You don’t have to look too hard at the record of this Conservative-led government to find examples where right-wing ideology and purblind prejudice have trumped reason and evidence in the formation of policy. Dismantling our National Health Service through financial competition, when all experts favour closer integration and collaboration, is one glaring and destructive example. Another is the crumbling foundation stone on which the government’s failing economic strategy is based: that public sector cuts will incentivise investment by the private sector. Seven hundred billion pounds of capital and assets hoarded in banks and corporate balance sheets is one evidence-based yardstick by which we might measure the margin of error of that call, though a more human scale might index the months of misery endured by the young unemployed of Britain as they wait for an upturn in our economic fortunes. However, I’m tempted to suggest that the most egregious example came yesterday, when Jo Swinson, the Liberal Democrat minister for employment relations, announced that she was cutting the minimum notice period employers have to give before making large-scale job cuts from 90 to 45 days.
This idea was first floated earlier in the year by Conservative donor Adrian Beecroft, in his slash and burn report on employment law. Beecroft infamously concluded that “employment law and regulation impedes the search for efficiency and competitiveness” and suggested that long established protections against unfair dismissal should be scrapped, parental leave and flexible working curtailed, pension rights reduced or removed altogether for employees in firms with just five workers, gangmaster licensing repealed, TUPE rules hobbled and the Agency Workers Directive dumped. Rather than recoiling from this shameful list, Tory minister Mark Prisk boasted that 17 of the 23 recommendations were already being implemented, though Vince Cable sounded a note of sanity in declaring it “complete nonsense to think that if labour rights were stripped down to the most basic minimum, employers would start hiring and the economy would soar again.”
The Business Secretary pointed to evidence that Britain already has one of the most flexible labour markets in the developed world, a fact borne out by the OECD’s assessment of employment protection, which shows that British workers enjoy significantly fewer rights and statutory protections than their international counterparts.
Employment Protection in 2008 in OECD and selected non-OECD countries*
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Scale from 0 (least stringent) to 6 (most restrictive)