Editorial: The new employment law is the latest foolish legislation from this Labour government

​The Labour government’s reform of workers’ rights will at last become law.

​The new legislation manages to be two contradictory things simultaneously: yet another Keir Starmer u-turn and yet another Keir Starmer capitulation to the trade unions, in the mould of Labour’s 1970s weakness in the face of union demands.

Peers yesterday called a halt to their opposition to the controversial plans in the Employment Rights Bill. The climbdown by the upper chamber followed assurances by the government over scrapping the compensation cap on unfair dismissal.

The package of measures, which include a ban on zero-hour contracts and day-one rights to statutory sick pay, has been watered down considerably from the Jeremy Corbyn-style idiocy of the original proposals. That intended plan was to give workers full employment rights from day one in a new job, rather than after two years, as is currently the case. You only need to think for a moment about such a plan to see how monumentally stupid it is: imagine a small business that realises at once that it has hired a bad worker. They could not get rid of them without huge costs, if at all.

Now Starmer, a foolish and weak prime minister who repeatedly retreats from daft left-wing ideas, has extended that to six months. But even six months is insufficient time for a pressured small business to assess new staff. Critics of this new law are rightly pointing out that it will make businesses wary about hiring at a perilous moment for the UK economy.

Expanding already generous parental and bereavement leave, for example, is not what the country needs at a time when so many people of working age are making lifestyle decisions, backed by Labour, to not work. Weakness towards pressure groups is in the DNA of recent governments, Tory and Labour. But rather than retreating from such cowardice, this new law bolsters it.