General Political Fund: Resources for running campaigns

The General Political Fund (GPF) is separate from LabourLink and was set up to allow the union to collect money from members specifically to fund political campaigning work.

It is not affiliated to any political party, but the money in the fund is used to support local campaigns, to give a boost to our big national political campaigns, and to pay for political advertising.

Much of the high profile political campaign work you see from UNISON is paid for by the GPF. The GPF funded a TV recruitment advert 'You're one in a million', launched in October 2004.

In the run-up to the elections in last year, the GPF funded anti-racism adverts in areas where the BNP were standing as well as adverts in national papers.

But it's not just the big things that the GPF funds. All sorts of national and local projects and campaigns benefit from receiving funding this way. Recently these have included:

• Anti-racist events
• The Durham Miners gala
• Local campaigns against the Private Finance Initiative
• Campaigns against council housing sell-offs - like the money it made available to us in Edinburgh for that but also Nationally for the Asylum Seeker Children initiative started off by this Branch.
• Scotland's public services campaign and research into democratic involvement and accountability in public services in Scotland.

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