The Conservative Party is launching a new organisation to represent trade unionists sympathetic to the Tories. It is called the Conservative Workers and Trade Unionists Movement. Robert Halfon MP, the Conservatives’ deputy chairman, said his party was now ‘the party of working people’ and that ‘militant’ union leaders were alienating workers from existing organisations (i.e. unions). He stated: ‘We want to provide a voice for Conservative-minded trade unionists and moderate trade unionists … [it] is going to be a voice for Conservative trade unionists. … a voice for moderate trade unionists who feel they may have sympathy with the Conservatives or even just feel that they’re not being represented by militant union leaders’. Halfon added he wanted the Conservative party to have a new relationship with the many trade union members who he claimed did not share their leaders' views, saying: ‘Trade unionism should be for the many, not the few … And at the moment, so much of it, you see it through... the prisms of a few militant leaders who I believe don't represent the thousands of ordinary trade union members’.
Cameron rebranding operation. The launch is part of an attempt by the Conservatives to rebrand the party as a workers’ party and it was advocated by Halfon earlier in the year. It follows on from the promotion of the government’s ‘national living wage’ that starts in April 2016 as a ‘worker-friendly’ measure. However, with new rules now in force as a result of The Transparency of Lobbying, Non-party Campaigning and Trade Union Administration Act 2014, unions will find it more difficult to direc
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