committee warns the Bill is “not fit for purpose,” unacceptably vague both on its likely impact and the costs it will impose on trade unions.
The sloppy attention to detail shows ministers have reached for this draconian strike-busting blunderbuss in panic: they are running scared of the mounting wave of strike action sweeping every sector of the economy.
That was clear from the way the Bill replaced the Transport Strikes Bill a mere three months after the Tories had announced the latter.
An initial plan to make an example of the rail unions was deemed too slow an approach to stem the flood, and hastily replaced by an all-out assault on the entire labour movement.
But expert criticism that their Bill is poorly defined will not stop the Tories.
In law, vagueness is a weapon. Authoritarian legislation like the Policing or Spycops Acts made a point of it: empowering police to prosecute people for being a “serious nuisance” and undercover state agents to commit crimes on grounds like the country’s “economic wellbeing.”
The purpose is to give the state a wide remit to do what it wants — in this latest case to allow the Secretary of State to single-handedly determine what a minimum service level ought to be and then dragoon trade unions into enforcing it.
This is an outrageous attack on our democratic rights. The Tories have no mandate for it.
But here we come up against the limitations of a purely parliamentary opposition.
Keir Starmer’s Labour is not even a fair-weather friend to the trade union movement: it tries to ban front-bench MPs from backing strikes that enjoy majority support in the polls.
A deeply authoritarian party, its opposition to the raft of anti-democratic legislation from this government has been tepid at best, and its leaders have wobbled even over whether to reverse this particular anti-strike legislation.
But policies aside, it is a party committed not to mobilising the labour movement or wider public to deliver political change, but the opposite.
Starmer’s task has been to disarm the popular movement, to erect a cordon sanitaire between a Westminster where “adults in the room” play politics and the unruly demands and aspirations of the rest of us.
That is what he means when he proclaims that Labour is “a party of public service, not protest.”
Monopoly media narratives imply that the “forensic” Starmer with his glib Westminster jargon is an effective opposition leader, while a predecessor who packed out venues in every corner of Britain was on a hiding to nothing.
The reality is different. Jeremy Corbyn’s mobilising politics inflicted defeats on government more than once, and not just on Brexit minutiae in a hung parliament.
It was full throated, this-will-not-stand opposition — led by then shadow home secretary Diane Abbott, who gained moral authority from having warned years before of the consequences of the 2014 Immigration Act — that forced Amber Rudd’s resignation as home secretary over the Windrush scandal in 2018.
It was that insurgent approach, combined with alliance-building across civil society to deliver real pressure on Tory MPs, that forced David Cameron to U-turn on his refusal to allow child refugees into the country in 2016 — when the Conservatives had a parliamentary majority.
We need an opposition today that can raise awareness of injustice and help marshal grassroots anger to apply real political pressure to stop a disastrous law.
At Westminster that opposition has ceased to exist. The unions mobilising for a new wave of strikes will need to build that pressure themselves.
But they should look too at why Labour has ceased to deliver politically — and what can be done about that.
