Not Urgent

Any legislation is worthless if no one, including the people who were paid to enforce it, showed any practical sign of ever having heard of it. That has been working for foxhunting for 19 years.

Even Jacob Rees-Mogg has just described the Trade Union Bill as "not urgent legislation". In the midst of websites and apps to enable people to attend several picket lines in one day and numerous in a week, who knows that you were supposed to have no more than six pickets, and that you were supposed to picket only your own usual place of work?

"No mass or flying pickets," Tony Blair told the TUC many years ago. Yet these days, while there are rows about Labour MPs on picket lines, neither Government Ministers nor rent-a-gob Conservative backbenchers ever mention that those MPs simply should not be there. One can only assume that they do not know, and that nor do the Police, in the way that those have apparently never heard of the hunting ban.

You could tighten that ban to your heart's content, for all the difference that it would make. It, too, was enacted purely as a crowd-pleaser inside the governing party. Now try and imagine a prosecution under the Trade Union Act 2023. Not even Rees-Mogg can conceive of that.

The biggest threat of it would be from a Starmer Government. But we are heading for a hung Parliament. To strengthen families and communities by securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty, we need to hold the balance of power. Owing nothing to either main party, we must be open to the better offer. There does, however, need to be a better offer. Not a lesser evil, which in any case the Labour Party is not.