Mr.
Djanogly: The judgment was certainly about membership of a
political party. Amendment No. 18 defines what constitutes a political
party. Would anyone who heard this debate have a clear idea as to what
constitutes or is likely to constitute a political party? I do not
think so. I submit that there will be court cases based on what
constitutes a political
party. The
hon. Member for Broxtowe gave a thoughtful speech, using the example of
Combat 18. We have to ask whether that is a political party or just a
movement. That is highly debateable. Does hanging out with the same
group of people in a particular place without a membership card make
one a member of a political party? Does a group all wearing a T-shirt
saying “Combat
18” constitute a political party? On what basis is a member of
Combat 18 a member of a political party? Another example that comes to
mind is the Militant Tendency, which it called itself a newspaper
rather than a political party. That was a highly debateable point. We
could debate it again
today. My
point is that we are creating legislation that will lead not to less
review and fewer court cases, but to more. We have seen that
organisations such as the BNP are quite prepared to go to court and
test this kind of thing. Do not think that this will be the end of it.
Our suggestion is that we must tie the matter
down.
Mr.
McFadden: The point about the potential for litigation is
important and valid. My point is that the kind of extra conditions
contained in the amendments would be likely to give more grounds for
litigation to the people that the hon. Gentleman is worried
about.
Mr.
Djanogly: I disagree. If someone is a member of a
registered political party, that is a lot more certain than anything
else that we have discussed. I appreciate that the amendments might not
be perfect. If the Minister were to come up with other suggestions, we
would be prepared to discuss
them. As
the hon. Member for Broxtowe said, a party could change its name, but
that is unlikely. The more popular political parties are unlikely to
want to change their names regularly. He also said that one of the
advantages could be that BNP members would end up going into their own
unions. I do not wholly agree with that as a valid course of action. It
smacks of the Italian fascist corporatist unions. Although this is not
directly relevant to the debate, I do not think that that would be an
effective way to negate BNP or fascist action in this
country. On
the arbitrary 12-month period, if the hon. Member for North-East
Derbyshire thinks that it should be two or three years, we are prepared
to discuss that. In principle, the idea that someone can be excluded
from a union or anything else because of something that they were
involved in 20, 30 or 40 years ago is conceptually wrong and
unfair.
Natascha
Engel: The hon. Gentleman is trying to legislate for
something that I do not think will ever happen. The idea that a trade
union might be purely vindictive and get rid of somebody because 40
years ago they were a member of such-and-such an organisation just will
not
happen.
Mr.
Djanogly: I assure the hon. Lady that in Nazi Germany a
person’s membership of the Communist party 20 or 30 years
previously may well have been taken into account in deciding how they
were dealt with. Such treatment is therefore conceptually possible. As
to whether it has happened in this country, I do not have any proof. Is
it conceptually possible? Is it a fear that as legislators we should be
looking at? I think it is.
Natascha
Engel: The point is that we do not live in Nazi Germany.
If we are legislating on the basis that we are living in Nazi Germany,
we should start all over again.
Mr.
Djanogly: I see myself as a guardian of democracy in this
country, and I hope that all of us do to some
extent. 1.45
pm
Michael
Jabez Foster: Is it not the case that Nazi Germany did not
have proposed new subsection (4H), which will impose reasonableness?
With respect to the hon. Gentleman, any of those bizarre examples, such
as someone who was a member 20 or 30 years ago, would be unreasonable
unless their conduct had been different in the
meantime.
Mr.
Djanogly: I think that I have made my
point.
Mr.
Binley: Does my hon. Friend agree from his history
lessons—I lived through it—that vindictiveness occurred
in the union movement consistently in the 1970s? Before saying that it
did not, one should talk to many of my friends who fought that battle
in Nottinghamshire and other parts of the country. It may happen again,
and we need to be aware of that when we are writing law. We are not
writing law for a week or a month; we assume that we are writing law
for a long time indeed, and we must take that into
account.
Mr.
Djanogly: I totally agree with my hon.
Friend.
John
Hemming: Does the hon. Gentleman agree that the price of
liberty is eternal vigilance and that our role is to ensure that the
laws operate properly and protect people against vindictive actions?
Although I would disagree with him on this occasion in valuing the
right of voluntary association where a person does not suffer any
disadvantage as an important issue to be taken account of, it is our
responsibility as hon. Members to protect the freedoms of the people of
this
country.
Mr.
Djanogly: I agree that eternal vigilance is certainly one
of our duties as legislators. The ban is based on being a member of a
political party—we are agreed on that.
Another thing
came to mind as the Minister was making his remarks. I argued, as
others have been arguing, that a person’s views may change over
time, but there is another aspect: over 20 or 30 years, the
political party’s views may change as well. The Conservative
party of 30 or 40 years ago is not the Conservative party of today, so
it is not only people’s views but parties’ views that
change. What might have been a racist party might not be after 30 or 40
years, and vice versa.
The more we
look at the legislation, the more we see holes in it and ways in which
it will be challenged. What we have seen in the other place and what we
will, I hope, see today is an Opposition who say, “Yes, we
appreciate that the legislation is necessary, but we are not quite
happy with where we are at the moment,” or “What we have
is not going to work,” and we have been producing different ways
forward. It would be helpful if the Government gave some thought to how
such points could be firmed up, so that we could return to it at a
later stage.
Dr.
Palmer: The hon. Gentleman has gone some way to persuading
me that there is a difficulty in the political party definition. I am
not sure whether he is raising it as a practical objection or as part
of a wish to constrain the activity of trade unions. My conclusion is
that we should perhaps replace the term with “political
association or movement”—in other words, draw the
definition more widely. His approach of limiting it to parties defined
in the Bill would work.
Mr.
Djanogly: I have said openly, as has my hon. Friend the
Member for Billericay—the Minister tried to create some sort of
difference between us on this—that conceptually, we do not like
the legislation. We do not like the clause; we are concerned about its
overall impact on civil liberties. However, we respect the ECHR and
realise that it is our starting point. We are not trying to overturn
the ECHR decision and certainly not the convention, which was the extra world
that we got into. We are where we are, and we have made our point. I
will go away, look through the Hansard report of today’s
debate and think again about how we can review the amendments before
the Bill is considered on Report, because we will certainly want to
raise that issue again. In the meantime, we are willing to discuss it
with the Minister and hope that there will be movement on it before
Report. I beg to ask leave to withdraw the
amendment. Amendment,
by leave,
withdrawn. Question
proposed, That the clause stand part of the
Bill.
Michael
Jabez Foster: I must confess a prejudice. My prejudice is
against the BNP—there are some other political parties that I do
not like either, but I forgive them. The BNP are an obnoxious bunch,
and many hon. Members agree. Fascists, like chameleons, change their
appearances. My first concern is how unions can clearly define the
sorts of organisations that are contrary to their purpose, although my
hon. Friend the Minister has dealt with this point to some extent. I am
grateful to him for defining the point about the term “political
party” being wide enough so as not to be too prescriptive in
excluding or including groups that are contrary to the purpose of trade
unions.
I do not
understand why trade unions should not be able, in the main, to do as
they want—political parties do. If one cannot join political
parties in some parts of the country—that is not so much the
case these days but certainly was in the past—that creates
detriment. As political parties, we can decide who we want in our
membership, and if someone has already joined a party whose views are
inconsistent with ours, we do not have to take them on. Even the Fabian
Society states that one must not be ineligible for membership of the
Labour party, which means that one cannot be a Tory, because one cannot
be a member of the Labour party if one is a Tory party member. Those
sorts of thing seem to be obvious.
It seems
perfectly proper that voluntary organisations should be able to exclude
people who are not their fellow travellers. My worry is that that might
still be too restrictive. We now know that the ECHR has decided that
the right to association by the unions will, in all but one situation,
lead to that having prominence over the human rights of the individual.
The exception to that is
laid out in proposed new subsection (4G), to which the Minister referred
this morning, in cases
where “the
individual would lose his livelihood or suffer other exceptional
hardship”. The
loss of livelihood could never occur now because there are no longer
such things as closed shops, so I am not sure what the exceptional
hardship could be. I cannot think of an example in which exceptional
hardship could be imposed on anyone simply because they could not join
the club. This morning we heard all sorts of examples of inconvenience,
such as not being able to go on holiday in the west country and losing
the right to free legal advice, but exceptional hardship seems to be
such a test that it is almost inconceivable that simply losing
one’s union membership could be so described, and we discussed
that earlier.
Furthermore,
the other issues set out in the new clauses that the House of Lords
suggests are imposed make me worry about the possibility of significant
litigation on some issues. An example is the business of the reasonable
practicality of knowledge. What is the reasonable practicality of
knowing whether the union had brought a policy that the new member did
not know about? The test in proposed new subsection (4D) creates a test
of reasonable practicality in the knowing of the objectives—it
looks like a minefield. A BNP member might well find a fellow traveller
who is happy to come along and say that he did not know about the
objectives of the union. What will happen? Is the trade union to bring
a bus-load of shop stewards and say that everybody should know about it
if they turn up to their branch meetings? I just do not know why it is
all necessary.
I have not
tabled an amendment this afternoon. The Minister has worked really hard
to strike the right balance in the Bill, and whatever he does, there
will be people who will disagree with him—he has a tough job and
I congratulate him on his efforts. As far as I can see, however, the
bottom line is that the ECHR has made clear its point that under very
rare circumstances only—exceptional hardship, for
example—a trade union might be unable to expel someone. Unless
he knows of other such circumstances and if all the other provisions
are simply window dressing designed to comply with what the House of
Lords said, will he reconsider whether the provisions are necessary?
Would it not be just as simple to return to the drafting in the
original Bill? Might that not serve his purposes well and do what he
has been trying to do throughout the Bill, which is to simplify and
clarify employment legislation, so that the employee—the union
member, in this case—knows precisely what is intended? Perhaps
the BNP will not even bother to join unions in which they are not
welcome.
John
Hemming: Most of my points have been dealt with during the
discussion on the amendment. The debate is primarily about freedom of
association, voluntary association and people’s right to decide
not to associate with certain other people. I would share hon. Members
concerns if we tried to legislate on that within statutory
organisations.
Natascha
Engel: I apologise for not having said what a delight it
is to serve under your chairmanship, Mr. Caton—it is,
of course. I declare an interest in that, before I was elected to
Parliament, I worked as the trade
union liaison officer at the Labour party and, after that, with trade
unions organising their political fund ballots, so I understand unions
and how they work. They are very broad churches, beyond even what has
been said here today. I remember working quite closely with people in
unions and workplaces who were members of other political parties.
Before I did that job, I was a trade union
organiser. Mr.
Stephen Crabb (Preseli Pembrokeshire) (Con): On the hon.
Lady’s point about trade unions being broad churches, is that
not borne out by the fact that the majority of trade union members
voted Conservative in 1983, 1987 and, I think, at the last
election?
Natascha
Engel: I cannot comment on that, because I do not know the
facts. Trade union members are members of lots of different political
parties, and everybody who calls themselves a democrat should support
that. Although I would say that a working person’s rights are
much better represented by the Labour party than by any other party, I
would still die in a ditch for their right to join any other political
party, if that is what they wanted to do. We are overlooking that
important fact. Trade unions are very broad churches. The circumstances
that we are legislating for are very
rare.
Mr.
Binley: Having been a trade unionist, I understand the
hon. Lady’s point. I was a member the Union of Shop,
Distributive and Allied Workers and worked for the co-operative
movement in the bank, as I have said before. However, although the
unions are very reasonable at the moment, they have not been in the
past—for example, when a specific group took hold of a region or
branch and caused havoc. Havoc was caused to members of the Labour
party, let alone to members of other parties, whether Conservative or
Liberal. Does she recognise that we must write law with that
possibility in mind? That is what the debate is
about. 2
pm
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