A report in today’s Telegraph has the whiff of real scandal about it.
The paper has discovered that, over the past decade, Unite – the union that is now apparently doing its best to destroy British Airways – and the two unions of which it is the merged product, Amicus and TGWU, have received almost £18 million of taxpayers’ money. During the same period, the Labour party has received over £29 million, or over 24 per cent of its revenue, from the three unions.
Over £17 million has been paid to the unions from the Union Learning Fund, established by the Government in 1998 to help train union representatives and members. Funding for the scheme was increased shortly after Gordon Brown became Prime Minister in 2007. However, Unite does not give details of how the money is applied and evaluation reports ceased to be published years ago.
In addition, Unite has received over £380,000 from the Union Modernisation Fund, administered by Lord Mandelson’s Business Department, which has the ostensible aim of helping trade unions improve their management structures.
Unite, therefore, has received a huge wodge of cash from the taxpayer without, extraordinarily enough, having to tell the taxpayer where a single penny of it has been spent. What the taxpayer does know, however, is that:
- Unite is the Labour party’s biggest donor;
- its political director, Charlie Whelan, is now once again ensconced in Downing Street, where he is helping Peter Mandelson mastermind Labour’s election campaign;
- Jack Dromey, Unite’s deputy general secretary and Harriet Harman’s husband, has just been selected for the safe Labour seat of Birmingham Erdington from what was supposed to be an all-women shortlist;
- 108 Labour MPs, or almost a third of the Parliamentary party, are members of Unite.
On Wednesday, at PMQs, David Cameron suggested that the Labour party is now a wholly-owned subsidiary of Unite. It’s hard to disagree with that.
Today, Francis Maude, the shadow Cabinet Office minister, commented that the financial arrangement uncovered by the Telegraph “looks like money laundering – taxpayers’ money is being funnelled into Unite then put straight back into Labour’s coffers.”
On the face of it, it’s hard to disagree with that, too.
