Should employers brace for the arrival of Banter Police?
On his first day in office following Labour’s election victory last summer, Keir Starmer promised to provide the country with “a politics that treads a little lighter on all of our lives.” In hindsight, this seductive proposition could mean different things to different people. At the time, I optimistically took it as a promise to clip the wings of a state that had overreached itself, intruding ever further into private conversations, matters of opinion, hurt feelings and so-called ‘hate speech.’
In reality, it’s clear that Starmer just meant he’d try to deliver a calmer politics after years of Tory chaos. He was promising less news, not more freedom. He hasn’t been able to deliver on the former (no Prime Minister could, these days) and as for the latter, well, I should never have got my hopes up.
The government is establishing a number of new agencies that will extend the power and reach of the state, including the Fair Work Agency (FWA) which will be given powers of arrest. Its officers will have the right to enter people’s homes and seize documents as part of investigations into new “labour market offences”. The Federation of Small Businesses has warned about “Captain Clipboard” while the Institute of Directors has sounded the alarm over the agency’s “unprecedented powers” while claiming that the new body’s “aims and strategies remain unclear.”
The FWA has its roots in the government’s flagship (and highly contentious) Employment Rights Bill, currently being debated in the House of Lords where another egregious element of this ludicrous Bill is, thankfully, coming under attack. Clause 20 – dubbed the Banter Ban – requires employers to protect staff from indirect harassment which could include overhearing opinions they don’t like or agree with. Enter Lord Young of Acton, the founder of the Free Speech Union, who has tabled a number of amendments aimed at ensuring political, moral and religious views are exempt from the law.
If he’s successful, publicans (for example) won’t have to worry about protecting bar staff from the opinions (or even jokes) of their customers. If he’s unsuccessful, and the Bill becomes law as it is, presumably the Fair Work Agency will be kitting up for dawn raids in a bid to find out who said what, who was upset by it and whether the employer took “reasonable steps” to protect employees.
Is that what Starmer meant by “treading a little lighter” on our lives?