# Labour has humane and popular plans to stand up for UK workers. Why dilute them?

Angela Rayner’s employment rights bill is precisely why many voted for this government. Why be embarrassed about a defining policy?

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One step forward, two steps back. Angela Rayner’s employment rights bill is back in the Commons this week, stuffed with ideas for improving everyday working life: that’s the big step forward for a government that was elected on a promise of radical change. The weekend headlines, however, were all about what won’t be changing after all. The so-called right to switch off – an early Rayner idea about legislating to prevent employees being pestered by out-of-hours calls and emails, which was already presumed dead due to not being in the bill – was  once again for the Sunday papers, with a briefing that it still won’t be in the bill after fresh amendments are tabled on Tuesday.

Presumably the idea was to  fearful of extra regulatory burdens, on top of the looming April hike in employers’ national insurance. But since it’s the tax rise they’re really worried about, in practice it offers minimal reassurance while generating hostile headlines about a  (despite Downing Street’s best efforts to convey that the prime minister has never been closer to his deputy, a former care worker who is one of vanishingly few senior politicians to have done low-paid, insecure work herself in the past). The wary, almost apologetic way the government keeps approaching this admittedly complex bill suggests it’s still not entirely sure of its ground – and that makes its opponents scent blood.

What’s striking is the contrast between these domestic jitters, and the far more confident leadership Keir Starmer shows on Ukraine. The decisions he is having to take over national security, Britain’s relationship with its most powerful ally, and the inevitable consequences for other public services of earmarking billions more for defence couldn’t be more consequential; getting it wrong will cost lives. Though, for now, the public mood is solidly behind President Volodymyr Zelenskyy after the appalling way Donald Trump treated him, Starmer has already suffered  over his decision to raid the aid budget for defence spending, and must know his critics are just waiting for their moment. (Nigel Farage barely left it a weekend before suggesting Zelenskyy had ).


Keir Starmer hugs Volodymyr Zelenskyy as he arrives to attend a summit at Lancaster House in London, 2 March 2025.  
Photograph: Toby Melville/AFP/Getty Images

Despite these pressures, Starmer has looked resolute and decisive, capable of the imaginative leaps necessary in a fast-evolving crisis and of finding the right emotional register. There was something unexpectedly moving about watching him hug Zelenskyy in the street, but also about the images released after Sunday’s summit of EU leaders: Britain isn’t back in the union, but it is very much back in Europe. Something similar happened during the Southport riots, when Starmer’s evident confidence in what he was doing inspired confidence in the country. Yet all too often,  projects the opposite: a faint flinch in advance, betraying its fear of getting thumped.

That’s regrettable: Rayner’s reforms are popular, human and very easy to dramatise, because they’re about the lives we live every day. , according to YouGov: the bill gives working parents the right to request it from , and while employers don’t have to grant it if they can show good reason not to, flexibility becomes the default assumption. Crucially, that may help parents to move on from jobs they’ve long outgrown into something better paid, without worrying so much about losing the family-friendly deal that makes everything work.

Two-thirds of voters also support banning zero-hours contracts, aware of the horrible anxiety caused by not knowing how much work you’ll have from week to week, though ministers must still explain how they’ll cater for a minority of workers who genuinely like the flexibility they offer.  is a lesson well learned from the pandemic, when it became shockingly obvious how many people couldn’t afford to take time off work even after testing positive for a potentially deadly disease. And for a Labour government painfully conscious of the threat it faces from Reform, pushing ahead with this stuff isn’t just about doing the right thing: it’s naked self-interest.

Starmer won his majority by focusing unwaveringly on so-called , economically insecure people with little confidence in politicians who voted leave in the hope something would change. He has since spent billions on delivering for them: think of the , last summer’s  that helped end the NHS strikes, or even Rachel Reeves’s surprise decision to continue  in the budget, to the relief of white van drivers everywhere. Yet Labour seems almost embarrassed to mention it, seemingly assuming that those it meant to help will notice the difference all by themselves while it focuses on talking tough about immigration.

But the risk is that even if people do begin to feel their lives improving, they won’t necessarily connect that security with choices actively made by the government. What’s missing is a sense of publicly going into battle for the little guy, which parties such as Reform excel at conveying.

It’s true that there are tensions between stronger workers’ rights and the Treasury’s desperation for economic growth. But Reeves knows full well that rising GDP isn’t enough if people don’t feel it in their own lives, which is why she keeps saying growth must mean . Rayner’s bill embodies the difference Labour can make for its people, in a period where good news may be scarce. It’s time to move forward, this time with confidence.

* Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
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