Glass Houses and Throwing Stones

Owen Jones — a man talking an enormous amount of sense in the debate on trades union and strike ballot thresholds.

There was an interesting moment on last week’s version of Any Questions, Radio 4’s political panel show (think Question Time, but on the radio and with a different Dimbleby), there was an interesting little exchange regarding strike ballots.

In response to a question about the PCS trade union calling a strike for the day before the Olympics begin, and coming immediately after a spout of reactionary, right-wing nonsense from Kelvin MacKenzie (if not the most insufferable and repugnant men in the media today, then certainly one of), the microphone came to Owen Jones. After he had corrected Kelvin on the reasons for the strike, and doing a sterling job explaining why the workers had no choice, Jonathan Dimbleby asked him this question:

JD: “Does the fact that only 20% were balloted, and only 50% of the 20% were in favour of strike action, weigh with you or not?“

OJ: “That would strike out a lot of elected politicians in this country including Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London.“

Which, aside from being very true, is an interesting point. If we take practising what they preach as the standard that our politicians should be aspiring to, then the people calling for the introduction of strike ballot thresholds should, themselves, surely be commanding a majority of the overall electorate in their constituencies. Right?

So I decided to check. I started with the elected politicians in the cabinet, calculating how much of their electorates voted for them. I’ve put the turnout for each MP’s constituency there too, just for added context, and have colour coded the results: green for half or more of the vote; orange for less than half but more than a third; and red for less than a third. All results are rounded to one decimal place, and you are welcome — nay, encouraged — to check my maths:

Name	Position	Turnout (%)	Support of total electorate (%)
David Cameron	Prime Minister	73.3	43.1
George Osborne	Chancellor of the Exchequer	70.6	38.5
Nick Clegg	Deputy Prime Minister	73.7	39.4
William Hague	Foreign Secretary	67.2	42
Iain Duncan Smith	SoS for Work and Pensions	66.5	35.1
Vince Cable	SoS for Business Skills and Innovation	74.8	40.7
Danny Alexander	Chief Secretary to the Treasury	64.9	26.4
Theresa May	Home Secretary	73.7	43.9
Michael Gove	SoS for Education	70.0	40.3
Eric Pickles	SoS for Communities and Local Government	71.9	40.9
Justine Greening	SoS for Transport	64.4	34.1
Ed Davey	SoS for Energy and Climate Change	70.4	35.1
Andrew Lansley	SoS for Health	74.8	35.5
Ken Clarke	SoS for Justice	73.6	37.7
Philip Hammond	SoS for Defence	66.4	37.1
Caroline Spelman	SoS for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs	63.3	32.7
Owen Paterson	SoS for Northern Ireland	65.7	33.8
Cheryl Gillan	SoS for Wales	74.6	45.1
Jeremy Hunt	SoS for Culture, Media and Sport	73.4	43.1
Michael Moore	SoS for Scotland	66.4	30.1
Andrew Mitchell	SoS for International Development	67.9	36.7
Francis Maude	Minister for the Cabinet Office	72.1	38.0
Oliver Letwin	Minister of State in the Cabinet Office	74.6	35.5
David Willetts	Minister of State for Universities and Science	63.0	32.2
Sir George Young	Leader of the House of Commons	69.6	40.6
Patrick McLoughlin	Chief Whip in the House of Commons	73.8	38.4
Dominic Grieve	Attorney General	70.0	42.8

There’s a distinct lack of green in that table, isn’t there?

And bear in mind that these are cabinet ministers, the leading politicians of the Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties. Most of them represent “safe seats” where they far outstrip the nearest rival candidates. Backbenchers who represent more marginal constituencies are going to command even less support.

So, after this enlightening little revelation, I thought I’d do a bit more. Below is a second table, showing the same information with a number of other elected politicians who have called for or expressed support for introducing a rule requiring a ballot on industrial action to reach a threshold level of support in order to be valid.

(N.B. Aidan Burley is the chairman of the “Trade Union Reform Campaign”, an organisation dedicated to attacking the trades union, and staffed by a variety of comic characters, of whom Burley is by far the most tragically hilarious.)

Name	Position	Turnout (%)	Support of total electorate (%)
Boris Johnson	Mayor of London	38.1	19.6
Matthew Hancock	MP for West Suffolk	64.6	32.7
Aidan Burley	MP for Cannock Chase, Chairman of the TURC	61.1	24.5
Dominic Raab	MP for Esher and Walton	72.0	42.4
Priti Patel	MP for Witham	70.2	36.6
Nick de Bois	MP for Enfield North	67.1	28.4
Conor Burns	MP for Bournemouth West	58.1	26.2
Damian Green	Minister of State for Immigration	67.9	36.7

Still no green. And a good deal more red.

Now, I actually agree that there’s a problem with the turnout in the PCS ballot. But the solution isn’t curbing the democracy of the unions, but trying to encourage better participation in the democratic process. Owen Jones himself went on to suggest a number of good, constructive ideas:

“What we need to do is change our very stringent anti-union laws to allow workplace based balloting, to ensure as many workers can take part as possible. Text balloting, email balloting. At the moment the problem is with the postal ballot system, is that most people don’t get round to filling out their postal ballot and sending it off.“

Maybe I’m just a dangerous lefty subversive, but I think there’s a certain irony in people who don’t have majority support complaining that the unions don’t have the support of the majority of their members. This kind of hypocrisy could be stemmed with the introduction of a more proportional voting system — but none of the Conservative politicians listed above supported such a move when it was put to a referendum in 2011.

There is a well-known proverbial saying, “People in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones“. And I think there are a lot of politicians on the government benches in the House of Commons who should think very carefully upon it.