Prevention of Intimidatory Picketing (Hansard, 4 July 1984)

§ Mr. Tony Baldry (Banbury)

I beg to move, That leave be given to bring in a Bill to place upon police authorities the duty to reclaim as a civil liability from the union involved any additional costs incurred in consequence of police having to attend any site when the number of pickets is in excess of six; and further to amend the law so that the loss of employment resulting from refusing to take part in a strike shall be considered to be unfair dismissal. I am sure that the violence we have seen recently on television has made us all deeply anxious about what is happening in our country. Law is the condition of civilised life and respect for it enables men and women to enjoy their civil rights in freedom. If there is a right to strike, there is also a right to go to work. Picketing is lawful only when it seeks peacefully to persuade. To do that one needs no more than six pickets—not 60 or 600 and certainly not the 6,000 that we have seen at places such as Orgreave. What we have seen in the past few weeks is not picketing, but an attempt by force to prevent others from doing what they have a right to do. It is intimidation and an attempt to substitute the rule of law with the rule of the mob.

It is time for us to give quiet, serious and dispassionate consideration to how such intimidatory picketing can be curtailed. The code of conduct that accompanied the industrial relations legislation of 1980 and 1982, which was agreed with the Trades Union Congress, states that there need be no more than six pickets at any site. That makes sense. The legitimate purpose of picketing is to advise fellow workers that an industrial dispute is in progress. One does not need more than six people to make it clear that a strike is on and that a picket line exists. When one starts to get way in excess of six pickets and stones, bottles, smoke bombs and other missiles are thrown at people who want to go to work, the only reasonable inference is that people are there not peacefully to persuade, but to bully, threaten and intimidate and to try to prevent people from going to work with implied, and often actual, threats of physical violence. It is mob rule on the rampage.

Ironically, the long-term victims of such mob rule will be trade union constitutionalists as they attempt to contain hotheads with union rule books made worthless by so-called direct action. It has been said that the present situation could be resolved if the National Coal Board availed itself of the legislation to control secondary picketing. But that is to misunderstand the law. One cannot force a private body to seek private relief in the courts for the public good. If one wants to protect the public good, one has to give a public body the right to seek the necessary relief. It must be for Parliament to protect the public good. Until now, one of the results of restraint in the use of industrial relations legislation has been that it has imposed on the criminal law the task of protecting the rights of those who want to work, with more than 1,200 people, for example, being charged with the offence of behaviour likely to cause a breach of the peace, and with local police authorities incurring well over £50 million of additional costs as a direct result of the need to police the mass picket lines to enable people to get to work.

I believe that there is a way in which the activities of those trade unions that seek to intimidate and bully can be curtailed, and that is why I seek the leave of the House to 332 introduce a Bill that will help to prevent intimidatory picketing. Its provisions are simple. It will give local police authorities the right to reclaim as a civil debt from a union the direct cost attributable where it has been necessary for police officers to attend a site at which the number of pickets has been in excess of six, which is the number set down in the present code of conduct on picketing.

In practice, the presence of more than six pickets at any entrance to a workplace would, on the face of it, be considered intimidatory, and if a senior police officer believed that because of the presence of more than six pickets intimidation was likely to take place and that the presence of two or more police officers was required to protect those wishing to go to work, the direct costs of such extra policing could be claimed as a civil debt from the union with whose policy the pickets were supposedly trying to acquaint those going to work. It would be a defence that the union concerned had taken all reasonable steps to limit the number of pickets to six.

Such an approach would have a number of advantages. It would oblige any union involved in intimidation and violence directly to meet the costs of the police in protecting other citizens because of that union's violence. It would hit the pockets of unions that allowed or encouraged their members to intimidate or use violence. The police authorities would never be a party to the industrial dispute and, thus, their intervention could not affect relations between the union and the employers. Unlike an injunction—which is a mandatory order of the court—there would be no question of anyone being able to seek to become a martyr and go to prison because, if the union did not pay the necessary compensation, the court would simply have the power to take union assets in satisfaction of the judgment debt.

I believe that giving police authorities the opportunity directly to recoup from the unions involved the direct costs of having to deal with intimidatory picketing will go a long way towards bringing the heavy mob under control and stopping the mob action that we have recently seen.

I thus hope that I have the support of the whole House in introducing this Bill. I also hope that the Government may consider its provisions worthy of inclusion in future public order legislation, because Parliament must take every step necessary to protect the right and freedom of the individual to go to work, free from violence and free from intimidation.