I was once fretting about being mired in a political argument, when a very experienced politician said to me, ‘Ally, never be afraid of having the row. It’s only when you’re having a row, you know you really might be getting somewhere.’

Those words came back to me as I read through Katie Hopkins, and then Jacob Rees-Mogg’s, knocking copy on the recent media coverage of zero hours contracts. Along with my Merseyside colleagues, George Howarth and Luciana Berger, I’ve been looking at this issue for a while. All of us had unhappy constituents talk to us about the problems faced. We had heard about the insecurity and the stress of waiting for a call to know what hours you might get.

We conducted a survey, and wrote a report. Fairly normal MP-type activity, noted locally, and picked up by quite a few interested organisations.  But to Katie and Jacob, showing such concern is denying the natural order of things. We are against the virtue (according to Katie) of workers existing ‘hungry for work’.

Thankfully the good people at the Guardian in the shape of Phillip Inman and Simon Neville also did a huge amount of work to establish national-type retailers and employers who are using these contracts in what seems like industrial scale and the whole thing became national news.

We now know, for some, these contracts are not the exception amongst a few employees, but the rule. Just to make Jacob’s so-called ‘standard response of the left to market forces’ complete, Channel 4’s Siobhan Kennedy also found out about the practices at Amazon. I’ve no idea if Laura Kuenssberg is any kind of leftie, but she was early to report use of zero hours too. And ITV have followed up the issue with determination in recent days.

So is this just a leftie onslaught? Should we really be glad, as Katie points out with glee, that zero hours can mean, ‘Wages are driven down, pension and sickness benefits are limited’?

To accept this argument means all that matters is making money. The only dignity or self-respect a business owner should (or can) want is to make a bigger profit than the next trader. Whose life you trample on along the way? Who cares. The only dignity a worker has is beating the next person, in wages, hours, or whatever.

Helpfully, though, no one really, truly, thinks this, do they? Katie and Jacob’s view appears to be kind of pastiche-capitalism, that would make your average Tory MP blush. They take the argument so far as to reveal how silly it is. Almost a living reductio-ad-absurdum: capitalism must be made responsible; otherwise it could get to the Jacob and Katie ideal. This is clearly ridiculous, thankfully. We are, by and large, a very long way from the description of the Gas Company in Robert Tressell’s Ragged Trousered Philanthropists:

‘There was one way in which the Company might have used some of the profits: it might have granted shorter hours and higher wages to the workmen whose health was destroyed and whose lives were shortened … but of course none of the directors or shareholders ever thought of doing that. It was not the business of the Company to concern itself about them.’

Big companies that succeed value their staff. I’ve heard from senior business managers at the top level that it’s not just what they do that matters but how they do it. In the public, private and social or charitable sections of our economy there are successful organisations achieving great things because they invest in training and skills, not despite it.

And luckily (or so we thought) Vince Cable is therefore going to conduct a review to find out what must be done about the rise of zero hours. Unfortunately, it seems that this review is not much more than three civil servants and some desk-based research. That must change. With the data conflicting, we need proper evidence about the scale of the problem in order to work out how best to help business stop the race to the bottom.

But make no mistake, while Vince still dithers, we’ll stay arguing against the Jacobs and Katies of the world: those who say that workers can’t be helped because they must fight others for their hours; or see virtue in the indignity of people needing to work being sent home at a moment’s notice, told that they are not wanted.

I believe that there are very sensible steps that could be taken to make sure the national minimum wage regulation we already have passed through parliament isn’t undermined by zero hours: making sure care workers are paid for travel time, for example, through enforcing the minimum wage regulations. There may be other ways these regulations could help limit the worst practices surrounding zero hours. What’s more, we can work with commissioners of care services by encouraging them to sign up to Unison’s ethical care charter. And if business organisations – especially those on the high street with a large number of employees – can bring forward their own code of practice in the meantime, so much the better.

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Alison McGovern is MP for Wirral South and a vice-chair of Progress. She tweets @Alison_McGovern

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Photo: David Sim