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Mrs. Lait: My sincere apologies. How could I possibly accuse a long-standing member of the Liberal Democrats of being a Scottish nationalist. I apologise abjectly. I entirely accept the point, made by the hon. Member for Gordon (Malcolm Bruce), echoed by my hon. Friend the Member for Galloway and Upper Nithsdale, about people's lifestyle decision to work on Sundays if they wish.
The Conservatives welcome the Bill and congratulate the hon. Member for Greenock and Inverclyde. We look forward to his continuing contribution in the House, and we wish the Bill a speedy, if thoroughly debated, passage through the other place.
11.31 am
Malcolm Bruce: I congratulate the hon. Member for Greenock and Inverclyde (David Cairns) both on bringing forward the Bill and on gaining support for it across the House. It clearly was necessary; as I said on Second Reading, constituents of mine were directly affected by the lack of the protection that it provides. They will be grateful to him for bringing the law into line.
I suspect that this debate is part of a process of steps. There is, though it is not central to the Bill, an anomaly, so far as the rights of people to shop are concerned, between the law, as it applies in Scotland, where it is more liberal, and as it applies in England. The Bill equalises the rights of employees to decide not to work on Sunday, and to accept the consequences, while their employers must accept their right to decide, but that anomaly may well be revisited in a different way.
We have heard arguments, which may need further investigation, about how effective legislation is. In my view—not just a hunch, but formed on the basis of discussion with major, though not smaller, employers—employers have said that they can have two separate work forces and that that is how the law applies. That reduces the circumstances in which anyone can take a case to tribunal because the contracts are, as the hon. Gentleman said, entirely separate.
The hon. Member for Galloway and Upper Nithsdale (Mr. Duncan) used his personal experience usefully to highlight the fact that there may be problems of adjustment for some smaller businesses. I hope that he will none the less accept that if the law is about the rights of employees, it should apply to smaller businesses. Often, smaller businesses are the worst employers of all, because people employ themselves and their families, who voluntarily negotiate less favourable working circumstances than anyone would impose on a third party. That is the whole tradition of working all hours, and family businesses are about people working extremely hard for their own benefit. I certainly would not wish that to be prevented in any way, and the law should not intrude too much in that area.
The Bill, extremely usefully, clarifies and extends the law to create parity. I commend the hon. Member for Greenock and Inverclyde not just for bringing the Bill forward, but for the dignified way in which he has done it and for his recognition that it must be confined to bringing the law into line. If he had stepped beyond that, he might have opened up a can of worms, and it would have been more difficult to obtain unanimity. We shall probably have to return to some of the issues that have been aired, but he was absolutely right to confine the Bill to what it does. In so doing, he has, I think, guaranteed its passage through this House and the other place.
11.35 am
Mr. Boris Johnson (Henley): I add my pebble to the great mound of congratulations that the hon. Member for Greenock and Inverclyde (David Cairns) has already had for a sensible measure that brings Scotland's law into line with provision already in force in England and Wales. He told us that he is pleased that he is about to become a lawmaker, and I congratulate him on joining the tradition of great lawmakers such as Hammurabi, Solon and Moses, who made laws on this very subject. That is the single point that I wish to stress: since the dawn of time, this subject has been a fit subject for law.
One of the Bill's attractions, by the hon. Gentleman's own admission, is that it will not make much difference. It will not bite very hard on businesses or employees in Scotland, and that may be may be a good thing. In so far as it does make a difference, however, it will make a good difference, providing an important psychological condition. It will help to fix it in people's minds that there is indeed something special about our division of the week into seven days, and something special about Sundays. That hebdomadal structure, dividing into four the 28 days of the lunar calendar and allocating one day to be special, is an ancient thing, probably pre-dating the Hebrews, probably going back to the Sumerians. It was not only the Hebrews who had special days; every civilisation has always decided, by law, that some days should be special.
The House will be familiar with the introduction to Plato's "Republic", in which Glaucon and, I think, Socrates decide whether to go to Piraeus to take part in the pan-Athenaic procession, which was a regular festival, like the many that took place in ancient Athens that were times when the common people did not have to work and were protected by law from working. They could not be coerced into working in ancient Athens on those days, and those days were fixed in law.
The House will also be familiar with the fasti of ancient Rome, the days that were kept holy. Now, the fasti were controversial. Cicero, a good conservative, did not like any monkeying around with the fasti. Important businessmen and powerful lawyers in ancient Rome sometimes wanted to transact business on the fasti, and it was important to decide whether business could, or could not, take place on the fasti. There was a sort of "Keep Fasti Special" campaign in those days.
My point is that, since the dawn of human civilisation, some days, usually on some hebdomadal rhythm of the kind that we have in our Christian culture, have been reserved for holiday and have been kept special. The vital thing is that protections have been enforced by law. Since the dawn of time, those protections have not simply been cultural, but have been enforced by law and by politicians. In a way, Sunday, and the hebdomadal system, sanctify a human necessity. It is not just a question of devotion. In our culture we acknowledge that there must be at least one day when everybody can knock off and, above all, when our fellow wage slaves are not driven by someone else to try to get one over us on that day. Since the dawn of time, the importance of such measures have been commonly acknowledged as protecting people from abuse and oppression and preventing coercion.
I was interested to hear the case adumbrated by my hon. Friend the Member for South-West Bedfordshire (Andrew Selous). It was wrong and shameful of Mr. Copsey's company to make him accept a contract that forced him to work a seven-day week. It is right that we as legislators should extend the protection that Mr. Copsey enjoys in England and Wales to the people of Scotland, and I am glad that the latter-day Hammurabi who has introduced this Bill has chosen to do so. I listened with great attention to the speeches of my hon. Friends, and marvelled at the tour d'horizon from my hon. Friend the Member for Beckenham (Mrs. Lait), who dealt dutifully with all the potential pitfalls of the legislation. I also admired the speeches of my hon. Friends the Members for Galloway and Upper Nithsdale (Mr. Duncan) and for Rayleigh (Mr. Francois). I share their concern that we must guard against the danger of excessive legislation, and I speak as a Member of party that is successfully opposing a Government who are barnacling the British economy day after day with more and more legislation and regulation. We have slipped in the competitiveness league from ninth to 16th and, according to the CBI, £1.5 billion-worth of extra regulation has been heaped on this country since 1997. The micro-economic measures that the Government have introduced will not serve this country well when the economy starts to experience a downturn.
It is right that we should draw attention to those risks now, and I salute my hon. Friends for doing so. Their amendments, of course, were probing amendments, and I am satisfied with the explanation from the hon. Member for Greenock and Inverclyde of the way in which the Bill will apply. As he said, employers will continue to have the right not to hire someone who says that they do not want to work on Sundays—that essential freedom will be protected. As the Minister said, people who decline to work on Sundays must expect a lower pay packet. I may be traducing her, but I believe that that was the gist of what she said.
Andrew Selous: Suitably admonished by you earlier, Mr. Deputy Speaker, I shall make my intervention as brief as possible. For the sake of accuracy in the Official Report, Mr. Copsey is not a shop or betting shop worker, so he would not be covered by the Bill if he worked in Scotland. We therefore still need to go further in that area.
Mr. Johnson: I am grateful to my hon. Friend. I did not mean to imply that Mr. Copsey's case was concluded. He deserves the fullest protection, and let us hope that a future lawgiver, perhaps my hon. Friend himself, will find the means to give him the protection that he deserves.
No one will be forbidden by the Bill from working on Sunday—that is an elementary point, but it is worth making. We should not forget that some people are only too happy to work on Sunday. We should provide protection for people like Mr. Copsey or fathers who want to stay at home, but many people want to go out and work on Sunday. Indeed, in my experience, many fathers are happy to get away from the house on Sunday and go to the office. The desires of those people are not impeded in any way by the new law.
In conclusion, I want to reinforce the point that I made at the outset and emphasise the status of the hon. Member for Greenock and Inverclyde as a lawgiver and lawmaker. It is an ancient and hallowed custom in all civilisations that some days are preserved as special. My hon. Friend the Member for Galloway and Upper Nithsdale was prescient in pointing out that in a multicultural society we must acknowledge that other communities and groups will want to preserve other days as special days. Anti-discrimination measures are to be introduced that will oblige us to protect those days too, and I see no harm in that whatsoever. Those things were protected by law in ancient Rome and Babylon, and have been acknowledged since time immemorial. It is right that we, too, should protect them.
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