Last week, the Financial Times reported that the Labour Party is preparing a major rollback on workers’ rights. This is significant news — after years of abandoned pledges under Keir Starmer’s leadership, employment rights was the last bastion of transformative policy in the party program. Now it appears that too might be sacrificed.

I was a political adviser to Labour MP Andy McDonald when he held the employment rights and protections brief in the early days of Starmer’s shadow cabinet. During that time, working together with Labour’s affiliate trade unions, we drafted A New Deal for Working People — a policy paper setting out in detail how the party would strengthen workers’ rights.

The New Deal document was endorsed by party conference, and Starmer repeatedly stated his determination to bring it into law within the first one hundred days of a Labour government. Although McDonald resigned from his front-bench role in 2021 following a row over the minimum wage and statutory sick pay — and despite his name later being scrubbed from the document — its commitments remained largely intact. At least until now.