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Postal Services Bill [HL]

I have already detained the Committee a great deal today. I shall take, at most, one minute now. I have two small points to make in support of my noble friend Lord Lea’s amendment. The first is that it indicates that those of us who have taken a critical view of some aspects of the Bill are not Luddites; our minds have moved on since the Tolpuddle martyrs, and we see this as an opportunity for remodelling the structure of management and the board in a constructive way so that something new can be done. It would be wrong to paint us as being totally negative and defensive—or, to use the analogy from the Darwinian world, "dinosaurs". The other point is that, as a historian, it seems to me that this is a chance to reclaim one of the great lost opportunities of post-war Britain, the Bullock report of 1976-77, which was strongly supported at the time by the greatest living trade unionist, Jack Jones, and proposed a formal structure. I recall being told by the late Lord Callaghan how the people working on the Bullock report were sent to Germany and had a seminar with Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, who described how German economic performance had been improved by codetermination. This could be a chance to grasp what was a key missed opportunity to change the adversarial system of industrial relations in this country.