UKIP applauds the social partnership approach of the Welsh Government, because no sensible person wants to see confrontation in industrial relations. The Cabinet Secretary and I are old enough to remember a time when there really was confrontation in industry and in public services in this country. That’s why the trade union reforms of the 1980s were brought in. In the 1970s, there was an average of 13 million days lost to strikes every year. In the 1980s that halved to 7 million; in the 1990s it was down to 660,000, where it’s been—broadly speaking—static ever since. That’s why the Labour Governments under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown made no attempt to repeal the legislation that they and their predecessors so vigorously opposed when it was passing through the House of Commons in the 1980s.

If the social partnership model of the Welsh Government is so successful, which it appears to be, I can’t really understand why they think that the proposed measure being introduced at Westminster is such a threat to the good relations that currently exist between public service unions and the government in its various forms in Wales. Because the illusory threat of having to have a strike ballot to reach the thresholds in the proposed legislation won’t even be triggered, because of the approach that the Welsh Government takes. So, I wonder what is the purpose of introducing the Bill, to take up the time of this Assembly, when there are many more pressing matters that we can use the time upon. It is a fact that trade unions are virtually extinct, or at least redundant, outside the public sector in the United Kingdom today. In the real world, as it were, where people have to trade their services, trade unions no longer seem to have very much of a role. As voluntary membership organisations, they have to persuade people to stump up their membership subscriptions, and they haven’t been terribly successful at persuading their potential members to do so. In the public sector, it’s very, very different. There’s a very high proportion of people who join a union. That is because the difference between the public and the private sector is that decisions, ultimately, in the public sector are political, because the employers, ultimately, are politicians and, therefore, this is the way in which pressure is brought.

I think anything that makes it easier to call a strike in these circumstances is a threat to the interests of the public at large. After all, trade unions and their members are a sectional interest, not the public as a whole, and we’re talking here, 100 per cent, about public services that every single elector and the elector’s children will use at some time during the year. Surely, the interests of the public must take precedence over sectional interests, and therefore it is right that there should be a reasonable threshold before calling a strike. Strikes should be not the first resort, but the last resort. I therefore ask the Cabinet Secretary: why are we playing with fire in this instance?