LAWS allowing bosses to bus in scabs from employment agencies will be fast-tracked by the new Tory government, Business Secretary Sajid Javid bragged yesterday.

Employers are currently banned from drafting in temporary agency staff to blackleg during legal strike action.

But — to cheers from the CBI big business lobby — Mr Javid promised that the anti-democratic attack on workers would be one of the first laws of the new Parliament.

“That’s something we’ll give more detail on in the Queen’s Speech but it will be a priority,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. 

Plans to impose a 50 per cent turnout threshold on all strike ballots and require 40 per cent of all eligible voters to back strike action in essential services will also be included in the legislation. 

Mr Javid insisted “we need to update our strike laws” but is refusing to move away from arcane postal ballots and allow union members to vote online. 

PCS union leader Mark Serwotka said the policy is both “vindictive and hypocritical” given that just 24 per cent of the electorate backed the Tories. 

Thatcherite Mr Javid announced his attack union rights before the first all-Tory Cabinet for 18 years had even met for the first time.

Unite assistant general secretary Steve Turner said: “The divisive face of Conservatism has not taken long to reveal itself.

“It is a terrible shame and a big mistake that one of the government’s first acts is to attempt to reduce rights for working people that even past Tory administrations have upheld.”

Unison general secretary Dave Prentis added: “Bad employers will be rubbing their hands together in glee, safe in the knowledge that they can now pretty much treat their staff as they choose.”

That didn’t stop Prime Minister David Cameron claiming that the Tories are the “real party of working people.”

Setting out his vision to ministers at Downing Street yesterday, he said: “Some pundits might call it ‘blue-collar Conservatism,’ or being on the side of hard-working taxpayer.

“I would call it being the real party of working people.”

TUC leader Frances O’Grady said though that the Tory’s strike laws show “this is a government not so much on the side of hard-working people but Britain’s worst bosses.”

She said making legal strikes “close to impossible” would leave union negotiators with “no more power than Oliver Twist when he asked for more.

“After five years of falling living standards the prospects for decent pay rises have just got a whole lot worse,” she predicted.

The Morning Star revealed last month how the Tories’ strike threshold could breach International Labour Organisation conventions.

Mr Javid this week appointed Tory MP Nick Boles as a deputy minister with “responsibility for trade union and employment law.”

John Hendy QC warned yesterday that the Tory plans to scrap the Human Rights Act and pull out of the European Convention on Human Rights could prevent a legal challenge. “This just increases the power of management and diminishes the power of unions,” he told the Star.

“Unions are going to have to think very, very carefully about what their reaction to this is going to be.

“It is going to make it almost, but not quite impossible to take lawful industrial action.”