Alliance Trade union confer. ence on March 16 is the right initiative at the right time.
More than a month before the conference, over with 400 activists have already signed up to debate the way forward on the political fund and the next steps in mined the fight against privatisation.
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structure. eral campaigning, while it is through the APF that the union maintains its links the Party. Union relations with, and representatives the Party are deterby the APF Committee. While all members may pay into the APF, only Labour Party members may participate in the APF There has been for a while A very different approach to the Political Fund has been taken by the GMB trade union, which is increasingly positioning itself as a rival to UNISON in the recruitment of public sector workers. The GMB voted early in 2001 to withhold £1million of its planned political fund contributions to the Labour Party over the next Tour vears. and instead to spend Inis in The result has been a succession of investigative reports. news stories and high-profile. hard-hitting adverts in the national LIC. press, which have been so successful that each advert has recruited new members for the GMB. Buoyed up by this success and angered by Labour's intensified rush towards further privatisation. the GMB's National Executive decided in January to double the deduction from Labour's funding to £2m over the four years to the next election. They also voted to refuse GMB support to any Labour candidates in May's local elections who support Blair's privatisation polidisaffiliate from the Labour Party, as in the absence of a sufficiently credible national alternative on the left, could be seen as shift to the right. A debate has occurred in the United Left about the possibility of a "third political fund". This position is promoted by the Socialist Party, who argue that this is the only rule change that could be allowed onto the agenda of However, such a fund would easily be dismissed as