Informed Consent

Union members in Scotland will be interested to learn that in the last quarter the Labour Party received the following donations from the big public sector unions.

Unite - £772,195
GMB - £485,830
UNISON - £458, 080

Just imagine if such large sums of money had been available to support the fight for equal pay - the employers would have been heading for the hills long ago.

Because a budget of millions of pounds would have funded the most well-resourced campaign   the UK has ever seen - and on an issue of huge importance to the lowest paid union members.

Instead all this cash has gone straight into the Labour Party's coffers - which is now in favour of a Living Wage, of course, at the measly rate it has to be said of £7.56 an hour outside London.

Yet if the trade unions and the Labour Party had shown as much determination, in financial and other ways, in the fight to achieve Equal Pay - the fact of the matter is that low paid council workers in Scotland would have been earning £9.00 an hour several years ago.

So, I don't regard these big donations to the Labour Party as money well spent - in fact when I think about the behaviour of certain Labour councils I think its tantamount to pouring the members' money down the drain.

And that's the key point, the money belongs to ordinary union members who should decide which political party they want to donate some of their hard earned cash to, if any.

Ed Miliband's pledge to reform the present system is welcome and long overdue - but it will be put to the test over the next few weeks amid signs that the Labour leader is being encouraged to backtrack on his original proposal.

But what Ed Miliband said just a couple of months ago seemed perfectly sensible to me - the unions should only be able to donate money to Labour when an individual member has given their informed consent because the present system - which is dominated by union bosses and faceless union committees - is really just a racket and is wide open to abuse.