As one of many wealthiest and strongest commerce unions within the land, Unite has been the Labour Get together’s most beneficiant benefactor.
The union below Len McCluskey donated thousands and thousands to Labour below Jeremy Corbyn, who was a detailed ally of ‘Pink Len’.
Unite has additionally lavished £98.6 million on a troubled resort and convention venture in Birmingham which is now the topic of a QC-led inquiry.
Now it emerges that the union claimed an astonishing £660,000 in taxpayer-funded furlough money for its resort workers in the course of the lockdown.
The union claimed £145,206 furlough for workers on the Birmingham resort and an additional £519,125 for employees at its resort in Eastbourne.
As one of many wealthiest and strongest commerce unions within the land, Unite has been the Labour Get together’s most beneficiant benefactor. A file picture is used above (inventory picture)
The accounts mentioned: ‘In the course of the interval, the Union’s lodges in Birmingham and Eastbourne furloughed 94 workers on common for 9 months below the Authorities’s Job Retention Scheme.’
Throughout the identical interval McCluskey, who stood down as normal secretary final yr, was paid £101,568, together with a ‘automobile profit’ of £5,900 and £4,852 in pension contributions. The accounts additionally mentioned: ‘Key administration personnel compensation of £5.1 million was paid within the yr comprising wage, advantages in sort, and employer pension contributions.’
Unite, whose revenue from members and investments was just below £172 million, spent simply over £167 million, leaving a surplus of £4.6 million for 2020.
So why did they want the taxpayer to fund their resort workers?
I spy Craig’s undercover agent gong
In a uncommon interview Sir David Omand, former head of the UK intelligence company GCHQ, confessed an admiration for the James Bond movies. ‘I vastly take pleasure in them however they don’t have anything no matter to do with the gathering of secret intelligence,’ he informed Nick Ferrari on LBC radio.
‘The perfect intelligence officer, is the individual, she or he, who walks into the room and also you don’t even discover them. If Daniel Craig walks right into a room heads will flip.’
Requested if it was proper that Craig is within the Order of St Michael and St George — an honour often solely accorded spies and diplomats and which James Bond has within the Ian Fleming books — Omand replied: ‘Oh sure, it’s a kind of little British quirks, it’s a little bit little bit of eccentricity.
Tributes have been pouring in for the deputy chief medical officer for England Professor Sir Jonathan Van-Tam, who’s leaving in March to take up a job at Nottingham College. Commerce minister Penny Mordaunt says: ‘No matter you apply your self to subsequent, I do know you’ll tear the pants out of it.’
Sound recommendation from dry-as-dust Tory MP John Redwood for supporters of Chancellor Rishi Sunak: ‘Those that transient that Mr Sunak needs to be the subsequent PM ought to inform him that imposing an avalanche of unpopular and unwise tax rises will undermine that ambition.’
Within the 2016 Tory get together management contest, the then-Minister of State for Power and Local weather Change Andrea Leadsom withdrew from the ultimate spherical, enabling a coronation of Theresa Could.
Is she going to run once more?
A Brexiteer who was sacked by Boris in his final reshuffle, she was noticed in The Outdated Customized Home, a pub beside the harbour in Padstow, Cornwall, audibly opining on her management credentials.
She was remarking that she is ‘one in all solely three Dames within the parliamentary get together’ and that she had been suggested to take a seat tight and ‘behave herself’ whereas the PM’s issues proceed to pile up.
Who you gonna name? Gove-busters!
Is the second final week when Housing and Levelling Up Secretary Michael Gove grew to become trapped in a carry within the BBC about to change into comedy gold?
Jon Culshaw, a star of Radio 4’s Lifeless Ringers, is on the case. ‘It’s the right reward for a playwright. As a super 30-minute one act play. It will absolutely be written and be a super begin to a theatrical night.’
Who will play Gove? It must be Rick Moranis, who starred in Ghostbusters.
In the event you pardon the pun, he’s an actual useless ringer for Gove.