Employment Bill [Lords]

I will not give way. Too many advances have been made since 1992 for us to return to that position. We therefore oppose those amendments. We accept the legal authority of the decision of the European Court of Human Rights in the ASLEF case, but we would like to put on record our deep unease with it. To our mind, it marks a further erosion of personal civil liberties by an organisation whose remit is supposedly to protect them. Here we have a court of human rights reining in the freedoms of an individual. I should like to move on to amendment No. 10, which seeks to place a limit on how far back a trade union is entitled to look into a member's past to find reasons to exclude or expel that person. I accept that this is a question of balancing interests, proportionately and in a common sense fashion. We recognise that, with time, people change, that their views change and their actions are adapted. As we pointed out in Committee, membership of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament as a student in the '60s should not automatically allow a 50-year-old to be expelled from a trade union that represents workers in the nuclear industry—