Johnson government keeps Trumpian fires burning with review of workers’ rights

Business secretary Kwasi Kwarteng took aim at the FT when it reported that rights formerly enshrined in EU law were at risk, only to confirm to MPs that a review is in train, writes James Moore

NHS workers are among those covered by the Working Time Directive the government is thinking about scrapping (PA)

On the day Joe Biden was inaugurated as president of the United States, the British government seemed keen to stake its claim as the keeper of the Trumpian flame.

Take the issue of workers’ rights. Last week the Financial Times reported that they were at risk, with the government considering plans to tear up the EU’s labour market rules.

No, no, no, said business secretary Kwasi Kwarteng, who retweeted the Pink ’Un’s headline for the purposes of pouring cold water over it.

“We are not going to lower the standards of workers’ rights. The UK has one of the best workers’ rights records in the world – going further than the EU in many areas. We want to protect and enhance workers’ rights going forward, not row back on them,” he declared.

For a start, that second point is highly debatable, as unions would testify, but we’ll let that pass because what we’re considering here is the future now Britain’s out of the EU.

The contents of the tweet were, naturally, widely reported. But hang on a second, what’s this? Now MPs have been told that the rights enshrined under EU law that were supposed to be “protected and enhanced” are under review after all.

Said Mr Kwarteng: “I’m very struck as I look at EU economies how many EU countries – I think it's about 17 or 18 – have essentially opted out of the working time directive.”

Citing “people familiar with the plans” the FT’s article said of the review: “The main areas of focus are on ending the 48-hour working week, tweaking the rules around rest breaks at work and not including overtime pay when calculating some holiday pay entitlements.”

These rules are contained in, you’ve guessed it, the working time directive.

Mr Kwarteng also told MPs that “the idea that we are trying to whittle down standards, that's not at all plausible or true”. Meanwhile two plus two equals five, and there was a pink elephant trumpeting “I’ll miss you Donald” as the orange one slunk off to Mar-a-Lago.

Quite how the business secretary expects us to believe that ditching the protections contained within the directive is about “protecting and enhancing workers’ rights” is hard to fathom. Maybe he just thinks it’s all part and parcel of the post-shame politics ushered in by his boss Boris Johnson of which Donald Trump was the pre-eminent exponent.

It does, perhaps, rather help to explain the EU’s scepticism towards the British government’s intentions during the Brexit trade negotiations at the end of last year.

All those shiny new trade deals the government promised once Britannia was unchained are also going to get just that bit harder every time the Johnson government proves just how much of an unreliable partner it can be.

Mr Kwarteng was, of course, one of the authors of the infamous book Britannia Unchained which declared: “The British are among the worst idlers in the world. We work among the lowest hours, we retire early and our productivity is poor. Whereas Indian children aspire to be doctors or businessmen, the British are more interested in football and pop music.”

Not only is that spectacularly offensive, it’s also completely untrue (you might be sensing a theme there). Even with the directive, British workers put in some of the longest hours in Europe and that’s before we get onto the vexed subject of the millions of hours of unpaid overtime they perform.

In fact, a 2019 TUC study found that the average came to 42 hours a week over the prior year, nearly two hours longer than the EU average. That’s equivalent to an extra two and a half extra weeks of work a year.  

It’s not as if employers are even calling for such a move, which is driven by the blinkered ideological obsessions of the hard-right wing cabal surrounding the prime minister and backed by only a handful of fringe figures in the business world.

But we mustn’t let the facts get in the way of trashing a good story, eh Mr Kwarteng?