Trade Union Funding
Debate between Fiona Bruce and Alec Shelbrooke(12 years, 4 months ago)
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Alec Shelbrooke (Elmet and Rothwell) (Con)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Owen. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Congleton (Fiona Bruce) on securing the debate. It is important that things are debated. However passionate the arguments on each side are, there is nothing wrong with having this debate.
I have been disillusioned this morning. I am certainly not speaking in the debate to bash the unions. I do not believe that my hon. Friend the Member for Selby and Ainsty (Nigel Adams) wanted to bash the unions either.
Fiona Bruce
Will my hon. Friend confirm that not one single Member on this side of the Chamber has said anything other than to acknowledge the good work of the unions?
Alec Shelbrooke
When people look back through Hansard, they will see that much praise has been given to the trade unions.
I was a member of Unite for 11 years. My money ended up being spent against my hon. Friend the Member for Pudsey (Stuart Andrew), but there we go. I cannot say that I was ever funded by Unite. I believed in the trade unions, and one of the most important things about them comes down to the shop stewards. I have seen some good shop stewards—members of the Labour party and elected councillors. I was a Conservative councillor, and the shop steward in the university where I worked was a Labour councillor, but we were able to work together. A lot of it comes down to the shop steward on the floor, and I have seen progress being made.
I am not here to bash the work of the unions at all. The problem I think we have—I put this challenge to Opposition Members—is that if at the next general election, Royal Bank of Scotland turned up and said, “We have decided to give £10 million to the Tory party to campaign,” there would be outcry from the Opposition Benches.