My Lords, perhaps I could be allowed a brief intervention—I was not making a particular point about being brief; I mean it will be brief for me. I apologise that I have not been able to take part either at Second Reading or in the Committee. The Scotland Bill and the Economic Affairs Finance Bill Sub-Committee have taken me away. I wanted to make a contribution and am sorry that I was not able to in respect of Clause 10, but I support Amendment 92, in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Wheeler, as it seems to provide a perfectly sensible way forward for the Government.
If we had a Labour Government who brought forward a Bill suggesting that employers should no longer be able to deduct private health insurance payments from people’s salaries, I wonder how we would react on these Benches. We would go absolutely mental. We would say that it was a gross intrusion and a politically motivated thing, which interfered in the relationship between employers and their employees.
The noble Lord, Lord Lea, seemed to think that there was some ideology here. I can probably be identified with ideology in the Conservative Party more closely than most. I am a strong Thatcherite and very much supported my noble friend Lord Tebbit, who is no longer in his place, in his trade union reforms, which have stood the test of time. Those reforms were about ending the closed shop, giving the trade unions back to their members and taking the trade union movement away from the extremist militants within it who had led that movement, with its very proud history, into an abyss. That is what they were about.
Although I understand the main purpose of the Bill is to ensure that minorities do not dominate the decisions of trade unions, and support that core purpose, on
both check-off and the question of opting in and out of the political levy I believe the Government are going far too far.
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