David Cameron and the EU Social Chapter

Last week, David Cameron promised that a Conservative government would opt out of the EU's Social Chapter.

Nick Cohen:

The immediate effect would be the removal of legal protection for part-time workers and the ending of the rights of women to extend maternity leave. I double-checked with Cameron's friends to see if there had been some mistake. Not at all, they told me. You don't understand David if you suppose he believes in regulation, particularly regulation from the EU. But what is going to happen to part-time workers - most of them women and many of them poor? Well, they replied, we will exhort employers to be nice to them.

Last election, the Trades Union Congress showed that the main losers of opting out of the EU Social Chapter would be women voters:

Measures which either mainly affect women, or have been mainly used by them, that have come through the social chapter include:

- 7 million part-time workers have gained protection against discrimination
- 4 million parents have gained the right to take unpaid parental leave
- Everyone with a caring responsibility has the right to take unpaid emergency leave
- Changes in the burden of proof in equality cases have simplified and made it easier to prove discrimination.
- Rights to information and consultation
- Protection for employees who have been employed on successive short term contracts

Cameron likes to talk about "social responsibility" but for every pronouncement like this one on the Social Charter, I'm failing to see who will enforce it.

I mean, a society with "social responsibility" would ensure the right to take parental leave, family values, yada yada, but who enforces it? In Cameron-World, the state won't, grunt grunt, state bad, so who?

Do discrimination/equality cases exist in Cameron-World, and if that does fit into "social responsibility" -- respect for others, making sure we create a civil society where we can interact as equals -- then who enforces it, the state, a quango, or internal processes within companies?

The more you look closely at the scant policies outlined so far, the more it looks like Cameron is using his environmentalism as a smoke-screen for status-quo Tory social policy.