Never underestimate the capacity of the political world to focus on questions that are relatively trivial in the larger scheme of things, all while issues of much greater significance stare them in the face. Labour’s furious row over Diane Abbott’s candidacy is a case in point.
Abbott is a politician coming towards the end of her career. She will have no power whatsoever under a Keir Starmer government. But the recent row over Abbott drowned out a far more consequential internal Labour argument – the one over workers’ rights. It is more consequential because, unlike Abbott, millions of workers are in line to get more power under Starmer.
Exactly how much power, and on what terms, is unclear. The details are still being thrashed out. Some of the issues will only crystallise after the election. These are often represented as party management battles, or ancestral left-right tussles. That is true to an extent, but it misses the main point, which is that Labour is attempting something highly ambitious – to create a new business model for the British economy.
In this election, Starmer’s priority is to reclaim the working-class voters that Labour lost to the Conservatives in the Brexit years. This is a priority driven by electoral necessity but also, it seems clear, conviction. It is what he means when he talks about a changed Labour party at the service of working people, a constant refrain.
This is a historically bold project. It is consistent with Starmer’s guardedly social democratic, perhaps even “blue Labour” approach to Britain’s priorities. It is closely aligned in places with the so-called European social model, against which the UK often bridled, under Labour and the Tories, when it was an EU member. Such a thing has not been on offer from Labour, under a leader with a serious chance of outright victory, for decades.
To Starmer, and to the shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, the case for strengthened workers’ rights is rooted in two linked things. One is Britain’s long-term need for more respect in the workplace. The other is Britain’s need for more productive businesses. The link between rights at work and successful – ie profitable – businesses is absolutely key to the strategy. It is a world away from the old industrial politics of half a century ago.
Don’t take my word for this. Here is Starmer himself, speaking on 25 May: “The number one mission for an incoming government is to grow the economy to make sure our economy ensures living standards are improved everywhere across the country. I don’t think you can do that if you don’t treat your workforce properly.”
And here is Labour’s latest official reiteration of its aims, published on 24 May: “A step change is needed in how working people exercise control over their working lives, and businesses need urgent action to address our poor productivity. Labour is pro-worker and pro-business, and we will work in partnership with trade unions and business to deliver.”
Most of the unions are happy to at least go along with this. A few, though, see it merely as blah. For some unions, including Unite, workers’ rights are still what they were in 20th-century Britain, a zero-sum game, in which rights for workers essentially means more power for trade unions. But workers’ rights and trade union power, though connected, are not the same thing. This is where Labour’s current row has its roots.
The vanquishing of over mighty trade unions in the 1980s by Margaret Thatcher remains a central part of the modern Conservative party’s legacy. A generation ago, New Labour still felt the need to distance itself from anything implying the restoration of 1970s-style power to trade unions. The unions, though generally cowed, resented Labour’s indifference.
Starmer is taking a rather different approach. It is not about overturning the Thatcherite past. It is about security and growth. It is not yet, as far as I can see, about industrial democracy and codetermination – the proposal, in the tragically spurned 1977 Bullock report, that there should be worker-directors on the boards of all companies with more than 2,000 employees. But it could be, and it should be, even now.
Labour’s New Deal for Working People, which has now been redubbed as its Plan to Make Work Pay, includes protections against unfair dismissal from day one in employment, a ban on compulsory zero-hours contracts, an end to fire and rehire practices, an entrenchment of flexible working options, the “right to switch off” out-of-hours, and the strengthening of maternity, parental leave and sick pay rights.
The plans are a reminder, in short, that times have changed. We live in a different Britain from the freewheeling economic expansion of the 1990s. Since the 2008 financial crisis, attitudes have swung round to embrace the case for better protections. And it’s not just Labour voters who are eager for more security at work. It’s every other sort of voter too, including plenty of Conservative ones, not least among supporters of Brexit.
The shift in opinion on rights at work has been evolutionary, not revolutionary. It is a gradual curve not a complete about-face. The unions certainly played their part in making it happen. But so did sensible Tories such as Theresa May. The voters whose views have switched, putting secure work and decent treatment ahead of an economy going “gangbusters”, seek some basic control over their lives, their income and their prospects. It does not mean they want to be on strike.
These plans are popular, even among Conservative voters, almost half of whom say they would prefer more working protections even if this slows down the economy. This will seem incredible to Thatcherites and Trussites, locked into their reductionist view that only deregulation can generate growth. But it is the sort of shift in opinion that makes one think this country may really now be at a turning point.
Labour deserves credit for getting dignity and fairness at work back on to the political agenda. It is striking that Sunak and the Conservatives still have nothing to say about these issues. But to think of the 2020s as payback time for the 1980s would be merely destructive. Instead, we should see the 2020s as a decade in which issues such as workplace democracy and codetermination in company decision-making make infinitely more sense. Workers’ rights need to be reinstated at the heart of the national conversation in terms that make sense for 21st-century businesses. If Starmer can achieve this amid the headwinds of the 2020s, he will have no finer legacy.
Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist
