Why do the unions fund Labour? Because it works for them. The Employment Rights Act is very close to a straight transfer of TUC conference policy into the statute book, and nobody involved is embarrassed about it, nor should they be, since that is what affiliation has meant since 1900.
Sharon Graham has been admirably plain about this. Standing for the general secretaryship she told Keir Starmer there would be no more blank cheques. She has put Unite’s funding under review when Labour councils have crossed her. She treats the money as leverage because it is leverage, openly, on the record, in the Sunday papers. Then she stands up and objects to donations from men who want nothing.
Because that’s the difference, and it’s the bit her argument cannot survive. Harborne and Delo aren’t buying policy. There’s nothing to buy. We were low tax, pro-enterprise, anti-quango and hostile to the regulatory state before either of them wrote us a cheque, and we’d be all of those things tomorrow if both of them stopped. You cannot purchase a conviction from someone who already has one. All you can do is pay for the envelopes.
What they’re buying, as far as I can see, is a fair fight. The most conventional British appetite there is, the one that makes a crowd turn on a man who kicks somebody off the ball, and the one thing the modern establishment has decided it cannot afford to concede.
Nobody woke up. That’s the insult, and it isn’t aimed at two crypto billionaires who can look after themselves. It’s aimed at you, and it always was.
To get this out the way, im completely against state funding of political parties.
Im also against anyone other than a voting uk individual being able to donate. That means no corporate or union donations.
Lastly, im against huge sums of money being donated by individuals.
Do thats what im against. Im for grass roots political party membership. For donations from a broad number of people. Fir political party engagement with the widest number of people. For a lack of big money corruption.
This problem goes back a very long way – all the way back to the 1875 Disraeli Act.
The British establishment convinced itself that employees were “exploited” – that wages could be higher if factory owners were less “greedy” (morally bad), and that the answer was unions with, for example, the legal power to obstruct the entrance to a business enterprise with a paramilitary “picket line” (how this was to be “peaceful” was never really explained – as “peaceful” intimidation and obstruction is a contradiction in terms).
The Labour Party formed some decades later – partly from wealthy totalitarians, such as Mr and Mrs Webb (who very much were totalitarians – as all the Fabians were), but also from the trade union movement – given power by the 1875 and 1906 Acts of Parliament.
Not “legalized” – unions had been legal since the 1820s, given-special-powers.
These powers, government backed “Collective Bargaining”, lead to Institutional Unemployment.
Wages are not low because of morally bad “greedy” employers – wages are a matter of supply and demand, and trying to artificially increase them without any rise in productivity, leads to Institutional Unemployment.
Are.