TUC highlights draconian political restrictions in Transparency Bill

In a Guardian article today TUC General Secretary Frances O’Grady is raising important concerns about restrictions on third party political expenditure in the Con Dem government’s Transparency of Lobbying, Non-Party Campaigning & Trade Union Administration Bill. This belated warning about the anti democratic and draconian implications of the proposed legislation makes good its omission from the TUC reaction to the Bill when it was first published. However less understandable is the comment by Frances that ‘I do not believe that the Lib Dems could knowingly have signed up to such illiberal proposals.’

In the House of Lords, Lord Paul Tyler concentrates on ‘advancing an agenda of radical political reform, working with Ministers in the Coalition Government’ and no one was more cock a hoop than the Liberal Democrat Peer at the publication of the Bill claiming ‘it marks a major and rather unexpected advance.’ Like the Labour Party leadership, the TUC should stop being naive about the political forces driving the government’s agenda to marginalise once and for all the political influence of trade unions in Britain - using the bogeyman of ‘big money’ as a pretext for doing so.

To read more on the Transparency Bill go to:
http://unisonactive.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Lobbying