Same Old Tories (Evil to the Core)
Senior Tories called for action to save jobs by limiting new employment rights and reducing red tape, in a shift away from David Cameron’s support for measures such as more flexible working.
Mark Prisk, the shadow business minister, attacked the government’s decision to grant temporary and agency workers similar rights to permanent staff after 12 weeks in a job, arguing that this could be the last straw. ‘This is just the wrong moment to start making things more complex and expensive. There are people out there now who if you start ratcheting up the costs of employment might just tip over the edge and start pushing more people into joblessness,’ he said.
Chris Grayling, the shadow Work and Pensions Secretary, said that the priority now was to save jobs: ‘The fundamentals for business will be making ends meet and paying salary bills. The presumption over the next couple of years should be against new regulation and in favour of deregulation where we can.’
Government aides, however, rejected the demands to scrap planned new employment rights. ‘There is no way out of a recession by reducing people’s rights at work,’ declared a Downing Street source.
Now we are facing our moment of truth - Brown
Anyone who thinks that the Conservatives will look after “the little people” more than Labour is as deluded as the idiots who have spent the last decade ramping up house prices and repeating the mantra “property never goes down in value”.