My Lords, I rise to oppose the proposed amendments to Clause 11. We discussed tangential matters on earlier days, but this
focuses on the core issue of transparency. I think that of the 25 unions with political funds in the UK, 10 are not affiliated to the Labour Party and the remaining 15 will fund political campaigning unconnected to the Labour Party. We are not talking here about the donations to a political party, which are of course disclosed very easily, normally being large sums of money, but the amounts which, given that the amendments to Clause 10 will not happen, will be within the political fund. This is about understanding what those payments from within the political fund will be. It is very difficult to know what they are at the moment.
Doing some desk research, one can see the nature of the recipients of the fund but one cannot see the amounts. In the past, of course, these have included campaigns which all of us would approve of, encourage and welcome, such as those mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Hain, against apartheid or the BNP. Currently, as far as I can see, they include campaigns supporting the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, opposing outsourced contracts in the public sector, opposing welfare reform and, in particular, opposing Israel in the sense of supporting BDS—boycott, divestment and sanctions—as well as just general funding of think tanks.
Union members might be happy with all of this, but do they not deserve the right to know the amounts that are being spent on these causes? I take the point from the noble Lord, Lord Collins, that there is the requirement for a ballot, but that ballot is open for, I think, about three weeks. The last one, for Unison, was in May, I think, and despite being open for three weeks, it attracted only 18% support. It is not clear that people are focusing on what is going through the political fund.