Red Theresa's "new deal" for workers doesn't stand up to even a cursory analysis

The problem for her opponents is that voters seem to be buying it. They might just have to hope for a backlash when she fails to deliver

Can May be trusted to deliver on a "new deal" for workers? (Getty Images)

It’s a “new deal for workers”!

Statutory leave for parents if their child dies, the right to take leave to care for family members like workers in Ireland, the right to training, protections for people exploited by the “gig economy” and a guarantee that European Union worker rights will be maintained through the Brexit process.

Oh, and employees are going to have their voices heard in the boardrooms of Britain's big companies.

It’s that damn Red Jez again! Employers will never wear it! It’ll heap costs on them. There'll be loads more red tape too. These commie policies. They'll come at the cost of hundreds of thousands of jobs. This is what you get when you put a Trot in charge of your party!

Wait, what’s that? These are Tory proposals? No, you’re kidding me. This is more what you’d expect from TUC general secretary Frances O’Grady than Theresa May. It's fake news! or you read it on The Onion or some other satirical site.

Except that it isn't fake news. It is real. All these measures are being trailed by Ms May’s Tory Party as part of an unashamed pitch to Labour voters. Did I say unashamed? A better term would be shameless.

This is the party that wanted to opt out of the European Social Chapter when it was first conceived way back in the days of the Maastricht treaty debate in early 1990s. Now it’s promising to protect rights hailing from Europe?

This is also the party whose plans for anti union laws, and in particular, an attack on the right to strike, were so extreme that even the Chartered Institute for Personnel & Development said they went too far.

Conservatives acted to limit an employee’s right to take their employer to a tribunal, extending the qualifying period to bring unfair dismissal claims to two years from one, while at the same time increasing the cost (and thus the risk).

They cut the required consultation time between employers and employee representatives over compulsory redundancies. Meanwhile, self employed workers, many of whom are exploited in Britain's "gig economy", were exempted from numerous health and safety rules.

Despite repeated critical reports from the Work & Pension Committee, the number of people working in the latter has boomed under Conservative, or Conservative led Governments.

So has the use of zero-hours contracts. Just last week official figures showed the number of those jumped 13 per cent to a record 905,000, as insecure work becomes the norm for the young, and often for women too.

Bear in mind, too, that the above list is focussed primarily on just the last few years, and that it is by no means exhaustive.

In point of fact, there has scarcely been a protection for employees that Conservative ministers haven’t tried to apply the shears to at some point in the name of Britain’s “flexible labour market” that might make it cheap to hire, but also makes it very easy to exploit and to fire.

In one respect you have to (grudgingly) admire Ms May’s chutzpah. While pursuing the hardest of hard Brexits to placate her own hard right, and keep the steady stream of UKIP voters seeking safe harbour in Tory ports on board, she is at the same time trying to occupy the political centre ground in a naked, and cynical, appeal to Labour voters.

“A country that work’s for everyone,” she once said. Empty rhetoric, as can be seen in the way that mooted plans to put workers on boards (uncontroversial in Europe) were rapidly watered down when City bigwigs spat their coffee out on to their desks after reading about them in the FT.

Ms May has about as much credibility as a defender of workers rights as I would have as an opera critic. Her pitch should inspire derision, laughter even. Except that there’s nothing funny about her poll ratings. People shouldn't buy her "new deal for workers", but it appears that at least some are prepared to.

Conservative opponents urgently need to find some way of landing a blow or two, because about the best they can hope for as things stand is that there may, in future, be a backlash if Ms May doesn’t prove to be as good as her word.