My Lords, I have to confess that my experience of the unions is obviously much less extensive than that of opposition Members. I suspect that it is also out of date and rather specialised. I was a member of the National Union of Journalists for a decade or so. I never aspired to be an officer of the chapel, although I attended regularly, so my contribution
to our consideration of this part of the Bill will have to be very limited. But it is genuine. I am really interested and concerned to ensure that we get this right.
I am listening very carefully to the debate on part 3—not least the two extremely important clauses that we are now looking at—and I want to speak specifically on whether Clause 37 should stand part of the Bill. I believe that we should retain it until we have seen something better, and I am not yet persuaded by the amendments. From what noble Lords on the other side of the House have said, I am not clear whether their principal concern is with the direction of Part 3 or the detail. Is it with the principle or is it with the practice? Different Members of your Lordships’ House have touched on both. Is it the intention or is it the impact? It may be both, but it is not entirely clear to me yet whether they think that the problem does not exist or that it is not being addressed in an appropriate way. The noble Lords, Lord Monks and Lord Whitty, said that accuracy was a problem. So it is not a problem that does not exist. There is a problem; the question is whether we have the right remedy for it.
I am not yet entirely clear, either, why those opposite seem to have so much fear of what is proposed. It seems to be an effective process for auditing membership records annually and having them independently signed off. That, surely, is healthy. Is there a problem with it? Surely it is not a burden for the smaller unions either. I am not quite sure where the National Union of Journalists is these days in the league table of membership; I suspect that it is not very big. I do not think that 10,000 members is an unreasonable cut-off point in Clause 37 for the smaller members not to have to self-certificate.
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It seems to be not only a reasonable, moderate approach with benefits for ensuring that the electorate for ballots and other union processes are accurate, but a measure with potential future constitutional benefits. As other Members of your Lordships’ House may recall, I recently published a draft Bill with input from a number of parliamentarians at both ends of the building, and from across parties, to reform comprehensively the whole issue of party funding, including a donation cap. Labour Members have said to me regularly and consistently that for such a cap to work it would have to exclude affiliation fees from individual trade union members. If that is the case, surely it will be essential that everyone can have confidence in exactly how many of them there are before we can know that they have consented to pay into a political fund and that they want their money to go to the Labour Party.
That, of course, is not the purpose of this clause or this part of the Bill, since the Government are not yet committed to radical reform of party funding. But since the cross-party talks on that issue concluded in June, there have been some important signs of real progress that could make real development possible. After all, Mr Ed Miliband, having had his emissaries refuse to budge on the relationship with unions during the funding talks, has now made it clear that he does want to reform that relationship. Noble Lords will recall that he courageously made an important statement to that effect in July. He said:
“I do want any individual to be paying money to the Labour Party in affiliation fees unless they have deliberately chosen to do so. Individual Trade Union members should choose to join Labour through the affiliation fee, not be automatically affiliated. In the twenty-first century it just doesn’t make sense for anyone to be affiliated to a political party unless they have chosen to do so. Men and women in Trade Unions should be able to make a more active, individual choice on whether they become part of our Party. That would be better for these individuals and better for our Party”.
Labour Members cannot want both individual choice for members of trade unions on how they contribute to any party, and at the same time resist measures to make membership records more accurate and more robust. How can anyone suggest that individuals making that choice should be confident that it will be recorded in a sensible and accurate way year by year if they do not know that those records are up to date? Like many other measures in this Bill, I think that they will pave the way to make serious reform of party funding easier and more effective in the future. I hope, therefore, that the Leader of the Opposition’s commitments earlier this year will make it easier, too.
This part of the Bill may not be perfect, but that it is potentially an extremely important part of the jigsaw that will have to be put in place if the Leader of the Opposition’s proposals for a new relationship are taken forward after the conference that he is proposing next year. To that extent, these clauses and this part of the Bill must be welcome to those of us on all sides of the House who are genuinely determined to try to take big donations out of British politics.