Employment Bill [HL]

moved Amendment No. 27: 27: Clause 17, page 16, leave out lines 9 to 14 and insert— ““(a) at the end of subsection (4A) the words ““but does not include membership of a political party where the values and ideals of the party are incompatible with a rule or objective of the union”” are inserted; (b) after subsection (4B) there is inserted— ““(4C) For the purposes of subsection (2)(d), the exclusion or expulsion of the individual is permitted only if— (a) the decision to exclude or expel was taken in accordance with the union’s rules or established procedures, and (b) the exclusion or expulsion does not prejudice the individual’s livelihood or conditions of employment.””.”” The noble Lord said: At Second Reading, I made a very full speech and I do not intend to repeat it all because all Members of the Committee are as capable as I am of reading. I thank Ministers and officials of the TUC. I have met Ministers and TUC officials to discuss the issue. I am extremely grateful to them. Being an optimist by nature, I also very much hope that by the time we reach Report it may be possible to secure an agreement on all sides of the House on a sensible way forward. I now have the perfectly ghastly task of trying to explain—so that I understand because if I understand maybe others will—the situation we are in as regards the context of Clause 17. When the Conservative Government were in power, an amendment was moved to amend the trade union legislation, and it was supported by both main parties. At the time, it was supported by the right honourable Frank Dobson, not because of anything to do with the BNP, but because of communists. During the debates Frank Dobson said that there had been a bleak period in trade union history—post-war and pre-war—when communists were debarred from membership of trade unions or from holding office in trade unions and, therefore, there was a bi-party agreement about the necessity to give protection. That was part and parcel of the wider protection connected with the closed shop. As a result, protective provisions were put in, not only dealing with the closed shop and its abuse, but also giving rights to individuals not to be excluded or expelled from a trade union unless the exclusion or expulsion was permitted by Section 174 of the 1993 Act. As the Minister said, a distinction was drawn between political activities and political membership—a difficult distinction to draw and maintain as a matter of fact. The Government put forward an admirable consultation document, which I dealt with in detail at Second Reading when I explained why it seemed to me that some safeguards are needed that are compatible with the convention and in the best tradition of the trades union movement. At the time, I was glad that the noble Lord, Lord Morris of Handsworth, that most experienced senior trade union official who also has reasons for understanding the need to protect people against oppression, supported me and even went so far as to describe Clause 17 as it stands as barking mad. I could never find that language, but I understood what he was saying. In my amendment I have sought to do the minimum, not the maximum, that can be done to strike a fair balance between the conflicting rights and interests of trades unions on the one hand and individual members on the other. I could have gone wider, and in one formulation, I did go wider. However, I have cut it down as far as I can to try to get a clear dividing line. Having read and reread the judgment of the European court—which I shall certainly not read now because it was read at Second Reading—I have said that the way in which a union can lawfully exclude or expel is by making sure that its rules and objectives, say in relation to the BNP, are incompatible with being a member of that party. The Minister was kind enough to indicate in his speech, I think at Second Reading, that most unions have already amended their rule books, or will do so in order to ensure that. The first thing is to get the rule book in order so that it is clear that Nazi party activity and membership are incompatible with the ideals of the trade union.