'Union battleground may decide election as huge dividing line remains'

14 January 2024 , 21:00

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Labour would outlaw exploitative zero-hours contracts and put a stop to fire-and-rehire dirty tricks (Image: PA)

How working folk are treated is as huge a dividing line between Labour and the Tories today as it was 40 years ago.

It was four decades ago this month that Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Government chillingly banned unions at GCHQ.

The rule at the Cheltenham surveillance base announced in January 1984 smeared trade unionists as unpatriotic, and 14 heroes were eventually sacked for refusing £1,000 bribes to give up their fundamental rights.

Horrific workplace clashes across Britain followed – a 12-month miners’ strike beginning in March, Rupert Murdoch’s Wapping lockout and mass sackings of Dover seafarers among them.

When Labour won power in 1997, it reversed the GCHQ ban and improved employment rights.

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History will repeat itself in 2024 should Labour win the general election, as job and trade union rights remain a thick red line between Keir Starmer and Rishi Sunak.

Ignorant cynics and mendacious Right-whingers try to spread disenchantment by lazily asserting that the two main parties are morphing into one. But they couldn’t be further from the truth on this battleground.

Labour would, for starters, introduce unfair dismissal rights from day one instead of two years into a job, outlaw exploitative zero-hours contracts and put a stop to fire-and-rehire dirty tricks.

Labour and Conservative remain on opposing sides

Also promised within 100 days is a Bill to repeal a Tory slavery law that forces trade unionists to break strikes. This law was a Conservative authoritarian response to disputes in health and transport, with ministers behaving like dictatorial 19th century mill owners.

Labour working class heroine Angela Rayner passionately champions a policy package she says is the “biggest upgrade of workers’ rights in a generation”.

Some unions that big business might coax her boss Keir Starmer into diluting parts of it but the gulf will be clear when Sunak, as he will, intensifies assaults on Labour’s plan and devises fresh anti-union shackles for the Tory manifesto.

The 40th anniversary of the ban on unions at GCHQ is a reminder that, as far as workers are concerned, Labour and the Conservatives remain on opposing sides.

Kevin Maguire DNU