| Previous Section | Index | Home Page |
Sir Patrick Cormack: There are two answers to that question. I believe that they genuinely try to protect them, but there are insidious pressures, as we all know. The other answer, of course, was given to my right hon. Friend by the Bill's promoter: a lot of shop workers are not members of a union.
Sir Patrick Cormack: As a libertarian, my right hon. Friend should jolly well welcome the fact that they are not. He tries to have it both ways all the time. He is the arch-maverick wrecker of Parliament.
Sir Patrick Cormack: Had he not been so indiscriminate in his wrecking tactics when first we had a Labour Government with a large majority, keeping the House up night after night for spurious reasons, we would not now be suffering the current sitting hours. Frankly, he should realise that he, more than any other individual, has destroyed the parliamentary pattern, and he has destroyed enough. Now I shall give way.
Mr. Forth: I am glad of this opportunity to allow my hon. Friend to calm down a bit. He says that I am having it both ways. That is what I try to do all the time here, and I succeed at some times but not others. I am rather intrigued by his saying that the unions are doing their best to protect vulnerable workers, but that vulnerable workers who are being exploited choose not to join a union. There is a circularity in that argument that I find
difficult to follow. If workers believe that unions can help them, they are free to join them, and if the unions are any good, they should be able to help them.
Sir Patrick Cormack: My right hon. Friend knows full well that that is not the reality of life. Many who work in such places do not necessarily wish to be members of unions, and others are subject to the insidious pressures to which I referred. We all know how that can be exerted; if someone will not do a certain thing, they will not get overtime. Or if the question of who is going to be laid off first arises, the answer is, "The person who is least flexible. We'll put them to one side."
This very modest Bill merely seeks to protect the people in my constituency, and in the constituency of my right hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst, who are most vulnerable. But it is not about the trade unions; it is about the fact that Christmas day is one of very few days of the year that are truly special for the vast majority of our people. It tries, very modestly, to ring-fence that speciality.
The hon. Member for Kettering (Phil Sawford) spoke about his son in the retail trade, and in doing so he illustrated just how commercial our society has become. Only a few years ago, not only Christmas day but Boxing day was special, and the earliest date for the sales was 27 or 28 December; now, throughout the country it is 26 December. [Interruption.] As we all know, the 24th has traditionally been a day of great commercial activity, and nobody objects to that, but when the tills closed at 6 o'clock on Christmas eve, they did so for a good two clear days. Now, they do not.
All that we are seeking to do is to put our constituents first. I ask my right hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst to do the same, and to say that they deserve this one day. Whether one lives in Bromley and Chislehurst, South Staffordshire, Bootle or Bognor, one is entitled to have Christmas day as a special day, and Parliament has a duty to ring-fence it. The Bill is modest and moderate and I hope that it will pass on to the statue book with great alacrity, and be enforced long before Christmas 2004. I hope that the Minister will, with commendable brevity, give his unreserved support to it. When my hon. Friend the Member for Canterbury (Mr. Brazier) speaks, I hope that he will endorse—with perhaps even greater brevity—what the Minister says, and when the hon. Member for Montgomeryshire (Lembit Öpik) speaks, I hope that he will do the same. This is not a party issue but a national issue. It is a very small national cause, but an extremely worthy one, and I warmly commend the Bill.
10.6 am
Ms Ann Coffey (Stockport) (Lab): I very much welcome the Bill and congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for North Durham (Mr. Jones) on his choice. I agree with all the points that he eloquently made in support of it. When we passed the Sunday Trading Act 1994, which enabled large shops to open on Sundays for six hours, the House debated carefully the question of shops opening on Easter Sunday, and it took the firm decision to protect that as a special day. I do not recollect our discussing Christmas day, but perhaps that was because the legislation focused on Sundays, and because it was inconceivable to Members that large
shops would open on Christmas day and that it would become just another shopping day. That was an oversight on our part. The Bill does away with that possibility by protecting Christmas day, which is the wish of the majority of people. In supporting the Bill we have the support of the British people, and I shall vote for it in the Lobby.10.8 am
Lembit Öpik (Montgomeryshire) (LD): This is a free vote issue for Liberal Democrats because it is a question of moral judgment, but I side with the hon. Member for North Durham (Mr. Jones). He simply seeks to emulate existing legislation by extending it to Christmas day, so the question is merely whether one agrees with the underlying principle. In my contribution, I shall focus on why I do.
Members may be relieved to know that I, too, am a libertarian—in fact, I have been defined as such by the University of Hull. It determined that I have the most libertarian voting record of any member of my party, which in itself should be fairly liberal-minded, given its name.
In essence, libertarianism is defined as the freedom to live life and to harm oneself—as long as one can show that one is conscious of the harm that is thereby being done—but not to harm others. The harm principle is the core of this discussion, because it applies to those who are compelled by others to work on Christmas day. It is not intellectually rigorous to pretend that there is no harm involved in making people work on Christmas day. I should tell those who oppose the legislation that it is not about unions.
We certainly could have a debate about what the unions have done and want to do, but that would be a sideshow and distraction from the Bill. Furthermore, the debate is not really about deciding whether other creeds or religions should have the same representation—not least because we are discussing a clearly defined issue here. We can always debate those issues—they are not mutually exclusive—in different circumstances. Given that Britain already has fewer public holidays than just about any other European country, there is heavy pressure on us to support the Bill on the two main bases of the harm principle and equalisation of free time between countries.
Finally, I would like to reinforce the point that it is not possible to have it both ways. It is all very well for the right hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Mr. Forth) to announce with satisfaction that he tries to have it both ways—sometimes succeeding, sometimes failing—but that is somewhat disrespectful to the general public, who do not regard these questions as a game. It is not reasonable to assume that postponing or preventing the Bill's passage is anything other than a personal—and, I have to say, somewhat egotistical—victory. It is an important Bill and should be treated as such.
The right hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst knows that I often agree with him on matters associated with freedom, not to mention on the new hours of the House. He should therefore reflect seriously on the fact that someone who is predisposed to share the same libertarian values as him has a totally different view on this Bill. I counsel him to think with some humility about his motives in trying to postpone the Bill. I hope that he will think again.
10.11 am
Mr. Colin Pickthall (West Lancashire) (Lab): I declare an interest from the outset, as I am a member of the Union of Shop, Distributive and Allied Workers. My details are in the register, and I am also the chairman of the USDAW branch in Parliament. I want to congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for North Durham (Mr. Jones) on persisting with this fairly long-running debate, which has been knocked back—perhaps by nothing more than coincidence—in previous years. I also congratulate the hon. Member for South Staffordshire (Sir Patrick Cormack) on his excellent contribution to the debate.
I shall be brief because my hon. Friend the Member for North Durham has already covered the main points. We must remember that we are talking about many thousands of shop workers who are already under a great deal of pressure. They are not well paid and they are often regarded by the public—including themselves, I suppose, when they are shopping—as part of the furniture in stores. USDAW has had an extremely successful campaign over the last 12 months in drawing attention to the large amount of aggression and abuse that is directed at shop workers. The union has uncovered a hidden problem, and it is trying to highlight in the public mind the fact that shop workers are people with human rights.
The Bill is about one single day in the year. It is designed to nip in the bud the practice of large retail outlets opening on Christmas day. For all the reasons that have been mentioned, we need to stop that now. It is not only workers in the large stores who are affected; the people who have to supply the large stores, who have to carry out waste disposal, who have to manage the traffic and so forth are all affected by the opening of large stores on Christmas day.
Competition is also relevant. The irony is that virtually all the stores that USDAW consulted said that they did not want to open, but if one of them opens, the competition and margins are so tight that all the competitors will want to open up, too. As the hon. Member for South Staffordshire explained, the problem will escalate. The stores are saying to us, "We do not want to open, so will you please legislate to stop us doing so?" That is ironic, but that is the position.
It is no use saying that the matter can be left to volunteering—that the workers in the stores can say yes or no. We all know what volunteering means in this place when there is a one-line Whip: we are free to attend or not, but as every Member who has ever run into a Whip knows, it is not as easy as that. Large stores cannot be staffed with many hundreds of volunteer employees: it is an impossibility. As the hon. Member for South Staffordshire described perfectly, the reality of volunteering is heavy pressure on each shift in the light of how much business has been generated at the end of the month or year.
People outside the House would be truly astonished if this modest and moderate measure were objected to. The Bill is simple, just and proper, and I believe that about 99 per cent. of the population would be astonished to find any opposition to it.
| Next Section
| Index | Home Page |