I heard what my hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh South (Ian Murray) said about the inability to amend this part of the Bill, and I sympathise with his view, but I thought that it would be useful for us to test whether the Government’s intention was to adopt a genuine approach to developing the concept of employee ownership or whether this was merely an attack on employment rights. I thought that it would be useful to set out how an employee ownership scheme could be introduced, and that if the Government’s intention was indeed to develop the concept of employee ownership they would support my amendments, or at least commit themselves to tabling amendments to the same effect.
The argument about employee ownership relates to economic democracy. I believe that we should socialise our economy. I believe that individual workers at every level should have control over their own working lives, and that that means democratic control of the firm, the region and the nation. Over the years, the House has debated a variety of methods of bringing that about. We have discussed public ownership, and nationalisation as part of that; co-operation; mutualisation, by which I mean true mutualisation and not the alternative description of privatisation employed by the present Government; and worker ownership models, which have included the extension of employee ownership. A range of models have been discussed over the years, including the Scandinavian model—in which share entitlements are given to the workers and then put in trust, gradually amounting to control of the firm itself—and the individual employee ownership model proposed in the Nuttall review.