Former Minister defends Union donations saying Labour ‘will get strikes down’

Former Labour minister Siôn Simon has defended Labour MPs who received donations from unions and said the government will reduce the number of strikes.

Speaking on GB News Siôn Simon said: “It averages out at nine grand per elected MP. Unions are associations of millions of ordinary working people, generally not very rich people, who explicitly opt in to contribute a little bit of the subs they pay for political campaigning for uses exactly like this.

“It’s very highly regulated and it’s completely transparent. So those Labour MPs get an average of 9k each from these associations of workers who choose to do this with their hard earned cash.

“You will be hard pressed to find a Tory MP who didn’t get a lot more than 9k during the election campaign from all kinds of people that nobody’s asking any questions about, just they don’t happen to be trade unions.

“A load of people who earn 30 grand a year don’t get an opportunity to sponsor many MPs, but if they each contribute a pound a month to fund political causes, and there are millions of them, then they can actually help fund Labour candidates in elections.

“We’ve had more strikes under the Tories than we ever did under the previous Labour government, ten times more strikes last year under the Conservative governments than they had in France and you know that strikes have gone haywire when that’s the case.

“This Labour government will get these strikes down. There’s no doubt about that. And one of the ways they’ll do that is just by making reasonable deals with hard working people, public sector workers have been badly paid and squeezed at a really difficult time under the Conservatives and they actually deserve a pay rise.”

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