“Historic amnesia”: Barry Gardiner on Labour’s relationship with the unions

“We need to understand our roots,” Barry Gardiner tells me. I’m sitting across from him, chatting about Labour’s relationship with the unions. “We need not to forget. And we need to reconnect with them and understand why some unions feel that as a party we’re no longer expressing their voice in the way that they feel we should be.”

The Labour MP acknowledges that the party and the unions are going through a “rough patch”. “It’s not just a shame,” he stresses. “It’s a huge historic amnesia.” Being the voice of the unions, Gardiner argues, is something that “goes to the very core” of what Labour does as a party: “We are here in parliament because of their historic struggles. We’re here to give them a voice in our parliamentary democracy.”

One of things he has been most pleased about with his work to ban fire and rehire – a practice where workers are issued notices of redundancy so that employers can then rehire them on worse pay and conditions – has been the widespread support within the union movement. 22 unions having now backed his campaign.

Gardiner says the campaign has been “turbocharged” by the P&O Ferries scandal in March – when the ferry operator sacked 800 of its staff with immediate effect via a Zoom call. A documentary has been produced as part of the campaign, which Gardiner describes as a “really powerful way” for workers to explain how fire and rehire has impacted them and their families. He tells me about one woman who only realised she had been fired and rehired after watching the documentary. “It’s happening at all sorts of levels in the workplace,” he emphasises. “And people honestly don’t know what is being done to them.”

Gardiner argues many workers who experience fire and rehire think they have just been “unfortunate”, when they have actually been the “target of a very deliberate construction of legislation to grind your position down and make you insecure”. He stresses that this is not limited to employment: “It’s in housing, it’s in health, it’s in every area of our public life, this is going on. And it’s making people feel insecure. So that they accept what they’re told, that they’re grateful for what they’re given.”

He argues that the brazen attitude of P&O chief executive Peter Hebblethwaite – who admitted that his company broke the law and said he would make the same decision again – shows that the penalty for doing so is “so slight” that companies think it is “worth doing”. “We have to have stronger legislation, and it has to be legislation,” he argues, dismissing the government’s plans for an enhanced code of conduct: “If companies are prepared to break the law, do you really think that an enhanced code of conduct they’re gonna take any notice of?”

We also discuss Christian Wakeford. Prior to his defection to Labour in January, Wakeford was the only Tory MP to back Gardiner’s fire and rehire bill, and Gardiner is thought to have played a role in Wakeford’s eventual decision to change parties. “I’m delighted that Christian joined the fight,” Gardiner tells me. “I think he’s been roundly welcomed by colleagues in the [Parliamentary Labour Party].” Gardiner emphasises that Labour is not a “closed society” or a “little preserve of purity”, instead describing the party as a “place in which we can together campaign for a better community, and we should welcome everybody who wants to campaign with us on those policies and on those values”.

On Keir Starmer’s leadership, Gardiner says: “We have to respect the judgement of the members who elected Keir to be our leader.”  He has “no beef” with any of his colleagues and says he has “good, professional relations” with all of them, including Starmer. “I chatted to him yesterday. In fact, I said how I brilliantly I thought he performed yesterday” (during the debate on Labour’s motion calling for an investigation into allegations Boris Johnson misled parliament over ‘partygate’). Gardiner makes one criticism about Labour’s current direction: “At all levels, this government has got the structure of finance, tax, the economy and wealth wrong. And I think we need to be making that case much more powerfully than we are.”

I ask the Labour MP for Brent North about the Labour left, but Gardiner pushes back slightly on the association. He sees himself “much more as a broad church party person”. He acknowledges that he would like to see the party campaign “more vociferously on certain issues”, but feels he is achieving this in his work on fire and rehire. He emphasises that his campaign is “absolutely supported” by the leadership of the party. “Some may say, ‘Oh, well, employment rights is a left thing’,” he goes on. “No, it’s a labour thing, right. It’s there in the name, for goodness sake. We are the Labour Party. We were founded by the trades unions. We came out of Chartism and protest and Tolpuddle and all the rest of it.”

Gardiner adds: “If I were to make a sort of left comment, it would be that I would like to see a greater respect and understanding being paid to extra-parliamentary struggle – and that is in the unions. And understanding that, when unions ballot and go on strike, they do so to protect people. They don’t do so to disrupt others’ lives. And I would like to see a greater recognition of that.”