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Mr. Tam Dalyell (Linlithgow): I hesitate to interrupt the flow of my hon. Friend's powerful and moving speech, but as he already been interrupted, and as he referred to Fenner Brockway, I cannot resist. I was there at the time, and Fenner Brockway was widely dismissed--not only on the Conservative side of the House. That reinforces my hon. Friend's point and shows how such actions can influence attitudes, perhaps not tomorrow, but certainly the day after tomorrow.
Mr. Winnick: I am grateful to my hon. Friend. We all have the highest respect for Fenner Brockway. If I may be party political for a moment, I pay tribute to him as a lifelong socialist, dedicated to the cause of working people at home and abroad. So appalled was he by the fact that anyone could be discriminated against on the ground of race, and especially that it should happen to so many people, that he took action that may, for all I know,
have undermined his position in his constituency and led to his defeat in 1964. Fortunately--although I am normally no upholder of the House of Lords--he continued to play an active role in public life. Long may he be remembered.
Mr. Hartley Booth (Finchley): I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman, especially as he has allowed so many interventions in his important speech. He has the sympathy and support of many Conservative Members. But why has he not been much more positive in his proposed legislation? He could require advertisements to declare that experience would be valued, which would affect people with experience--older people, perhaps. Why has he not taken that on? Why does he not challenge the people who practise blatant discrimination in advertisements by saying that, if they want to exclude older people, they must declare the reason? No one would admit to blatant discrimination, so that would form an effective ban, and would be positive.
Mr. Winnick: The hon. Gentleman may have a point, but how one would write it into legislation is another matter. All that I would say to him and to the Minister is, just give me a Second Reading, and I shall be responsive to constructive ideas in Committee. I shall be more responsive than any Minister in any Government could hope to be.
However, I suspect that there are already one or two Members--certainly not the hon. Member for Finchley (Mr. Booth), and probably not anyone who has already intervened in my speech--preparing to oppose the closure and to go in for all that business organised by the Whips. In saying that, I do not mean be offensive about the Government Whip who is here at the moment, the hon. Member for Croydon, South (Mr. Ottaway). Indeed, he initiated the Adjournment debate.
All I say is, give me a Second Reading and everyone will see what a responsive and constructive attitude I shall take to all those suggestions.
Mr. Winnick:
I shall give way for the last time, and then I must conclude.
Mr. Bruce:
The hon. Gentleman is being very tolerant. He answered a question very well, but it was not the question that I asked. I suspect that he will not get a Committee stage for his Bill, so it is important to discuss such matters on the Floor of the House. What I was saying, in a constructive manner, was: what about the words "junior" and "senior"? Will the legislation affect only people who specify an actual age in their advertisement, or will people have to start becoming very politically correct in their language? Such measures are often damned in the detail.
Mr. Winnick:
I do not want to be too politically correct, but the most blatant form of discrimination is that exercised by the upper age limit. Let us deal with that.If the hon. Gentleman is one of those who will try to ensure that the Bill receives a Second Reading today, and if he comes into the Lobby with me if there is a vote on the closure, as I suspect there will be, I hope that he will
I have two more points to make before I finish.The first is about the changing pattern of the work force.My Front-Bench colleagues will touch on the fact that the number of people in their 40s and 50s is increasing; that fact should not be overlooked. There are more now than there were 10 years ago, and the numbers will continue to rise into the next century.
I can cite two examples that I have come across in the past week. Someone in my constituency, who is on the opposite side to me politically, said that he had been made redundant after 26 years. He is an accountant, and he said that, when he lost his job very recently, he knew what the problems would be. He knew that, however qualified he was--obviously he is highly qualified after so many years' experience in his firm--he would have difficulty simply because of his age.
The other example arose yesterday, when I was doing a television interview at Millbank. When it had finished, the cameraman said that he was interested in what I had said, because he had been made redundant from another company at the age of 52. He now does freelance work, but he would like another permanent job. Time and time again, because he was over 50 when he was made redundant, he has found out the difficulties, to his cost.
In the interview I had mentioned the effects on pensions, and he took up that point, because the problems are only too real when those who have been made redundant and are out of work for years on end reach retirement age. What sort of pension can they expect?
Mr. Edward Leigh (Gainsborough and Horncastle)
rose--
Mr. Winnick:
I said that I had given way for the last time, but as the hon. Gentleman is bound to oppose my Bill, let us hear his point of view.
Mr. Leigh:
The hon. Gentleman has made some powerful comments about age discrimination, but he has not addressed the weak spot of his argument. If an employer is determined to discriminate against age, how will mere regulation of advertisements stop him? Is the measure warranted, given the small number of advertisements to which my hon. Friend the Member for South Dorset (Mr. Bruce) referred? Is it philosophically right to regulate good practice? Does not such regulation lead to more unemployment, as in Spain and France?
Mr. Winnick:
I said at the beginning that, if my Bill becomes law, that will not itself stop age discrimination--but that is not a criticism of the measure. If my Bill were enacted and age discrimination continued regardless,that is a strong argument for more comprehensive legislation. Whether the hon. Gentleman would support it is another matter. He certainly will not be supporting my Bill, because we know his political views.
I am a realist, so I know that, if the Government are absolutely determined to destroy a private Member's Bill, they have the means--if not on Second Reading then on Report, when hon. Members can speak endlessly, and the measure runs out of parliamentary time.
Mr. Peter Brooke (City of London and Westminster, South):
The hon. Member for Walsall, North(Mr. Winnick) made an eloquent and interesting speech. If one were to take 100 different political issues, most people would bet against the hon. Gentleman and myself being on the same side on more than a handful. However, the hon. Gentleman has always been a hard man on terrorism, so consequently I have always had a soft spot for him. Many of us could make a speech on either side of today's argument, but I will speak in support of the hon. Member, not least because I have a soft spot for him.
I am temperamentally unsympathetic to the politically correct. I take the view of the Scottish judge that the phrase "a change for the better" is a contradiction in terms. Just as constituents say that they disapprove of Members of Parliament in general but like their own Member of Parliament, or disapprove of the ways of education but approve of the school that their children attend, in this instance I have some limited experience,so I am able to discount the politically correct.
For better or worse, I was the first headhunter in the United Kingdom. I was not the architect of headhunting, because it had been practised in other countries before--just as I was not the architect of the national lottery.One could staff a pretty good practice with the people who claim to have been the architect of the national lottery, but I can claim to have been the master mason in both cases.
Headhunting started in this country 35 years ago,and the industry now has a volume of £100 million. That is a much slower rate of growth than the national lottery, but we started the headhunting industry with £2,000 of equity capital and a £2,000 loan. On the strength of that acorn, the oak has grown to a reasonable size. That experience is not strictly relevant, because headhunting primarily involves approaching individuals direct rather than recruitment advertising.
When we started that business, assignments would almost certainly be handled by the client company's chief executive. Over the past 35 years, the centre of gravity has gradually shifted to the personnel department, which would now let many such contracts. I can understand the attraction for a personnel department--here I touch on advertisements--of a Procrustean sieve to specify an age limit and to discount and discard applicants who fall outside it. I am not suggesting that the Institute of Personnel Management would be a foe of the Bill, but I acknowledge that the present practice affords employers a certain convenience.
I spent some of my time in a headhunting firm in the United States. My recollection of that era is that one could not even put one's date of birth on a curriculum vitae,
because that was potentially agist. That was a narrow point, because one could always work out from the arithmetic the person's likely date of birth--just as one can use the arithmetic of a CV to demonstrate fraud when someone claims that they have done more than they have.
We live in an era in which the relationship between employer and employees has visibly shifted. There was a time when an individual could join a clearing bank,for example, in the belief that, if he kept his nose clean,he would have a job until retirement. As the climate and competitive nature of banking has changed, that unspoken contract has changed, too.
It is a disagreeable experience for people who joined a bank in their early 20s to discover in their 40s or 50s that they are being made redundant, when their own sense of the contract was that they would remain employed until retirement. The hon. Gentleman's Bill responds to the climate of the time, and the uncertainties that have been bestowed on employment practices.
The circumstances are as the hon. Gentleman, described. It is worth dwelling on the perception of people who are made redundant in terms of the particular characteristic that he is seeking to outlaw. I once had some ambitions to join the Army, but my knee was damaged in national service, and I spent a long time recovering. I have no difficulty understanding the debilitating effect of that which Tennyson described:
The experience is made worse if the individual feels that society is conspiring against him through advertising of the kind that the hon. Gentleman described.
There is a practical and positive point to be made about the hon. Gentleman's measure, which exists at national and micro-economic local level. A colleague in my former firm took the view that one should listen to the client, write it all down, then decide for oneself what the client needed, and locate the individual who would fulfil one's personal specifications. One needs a strong personality and a remarkable success record to sustain that way of working, because one would clearly not be delivering the kind of individual for whom the client had asked. However, my colleague demonstrated on a number of occasions how successful his approach could be.
As each of us grows older and passes the years at which Keats, Mozart and Raphael died--all under the age of 40--we must wince at the scale of their achievements in comparison with our own up to that age. On the other side the balance sheet, we know that Sophocles, Titian and Thomas Hobbes all lived to the age of 100, and the scale of their achievements was spread over a much longer canvas.
When Madam Gorbachev visited Chequers for the first time, she went into the library and said what a great privilege it was to be in the country of Hobbes and Locke. Those of us who heard that story thought how extraordinarily well informed she was on the affairs of the Surrey county cricket club. However, I think that she was in fact thinking of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke rather than of Tony Lock and Jack Hobbs.
"To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use!"
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