The first sign that someone you’re talking to has no idea what they are talking about is that they say something like, “ Politicians are all the same.” Anyone who says this, probably while sitting in an awful Slug and Lettuce bar, should be ignored, shunned, and disregarded without remorse. To make such a statement is to declare oneself an intellectual vacuum and an incurious, pointless, vapid calamity.
Anyone who can look at Labour , the Tories, the Liberal Democrats and the other, smaller, lesser parties and declare them identical has little chance of redemption. The differences are stark, obvious, and clear. Take, for instance, working from home.
It’s an issue that has never really gone away since the COVID-19 pandemic made it ubiquitous and it is back at the forefront. Labour’s new Business Secretary, Johnathan Reynolds, has made it clear that he supports working from home/flexible working to the extent that it is to be enshrined as part of Labour’s employment rights package. It is to be included alongside removing restrictions on trade union activity and the right to sick pay and to sue for unfair dismissal from the first day of employment.
It is a quietly radical piece of policy. The debate on flexible working shows just how different Labour and the Tories are. For the Conservatives, allowing employees to work remotely and flexibly was a begrudging necessity.
Who could forget former Minister for Brexit Opportunities and Government Efficiency, Jacob Rees-Mogg , leaving passive-aggressive notes urging office return on empty desks in government offices, leaving pointless litter like a reverse janitor? That is the difference, and it matters. Very little good came out of the pandemic. It showed us how vulnerable we are to the weaknesses in our biology.
It demonstrated how little we trust each other and how willing we are to impose brutal restrictions for the perception of safety. It also pointed out who the petty tyrants are among us, with their joyous snitching and glee at enforcing masks and distancing. It was not a good time and brought out the very worst in us.
However, if one positive came from the pandemic, it showed just how outdated, old-fashioned, and out of step with modernity the daily trudge into the office was. Doing our jobs at home made it clear that, for most office workers, being in a specific room to use the internet and a shared filing system was redundant. Rees-Mogg isn’t alone in his fuddy-duddy office opinion.
He finds agreement among some bosses who insist that there are benefits to being dragged into the office to use a different computer. The question is, however, who benefits from going back to mandatory office work? Is it the employee who once again must deal with the commute, whose cost continues to rise, organising childcare, preparing or buying lunch, and the million other headaches that slogging into the office comes with? Is it the business, department, or NGO? There is no reason to suggest so and the burden of proof is against it. Or could it be that working remotely shows that most people can do their jobs without direct, in-person supervision, rendering a cosy layer of middle management pointless? Is it about teamwork or managerial impotence? In the absence of studies, the anecdotal evidence must suffice, and it is conclusive; the office is a thing of the past, which is a clue as to why the Tories are such fans.
There are equality issues here too. Unless you have a very unusual home, it is difficult to drive an ambulance, operate a check-out, or take a table’s order from your home office. But just because home working cannot apply to all jobs does not mean that those it can apply to should have it taken away, some jobs will always be location-specific.
You don’t make things better just by taking things away from others; an impulse that the Labour Party seems to finally have gotten over. Labour’s first two-and-a-bit months in government have been tough. Starmer and Co have been passed an economic mess, made worse by the woeful records of the Tories and the SNP, public services are screaming under the strain, and our culture is breaking.
Wins, however, are available and the biggest and easiest of these is to implement their plans to make working from home the presumption where it is possible. Going through with this would show that Labour is on the side of working people and not the bosses and Rees-Moggs. That, with the other measures contained in their employee’s rights package, will show just how different they are to the Conservatives and should give even the most bone-headed, sauvignon blanc-quaffing, bore reason to admit that they are not “all the same.
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