Socialist Resistance

An archive of socialistresistance.org, 2002–2022

Democratising UNISON's political funds

by Fred Leplat  |  Socialist Resistance pilot issue October 2002  |  page 23

This is scanned newsprint, not web text. The original PDFs carried no text layer at all, so every word here was read off the page by OCR. Expect dropped opening letters, run-together words and wrong characters. There was no contents page to cut the paper up by, so the articles were found from the size of their headlines: a headline may carry its kicker, and where an article ran beside a boxed panel a few lines of the neighbour can appear. The scanned issue is the authority; this text is here so the words can be found at all.

• iven the experience under a New Labour governDelegate Conference agreed in 200l to review the union's political funds.

The motion entitled The Labour Government: what do we get for our money?' instructed the union executive to conduct a wide-ranging consultation and to report back with options to the 2002 conference.

The NEC, however, failed to produce a report for this year's conference and delegates adopted a motion criticising them for their delay.

The reason for the NEC's foot-dragging is to try to maintain two separate funds, the General Political Fund and the Affiliated Political Fund. In 2001, UNISON donated close to €750,000 to the Labour Party over and above its affiliation of £1,364,000.

The executive is particularty keen to maintain the Affiliated Political Fund (APF) into which most members pay a contribution, but which is not accountable to the union as a whole. The rules of the union prohibit the National Conference challenging the functioning of the APF or condemning UNISON members on the Labour Party NEC who fail to back the union's key policies.

The delay in the consultation has also been used by the APF to raise its profile with an unprecedented monthly newsletter to stewards. In the past the APF was more secretive than the Freemasons.

The NEC, through its consultation task group has skewed the debate by counterposing disafiliation from the Labour Party to maintaining the status quo, and suddenly announcing the end of the consultation even though the NEC will not discuss the issue until December.

The left in UNISON, the UNISON's Nationa

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