Political funding: what is to be done?
Posted on Friday 30 November, 2007
Filed Under Politics
Nothing more clearly underlines the essential continuity of the Blairism and the Brown government than the ongoing controversy over donations to New Labour from wealthy businessmen.
Sources of financial support symbolise – perhaps more than anything else – the different class bases of what Labour once was, and what it has today become.
Historically, few wealthy individuals have donated to an ostensibly socialist party out of political conviction. True, there were always a handful of working class boys made good, and those intellectually converted to Fabianism.
But most business backers of Labour – from Kagan to Maxwell, from Ecclestone to Abrahams – can fairly be labelled spivs and shysters. They are parvenus and arrivistes; in the words of that withering Tory put down, these are the sort of people that have to buy their own furniture.
New Labour’s tawdry crack whore-style dependence on what gets creamed off from the proceeds of rack-renting Newcastle slums offers democratic socialists an open goal to argue for the highest standards in political life. Such a call should certainly constitute one of the central planks of any platform of a renewed left.
We could make this our political monopoly, and we damn well should. As far as winning the support of the general public goes, this is the closest it gets to a one-way bet.
Corruption – sometimes petty, often not so petty – is an issue across the entire political spectrum, of course. Those of us that remember the Major years will be well aware of that.
If relatively few Lib Dems have been found with their fingers in the till in recent decades, that is largely on account of their continued distance from office rather then evidence of superior moral fibre.
Even sections of the far left have sometimes been happy enough to pimp their politics in return for a fistful of dollars from sundry petro-kleptocracies.
But the democratic left is sufficiently unsullied to make the demand for political transparency a speciality. Here are some policy proposals that deserve at least debate.
Let’s start from the proposition that political parties should be funded – if not entirely, than very largely so – by their own members and openly-declared supporters.
Individuals should be signed-up members of political parties before being allowed to make donations on more than the most modest of scales. It is surely only acceptable for someone to write out a six-figure cheque – or even a seven figure cheque – to a party if they strongly support its policies. Otherwise, the suspicion has to be that they are seeking either simony or bespoke legislation.
Let the political affiliations of both trade union executive members and board members of companies that make political donations be contained in the relevant annual reports. Most trade unionists don’t keep it a secret. Business people shouldn’t either.
Members of unions that donate to the Labour Party consciously have to opt in to the political levy. So why shouldn’t corporate donations – which no longer go exclusively to the Tories, remember – should be subject to similar strictures. Let shareholders vote on the question, and have the right to ‘opt out’ by withholding their share.
It is also necessary to oppose any further extension of state funding, and to examine ways of scaling back of existing provisions. There is a basic democratic principle at stake here. It just is not the job of the taxpayer to foot the bills for political parties, especially ones they heartily oppose.
Finally, it’s worth noting that there are plenty of existing laws against allowing considerations of personal gain to influence the performance of public office. Yet in all the decades of Tory and New Labour sleaze, only Aitken and Archer have actually done time.
Let’s just say that a fair chunk of those who have served in successive New Labour cabinets should at least be looking at 40 hours of community service, to put it mildly.
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14 Responses to “Political funding: what is to be done?”
‘Let’s just say that a fair chunk of those who have served in successive New Labour cabinets should at least be looking at 40 hours of community service, to put it mildly.’
And that’s before you add on the additional charge of war crimes for the likes of Brown, Straw, Hoon et al…
Any thoughts on who should be performing community service?
Archer and Aitken did not do time for corruption but for their misplaced confidence that they could get more money by going to court, and perjuring themselves (and in Aitken’s case getting family members to do so).
And then there’s the Thatcher family. But good old Labour helped keep the NAO and the Serious Fraud Office from going too far.
No gratitude in this world. Even letting TNT handle sensitive government mail did not stop Murdoch press from making the most of it going all wrong.
Of course when Wilson was getting dodgy payments they did not touch the Labour Party’s sides. This lot aren’t that clever. But aside from the fact that Labour landed itself in this mess in its rush to disown the unions, it is worth pointing out the large sums spent on individuals stands for leadership, in other words internal campaigning. What was expected in return? This is a new stage in the corruption.
Individuals should be signed-up members of political parties before being allowed to make donations on more than the most modest of scales.
They can get round that by simply joining the party for a while. Not much of a hurdle.
You don’t think that the Labour Party was not fundamentally compromised by its dependence on union money?
Surely, there there wouldn’t have been a Labour government over the past ten years if that relationship hadn’t been broken.
Rightist political myth #32575: “There wouldn’t have been a Labour government if they hadn’t turned in tories.”
The could practically have vowed to nationalise your record collection, liquidate suburbanites as a class and shoot the royal family and still have gotten elected, Tories were about as saleable as coldsores in 1997.
Which is why the last ten years is such a staggering, sickening waste.
“Surely, there there wouldn’t have been a Labour government over the past ten years if that relationship hadn’t been broken.”
But that relationship *hadn’t* been broken in 1997, and still isn’t completely broken now, though it frequently resembles that of an abusive husband and a battered wife.
Every attempt at reforming the financing of elections is a joke. There are always loopholes.
If there’s one lesson from the past few years it is simply that changing the rules is not the issue. The issues are arrogance, incompetence and regulation.
Giving the Electoral Commission the power to issue notices barring responsible officers (treasurers, general secretaries and leaders) from holding party political office unless they can prove they were actively prevented from finding out what was going on and thus genuinely unable to prevent breaches of the rules should remove plausible denial defences.
“Even sections of the far left have sometimes been happy enough to pimp their politics in return for a fistful of dollars from sundry petro-kleptocracies.”
It is interesting to note that Lenin himself stooped to encouraging a couple of his comrades to seduce and marry two wealthy sisters in order to ake delivery of their mutual inherited wealth; and of course the fact that he took money from the German SPD while rallying against Kautsky’s approach to WWI.
If Labour took the same attitude to him in stooping to anything to fund reformism, as the bolsheviks did revolution, I would be happy.
Shame the funding seems mostly and all too often directed at sorting out Bernie Ecclestone’s tobacco problems then…
I’ve just seen Hazel Blears on Andrew Marr’s Sunday morning programme. I am afraid I have a viseral response to ho er type of slimy toad. She very condescendingly said that trade unionists can still donate their ‘pennies’ to the Labour Party because they share political values, but they need oodles of tax payers cash to keep fighting for those values iePFI, rubbish schools, privatization ….(fill in your own particular pet hate).
“So why shouldn’t corporate donations – which no longer go exclusively to the Tories, remember – should be subject to similar strictures. Let shareholders vote on the question, and have the right to ‘opt out’ by withholding their share.”
Actually shareholders do get a vote on corporate political donations – it was something Labour brought in a few years back. But they can only vote against, they can’t withhold a share of the proposed donation based on their level of ownership.
In practice most institutional investors will vote against party political donations, but not against political expenditure (ie costs incurred for stands at party conferences etc). And very few companies make party political donations.
Concidentally one of the Tories corporate backers is an institutional shareholder itself – Fidelity Investments. personally I think this is a bit of a conflict of interest when they pitch for business from Tory-controlled local authority pension funds.
It is staggering that only a couple of people have ever been convicted of using money to buy influence.
Hopefully you read about the planning application for an enormous business park that Mr Abrahams had rejected, only to find it accepted once he had made a donation to the Labour Party – read Guido’s blog from last week if you’d like to find out more….
It all stinks even if Abrahams is a deal less objectionable than Ecclestone. The whole issue of political funding has massive ramifications. If the financial link between New Labour and the unions is broken, as Byers would like,then the residual social democracy within the party totally disapears.A state funded Party leadership would become even more divorced from the needs of ordinary working people.I can remember a report of the congress of the Spanish Socialist Party when nearly 80% of delegates turned up in their official cars since they were state funded functionaries.Proposls to put a tight cap on party expenditure could give even more power to the press barons and “non plitical” campaign groups as in the States. What we desperately need is an active mass membership and that is what we definately do not have.