LABOUR
By Sean Purcell
There has been a number hovering over British politics in the last week or so, and admittedly it is a very large one: £72 million.
For those who may not be aware, Reform UK recently received two donations of £36 million each, from the crypto-billionaires Ben Delo and Christopher Harborne. Whatever your view is of Reform itself, and whatever your view of the donors one thing is obvious - £72 million from just two individuals is an extraordinary amount of money.
When the news came out, it inevitably prompted another argument, one that is as old as time itself and one that needs a firm response:
What about the trade unions?
Critics will argue that if wealthy individuals giving millions to a party concerns us, then surely the fact that trade unions give millions to political parties, most notably the Labour Party, should be a worry also?
On the face of it, it sounds like a reasonable question, and the trite, character limiting nature of social media has amplified this question more than ever. However, a short post on X or a brief clip on TikTok will not help to unpick this issue, because the question is flawed. The question itself relies on treating two fundamentally different things as though they were equivalent. Let me be clear, they aren’t.
The first thing to understand is that a trade union is not a rich individual.
Individuals like Delo and Harborne who make large political donations are exercising the financial power that comes from their own personal wealth.
A political fund from a trade union is very different because unions, by their composition and nature are very different. They are collective institutions who are funded by the contributions of working people: a teacher (like me), a nurse, a postal worker, or a railway worker. These individuals contribute a relatively small amount of their overall subscriptions to a political fund which couldn’t be further from the large donation made by one individual. The money may eventually appear as one figure in the accounts of a political party, but where that money came from matters.
One represents concentrated individual wealth; the other represents collective contributions pooled by an organisation, and that makes them very different.
Some will dismiss this point so it is critical that we understand another important distinction that is often neglected: trade union political expenditure is regulated. A General Secretary in a union cannot simply decide one morning that they would like to take money from the general funds and spend it supporting political parties. It doesn’t work like that, it is not the personal chequebook of the leadership.
Political expenditure of the kind defined in trade union legislation must come through an established political fund, and establishing such a fund requires approval through a ballot of members. In fact, individual members also have the legal right not to contribute to that fund and I know of many members who do not contribute. Their rights as a member are not impacted and they continue to receive the same support as any other.
Many members do choose to pay in to the fund but that does not mean that they agree with every political decision made by its leadership and that is natural and should be expected. Trade unions contain people with different political views, just as businesses, churches, professional associations and almost every other large organisation do and union representatives like myself support members whatever their views. However, the important principle is that the political fund rests upon a collective structure, governed by very clear rules and ultimately sustained by contributions from members, and that is fundamentally different from an individual deciding to transfer £36 million of their personal fortune to a political party.
What I have noticed recently is that there is a danger that this entire debate of funding becomes tribal. Labour supporters defend union funding; Reform supporters defend large private donations; Conservatives point to Labour’s union relationship; and everyone retreats to their respective corners. That is not sensible and we need to be capable of having a better conversation than that.
Trade unions should have a legitimate role in democratic politics regardless of which political party they support.
Some unions affiliate to Labour and others do not. Every day, unions such as mine campaign independently on legislation, public services, employment rights and numerous other issues and this extends beyond unions because they are one part of a healthy democracy that contains various organisations through which ordinary people can make their thoughts, feelings, and voices heard.
There is also nothing inherently illegitimate about wealthy people participating in politics, after all they are citizens too, and we shouldn’t pretend that every large donation automatically purchase influence. However, we should be willing to consider whether there is a point at which the scale of individual financial power creates a legitimate concern for a democracy: £36 million from one individual is not just a more generous version of someone chucking in £20 to a local campaign, it represents spending power that is on a different scale completely.
It is also important to point out that question isn’t really about whether the donor is on the left or right. If two billionaires gave £72 million to Labour tomorrow, the democratic question would be exactly the same, and that is why we all need to have a grown-up debate.
But let’s be clear on one thing.
Trade unions exist because individual workers have limited power on their own. One employee negotiating with a multinational company has relatively little leverage, but thousands of employees acting collectively is more influential, and political funds operate on a similar principle: small contributions from large numbers of people are pooled together in a fund so that working people can exercise a collective political voice.
By all means disagree with the causes that unions support; disagree with the affiliation to Labour; argue for greater transparency or amended rules for political funds, but pointing to a number given by a union and comparing it with a large individual donation is like comparing apples with pears.
So where should the line be?
At present, electoral law permits political parties to accept donations of unlimited size from permissible donors, and that category includes registered individuals, qualifying companies and registered trade unions. My article isn’t about whether Reform had broken the laws, but whether the laws around individual donations are appropriate when they reach eight figure sums.
So this isn’t principally an argument about whether Reform has broken the rules. The relevant question is whether the rules themselves remain appropriate when individual donations can reach tens of millions of pounds.
Maybe we need limits, maybe we need more transparency, maybe we need to look at how parties are funded – all of these are worthy debates, but whatever we talk about out, we need to avoid a false equivalence.
A political fund built from the contributions of thousands of nurses, teachers, firefighters, shop workers and other employees is an exercise in collective political participation.
A multimillion-pound donation from a billionaire is an exercise of individual financial power.
Both potentially have a place somewhere within our current political system, both should be transparent and regulated, but they are absolutely not the same thing. Pretending that they are stops us from having the vital conversation about money, power and who gets heard in our democracy.
Who wrote this?
