Maybe. Well, I am not so sure if the Minister is—maybe she will tell us.
I do not want to get into the issue of bin strikes and so on—the hon. Member for Glasgow East (David Linden) mentioned the strikes—but they go to the heart of something that is infecting our politics at the moment. Our refuse collectors worked all through covid and did a marvellous job, but decided—quite rightly—to strike on the basis that they had been offered a 2% pay rise. People need fair pay rises, particularly the lowest paid. In all our councils across Scotland—it might be the same across England—we have probably the lowest-paid public sector workers out there. They are striking on the basis of pay rates.
We then had an unholy argument in Scotland about who was responsible for the strikes. Then, a few weeks later—one might reflect on adding one and one and getting maybe four, five or two—the First Minister put a funded deal on the table and the strikes were lifted. How can that not be the responsibility of the Scottish Government rather than of the Labour party in Edinburgh? That is beyond my comprehension. That is the kind of debate that we have had, rather than a sensible debate about whether employment law should be devolved to Scotland.
I know that the hon. Member for East Dunbartonshire (Amy Callaghan) has been back a while, but I have not had the opportunity to welcome her back. I wish her well in her continued recovery. Her speech showed that less is more, because she hit the nail on the head with regard to what we should be doing in employment law and getting it away from the Tories. My contention is that the best way to get it away from the Tories is to vote for a UK Labour Government, because it would be better to have a Labour Minister sitting on that side of the Chamber and putting forward Labour policies for workers’ rights.
Can I directly address the hon. Member for Glasgow East? I may misquote him here, but he said that the Scottish Labour party will have to explain why they oppose the devolution of employment law. We do not. The Scottish Labour party’s policy is to devolve employment law. I am not sure if the hon. Member for East Lothian was on the Smith Commission or whether it was his former colleague John Swinney, however, the reason employment law was not devolved was because the UK trade unions did not want that. They were concerned about devolving it without thinking through—