PM has failed with anti-strike legislation, says shadow minister Peter Kyle

PRIME Minister Rishi Sunak’s plan to curb public sector strikes with new legislation has been a failure, Labour’s Peter Kyle has claimed.

The Shadow Science Minister told GB News: “We said the reason we opposed the minimum standards legislation is we said that it doesn’t work in transport in France and all the other countries that they’re pointing to.

“We said that this isn’t a problem you can legislate your way through and we were right. What we see with this Government, with the Rwanda bill, with a minimum services bill, they focus on legislation that will not work. Now we have another set of widespread strikes.”

In a discussion during Breakfast with Eamonn Holmes and Isabel Webster, he continued: “What the government could be doing and should be doing is negotiating with decency with diligence and statecraft to get our country through this problem because it can be solved.

“We’ve seen when they when they apply themselves, they can sort out some of these industrial issues, as we’ve seen with the nurses, but with transport, we’ve had Grant Shapps…when he was transport Secretary, he refused to meet the transport unions for six to nine months, because he felt that he liked the aggro and he thought it’d be more difficult for Labour.

“What he did was create a very deep-seated set of problems and acrimony between the unions and government. Until they actually get around the table and solve this, then we’re going to end up in the situation we’re in now.

“To make your way out of these problems, you can only negotiate.”

He added: “We are putting forward a set of proposals as a Labour Party, as a prospective plan for government to fundamentally reform the status of the rail network in our country because there are fundamental problems with it.

“Until we get that fundamental reform, what we’re going to see is money being shovelled into the wrong places and not shovelled into the places we need it which is investment in our rail system.”