Brother Peston

Thus did Jeremy Corbyn describe him for this:

I have rarely read legislation so lacking in underlying coherence and logic as today's Bill from the Government that would significantly restrict the right to strike, and I quote, in "health services, fire and rescue services, education services, transport services, decommissioning of nuclear installations and management of radioactive waste and spent fuel, and border security."

The first thing to note is the sheer breadth of the services that would be affected, and by implication the millions of employees whose right to withdraw their labour could be restricted. The Government says that in the first instance it will use the proposed new powers in the bill to impose "minimum service regulations" for "fire, ambulance and rail services", and nothing else.

But that is not what the Bill would put into law. It gives the Business Secretary the right to draw up minimum service levels in all of the industries I cite above, on pain of costly damages for trade unions that failed to provide those service levels. So presumably, since the Act. specified the whole of "transport", bus and tram drivers could be told that not all of them could strike at any one time. And both cab drivers and the DVLA seem to be in scope, whatever the Government says is its intention.

Similarly, "health services" could mean public and private, or even pharmacies. And "education" presumably means Eton as much as Gasworks Comp. Also, what is meant by "border security'"? Does it include the Passport Office, as well as border officers? And why is only nuclear decommisioning specified? Why not operators of nuclear plant? Which gets me to the nub of what's weird, and some would say unnerving, about the Bill. It is simply not clear whether it's designed to protect our safety, our prosperity, or simply our convenience.

The right to strike is a basic human right. And perhaps it should be restricted if lives are potentially put at risk by industrial action, though all the public service unions, especially those representing ambulance workers, are at pains to stress that as a matter of practice they never strike in the absence of agreeing minimum service provision with employers on a voluntary and mutual basis. But by no stretch of the imagination are lives likely to be lost when the trains do not run, or teachers walk out, or the queues are hideously long at Heathrow.

It is no coincidence that when Ministers and officials talk about the new law, sometimes they talk about minimum services, and sometimes about minimum safety. The two are very different, though Ministers seemingly want the confusion. If what they really want to protect is vital core services where there are de facto national or local monopolies, why does this Bill not also include Royal Mail, or energy suppliers, or maintenance of internet cables, or water.

I thought at first that the common factor in the industries specified in the Bill is they're all publicly owned or publicly funded. But as I said above, private providers are in scope. And if it was about ring-fencing vital public sector monopolies, then anyone working in the law courts would have their right to strike limited by statute.

In the end, this Bill looks like a hastily drawn response to the current wave of public sector strikes, an attempt to prove that Ministers are not powerless. But there is a compelling argument that what is driving these strikes is a sense among public service workers that they are not valued highly enough, in either a monetary or a more general sense, by government or by wider society. And it is very unclear to me that limiting one of their basic civil and human rights, the right to take industrial action, will make them feel any more valued.

By the way, this critique should not be seen as a particularly left-wing one. I have spoken today to libertarian Tory MPs, who are as uncomfortable with this legislation as Labour MPs. This is an argument as much about personal freedoms as about worker solidarity.