Member

So what I am hoping for—we are a bit off the point but, after all, this is Amendment 1—is that, by the time we finish with the Bill, we will have knocked together a consensus so that trade unionism is not always at the front and the punchbag for people who want a row. The fact of the matter is that, if you analyse the Labour Party’s funding, most of it comes from very rich people, not from trade unions at all. If you look at today’s Times—or maybe it is the Telegraph—the headline is about the unions taking on the Government because they are not going to implement the full terms of the pay review body. But none of the unions concerned pays a penny to the Labour Party. They are actually completely independent. Many people, until they ended up with me as the Conservative trade union envoy, did not even realise that the BMA was a trade union at all. They thought it was a collection of doctors who sat around with stethoscopes around their necks and tried to bully the Government. I explained to the Conservative Front Bench of our great leader, the noble Lord, Lord Cameron, that the BMA was a trade union; we used to say, “There’s only one union in Britain you really need to be afraid of, and that is Hamish Meldrum and the BMA”, because in terms of getting money out of the Government for his members he was the most successful union leader of probably any of them at all.