Unions pile pressure on Brown with strike threats as private donations to Labour collapse

Gordon Brown is facing a bitter showdown with Labour’s trade union paymasters over below-inflation pay rises for millions of public sector workers.

Union chiefs will use their annual congress in September to push for a series of one-day strikes.

Labour is more dependent than ever on union cash, with 93 per cent of money donated to party HQ in the first three months of this year coming from union coffers.

The party’s accounts, to be published today, are expected to show a continued collapse in donations from wealthy individual backers.

The Government’s public sector pay policy has already triggered a wave of industrial action this year.

At the TUC’s annual conference in September, unions representing teachers and civil servants will call for more action.

The National Union of Teachers and Public and Commercial Services union are to urge support for coordinated industrial action, according to a draft agenda for the conference.

The congress will also discuss plans for industrial action over ‘restrictive anti-trade union legislation’ which union barons want removed from the statute book.

Labour’s reliance on the unions has dramatically increased under Gordon Brown, prompting concern over their influence on policy.

In the first quarter of 2002, only 30 per cent of the party’s national funding came from the unions, less than a third of the proportion for the same period this year.

Since donations first had to be reported to the Electoral Commission in 2001, Labour has reported union contributions totalling almost £70million.

The unions have also poured a total of £378,000 into marginal Labour seats since the last election in 2005.

Ministers agreed a series of policy pledges with union leaders in talks at the weekend, including an extension of the minimum wage and new flexible working rights.

Labour’s Employment Relations Minister Pat McFadden rejected the criticism over the party’s links with the unions, insisting Labour had spurned their most controversial demands including a return to secondary picketing.

‘The Tories are desperate to say New Labour is dead but this weekend showed that Labour will not go back to the past and we are still looking to the future,’ he said.

¿ Former Cabinet minister Lord Eric Varley, who served as Industry Secretary in the 1970s, has died at 75.

Lord Varley died peacefully yesterday afternoon with his family by his side, a Labour Party spokesman said.

Former minister Tony Benn, who took over from Lord Varley as MP for Chesterfield in 1984, described him as ‘very well respected’ and said it was a ‘great loss’.

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