by Conrad Landin and Luke James

TORY anti-union laws could leave Labour with just 10 per cent of its current funding from affiliates, an senior union source warned yesterday.

Labour HQ has announced that 189,700 trade union members have signed up as affiliated supporters to vote in the leadership election.

But 246,321 union and affiliate members cast votes in the 2010 election — around 50,000 more — which was conducted before the Collins review which imposed the requirement for members to opt in.

A chunk of new sign-ups are likely not to return their ballot papers.

Under the Tories’ proposed Trade Union Bill, union members would not contribute to political funds unless they opted in under a similar system — and it is feared that even fewer will do so, as this would entail them paying a premium on their subs.

An influential figure said unions could realistically expect only one-tenth of members to sign up.

The new rules for the leadership election were imposed after party rightwingers and the Tories accused Unite of illegitimate interference in the Falkirk parliamentary selection. The union was subsequently cleared in investigations by both the Labour Party and the police.

Trade union leaders who warned that they would struggle to persuade more than a minority of members to opt in now appear to have been vindicated.

The source said: “This was effectively imposed on the unions by the Parliamentary Labour Party.

“People are getting excited about the number of people who have signed up, but thousands of union members have been disenfranchised.”

Unions were allowed to continue to set their own affiliation regardless of how many members opted in to vote in leadership elections — but some fear that the Tories have taken inspiration from Labour’s internal reforms.

But Bakers, Food & Allied Workers Union president Ian Hodson, whose union is one of the few that opposed Labour’s new rules on affiliates, said it was more probable that the government was using the Collins review as a “smokescreen.”

He said the government’s real target was not party funding but unions’ campaigning activities.

“The aim of the government Bill is to nullify any opposition to attacks made on working people,” he told the Star.

A similar legal requirement for trade unionists to opt into political funds was introduced in 1927, following the General Strike of the previous year, but repealed by the postwar Labour government.