Unite, Britain’s biggest union, has revealed a sharp drop in global membership after discovering a quarter of a million “ghosts” who did not in fact belong to the organisation.

The group has reported a fall in its membership from 1.95m to 1.64m, equivalent to a drop of 310,000, in its annual report published this week. It later clarified this as mainly a “tidying-up exercise” as officials excised the names of former members who had left or died years earlier. Read more