Unite, the largest union and the largest union affiliate to Labour, has announced that it will reduce the number of members it affiliates to the Labour Party from 1,000,000 to 500,000, thus reducing the income Labour obtains by this method of funding by £1.5m (€1.8m) per year. This follows the passing of reforms proposed by Labour leader, Ed Miliband, precisely in order to reduce unions’ influence.
With the reforms passed by Miliband (see article No. 8153), union members that pay the political levy to their unions’ political funds and wish to have this money used to pay for their membership of the Labour Party now have to expressly give consent for this to happen. This is known as ‘opting in’ whereas until the reforms, those union members wishing that their political levy money was not used to pay for membership of Labour had to specifically ‘opt out’. In other words, ‘opting in’ was the
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