DOMINIC LAWSON: No marvel the unions have the higher hand so quickly

The biggest guessing game in politics has concerned the mystery of Sir Keir Starmer. As Prime Minister, would he be true to his self-description when running for the Labour leadership in 2020?

Wearing an ‘I love unions’ badge he told party members: ‘I’m Keir Starmer and I’m a proud trade unionist.’ He went on to say that Labour should be ‘shoulder to shoulder with the trade unions on everything that we do, including policy-making’.

Or would he be the man who, in an article for the Sunday Telegraph last December, called on Conservative voters to see him as someone after their own hearts?

He attempted this prodigious act of impersonation by praising Margaret Thatcher for her efforts to ‘drag Britain out of its stupor by letting loose our natural entrepreneurialism’. Thatcher achieved this, in no small part, by passing laws which greatly restricted the power of the trade unions.

Rewarded 

Well, now the guessing game is over, as striking junior doctors and train drivers have been instantly rewarded with multi-year pay awards well above the actual or projected rate of inflation, with not a single condition attached.

And coming down the legislative pipeline are new employment laws, demanded by the trade unions, which would make it easier for them to take strike action and illegal for firms to call their employees ‘out of hours’. The latter would be a curse for start-ups – exactly the entrepreneurialism that Starmer claimed he understood.

For those paying attention, this was always going to be the way that Sir Keir Starmer – pressed on by Angela Rayner, his deputy and a former trade union official – would govern. Last year I criticised the naivety of the corporate leaders who exclaimed how business-friendly they had found the Labour leader’s team.

But the biggest clue came in an interview published in May by the House Magazine. This is a publication sent to all members of both houses of Parliament, much of it written by the MPs and peers themselves. It’s much more interesting than that sounds, well worth a read.

Anyway, in that issue, a month before Rishi Sunak fatefully called a General Election, the House Magazine gave a lengthy interview to Mick Whelan, the leader of the train drivers’ union, ASLEF.

Whelan was a close ally of Jeremy Corbyn, and had earlier expressed dismay at his chum’s suspension from the Labour Party under Starmer.

He had also described as ‘a bloody disgrace’ Starmer’s instructions to Labour front-benchers not to join the picket line with the RMT when that rail-workers’ union took strike action in 2022. Yet by May 2024, the hard-Left Whelan had been won over by Sir Keir.

Whelan told the House Magazine: ‘Jeremy [Corbyn] is a great friend and I loved everything that was in the ’17 and ’19 manifestos. How do we move towards those things? It’s about being able to do it in a staged way. That’s what Keir is doing.’

In other words, Starmer, in Whelan’s view, would achieve socialist objectives, but stealthily. And he went on to say, of the relations between union leaders and the man now Prime Minister: ‘We’ve all got Keir’s personal number; we’ve got access to him.’

As the Mail revealed last week, out of the 404 Labour MPs, no fewer than 213 of them have received donations totalling £1.8 million in the last three months. Money talks – and loudly.

Devastating 

Starmer and his front bench colleagues have defended speedy settlements with the junior doctors and the train drivers’ union on the grounds that their strike action had been ‘devastating’ and it was best for the economy to pay up and move on.

But the message sent is that the strike weapon is guaranteed success.

Thus, the co-chair of the BMA’s junior doctors’ committee, Dr Robert Laurenson, while recommending his members take the 22 per cent increase in pay over two years offered by the Health Secretary, Wes Streeting, told his colleagues, over WhatsApp, that the ‘next window of opportunity [for strikes] is about 12 months away’.

As for Mr Whelan’s lads, two days after agreeing their deal to raise average drivers’ pay to £69,000 a year, Aslef declared three weeks of strike action in furtherance of another dispute.

About this, Sir Keir Starmer has nothing to say.

IF CELLS ARE FULL, HOW ABOUT THE STOCKS? 

The overcrowding of our prisons is now leading to perverse sentencing in the courts. Take the case of a serial offender by the name of Walid Raoul, last week convicted for stealing a £50,000 Patek Philippe watch from Mark Beard, as he and his wife walked back to the Connaught Hotel in London’s Mayfair, where they were staying.

Raoul’s accomplice had also attempted to rip the rings from the hand of Beard’s wife, Annli. Apart from the shock of it all, Mrs Beard suffered what her husband described as ‘a badly broken finger’.

Fortunately Raoul was, after a chase, captured by security guards and Mr Beard recovered his watch.

But the robber was himself ‘extremely fortunate’, to quote the words of the judge at Southwark Crown Court, Quinton Newcomb.

He said he had to ‘take into account the current overcrowding of this country’s prisons’, and so, instead of sending Raoul down, Newcomb passed a ‘suspended sentence of two years and 200 hours of unpaid work’.

Understandably, Mr Beard told the Daily Mail it was ‘pathetic … totally wrong’ that his assailant had walked free.

I have a suggestion which might address such concerns: bring back the stocks.

As one historian has observed, this form of local public punishment was ‘rendered obsolete by the development of the modern prison system, which took criminal justice out of the town square and moved it behind bars’.

Although use of the pillory was excised from the statute book in 1837, it seems the stocks are still, technically, available.

In 2016, this was brought to wider attention by David Bretherton, a Thame councillor, when he suggested the stocks be returned to his Oxfordshire town. His idea was to make them a tourist attraction, rather than revived as a means of punishing local villains.

But now our judges have, in effect, declared our prison system inadequate to the task demanded of it, why not? I’m sure shopkeepers – dismayed by the way those convicted for repeatedly robbing their stores are not being banged up – would welcome the sight of stocks being used for their traditional purpose.

I suspect the prospect of such public punishment would act as a deterrent — far more so than ‘unpaid work’. And it would cost a fraction of the amount needed to build thousands more prison cells.