At the end of every financial quarter we have come to expect hysterical press reporting about Labour’s ‘dependency’ on trade union funding. Today is no exception as figures for the final quarter for 2010 are published by the Electoral Commission: http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/janetdaley/100077382/the-trade-unions-own-labours-soul-again/
This is in stark contrast to minimal coverage of a recent report by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism which exposed the City as the Tory Party’s financial umbilical chord:
http://unisonactive.blogspot.com/2011/02/tory-snouts-in-city-trough.html
An insightful report by New Statesman charts the decline in Labour funding from non-union sources but puts the biased media coverage into perspective, ‘there is no comparison between the unions and the big-money donors the Tories rely on. For instance, donations from Unite are taken from the union's political fund to which 1,291,408 members contribute voluntarily’:
http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/the-staggers/2011/02/unions-donations-labour-2010
