‘Union battleground could resolve election as enormous dividing line stays’
How working folks are handled is as enormous a dividing line between Labour and the Tories as we speak because it was 40 years in the past.
It was 4 many years in the past this month that Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Government chillingly banned unions at GCHQ.
The rule on the Cheltenham surveillance base introduced in January 1984 smeared commerce unionists as unpatriotic, and 14 heroes have been finally sacked for refusing £1,000 bribes to surrender their basic rights.
Horrific office clashes throughout Britain adopted – a 12-month miners’ strike starting in March, Rupert Murdoch’s Wapping lockout and mass sackings of Dover seafarers amongst them.
When Labour gained energy in 1997, it reversed the GCHQ ban and improved employment rights.
History will repeat itself in 2024 ought to Labour win the overall election, as job and commerce union rights stay a thick pink line between Keir Starmer and Rishi Sunak.
Ignorant cynics and mendacious Right-whingers attempt to unfold disenchantment by lazily asserting that the 2 important events are morphing into one. But they couldn’t be farther from the reality on this battleground.
Labour would, for starters, introduce unfair dismissal rights from day one as an alternative of two years right into a job, outlaw exploitative zero-hours contracts and put a cease to fire-and-rehire soiled methods.
Also promised inside 100 days is a Bill to repeal a Tory slavery regulation that forces commerce unionists to interrupt strikes. This regulation was a Conservative authoritarian response to disputes in well being and transport, with ministers behaving like dictatorial nineteenth century mill house owners.
Labour working class heroine Angela Rayner passionately champions a coverage bundle she says is the “biggest upgrade of workers’ rights in a generation”.
Some unions that large enterprise would possibly coax her boss Keir Starmer into diluting elements of it however the gulf can be clear when Sunak, as he’ll, intensifies assaults on Labour’s plan and devises recent anti-union shackles for the Tory manifesto.
The fortieth anniversary of the ban on unions at GCHQ is a reminder that, so far as staff are involved, Labour and the Conservatives stay on opposing sides.
