A Foreign Office minister, three government aides and a Labour vice-chairman are to lose trade-union funding to their local parties.

They are among the first of about 30 Labour MPs to be cast aside by the GMB amid unrest over policies. Meg Munn, the Foreign Office minister and MP for Sheffield Heeley, and Stephen Ladyman, vice-chairman and MP for South Thanet, head the list whose constituencies will no longer receive up to £20,000 a year.

Paul Kenny, general secretary of the GMB, also said that the union would not pay off Labour's debts: “No GMB members' money will be going to pay off loans that the Labour Party took from multimillionaires who now want their money back because, perhaps, the peerages they thought they might have got are not going to materialise.”

More than a million days were lost to strike action last year. The average in the 1990s was 660,000.

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