The FT's reported that:
Donations to Labour from individuals have slumped to less than half of their level during the last parliament, highlighting the party's difficulty in appealing to wealthy business figures.
The opposition party received just £8.7m from private donors in the current legislative session, compared to £20.7m in the same period of the last parliament, according to an analysis by the Financial Times of Electoral Commission figures.
My immediate reaction was "so what?" The sad reality is that most of the funding for the Conservatives comes from hedge funds and private equity which I find no more attractive there than I do when it funds the Progress lobby group within Labour. Realistically, who does believe that there is any common interest between the quid pro quo these people will expect for their money and most people in this country?
The sooner we had state funding of political parties plus limited personal donations (maximum £1,000 a person) the better. And not just for left wing parties but right wing ones too, because time and again the evidence is that they too are poorly served by such ties.
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Much like the Labour Party being funded by unions.
Fundamentally different actually: they have millions of members for a start and you have to opt in to pay
But as you will note my recommendation covers that too
It is not partisan
Why not at least have a level playing field. I’m damned sure the hedge funds have stumped up a hell of a lot more than unions have.
And of course ask yourself when seeing funding: cui bono?
It doesn’t compare the wealth transfer upwards to the 0.01% for the last 30 years has by design made sure of that…
Union members create real wealth in the economy-goods and services. Hedge funds? Does their investment contribute to the common welfare or subtract from it for the benefit of the few? Could the existing investment bodies do their job better?
I sympathise with the argument for a cap.. though I don’t see how you can prevent indirect campaigning by those with means (be they funded by the wealthy, or by Unions etc).
State funding would bother me greatly though. If they can’t get people to support them voluntarily then they what gives them the right to any cash at all? They don’t listen to most of us anyway.. how would that make things any better? If they have less money to spend on billboards and mail shots then so what? The Internet is cheap, and the media gives them a far more persuasive platform anyway. Their cash mainly just lets them throw even more spam at their precious marginals.. which is hardly democratic. Why should the majority of us, in our neglected safe constituencies, pay for that?
I think you’ve answered the question you posed yourself.
It’s exactly the expensive advertising the in the media that shapes hearts and minds these days and that’s where the current government has an unfair advantage. The cap and equal spending target should be placed on this group of activities and every single receipt for every single piece of advertising published by Hansard.
The newspapers are still the shapers of undecided voters in my humble one.
One interesting question is what all of this money is spent on. A lot of it goes on advertising and media manipulation (this is even more the case in the US where elections are basically a way to transfer money from rich people via politicians to the tv and advertising industries)and most of the rest goes to pay for the work that used to be done by grassroots party members. The decay of political parties and the rise of a professional political class funded by donations is something that should worry anyone regardless of their ideology. I don’t like the idea of state funding however, although I am sympathetic to the idea the Power Commission floated of a box on the ballot where you could indicate which party you wanted your £5 or whatever of tax to go to. Why not do that directly though?
The people who will vote for this shower are those who are easily led by the nose by the media.
Only this morning I was talking to a colleague (Daily Mail reader) who believes that if they voted Labour, the party would just spend money we haven’t got. And we both work in the public sector in a local authority who are facing losing 300 odd jobs in 2015!! I mentioned raising taxes and she hit the roof!
It’s the old ‘turkeys voting for Christmas’ routine again I’m afraid and the counter-narrative to austerity still has plenty of work to do yet.
The way the fund raising works is too close to the American system of democracy for me (and look at where that has got them).
The mindset you note isn’t restricted to the local authority part of the public sector, Mark C. It’s well entrenched in higher education as well (though whether universities are any longer part of the public sector is a moot point, of course). Unfortunately, the austerity and debt narrative is very entrenched after nearly five years of most of the media bombarding the citizens of this country with that falsehood. Indeed, I noticed in the intereview with Nichola Sturgeon on the Today programme this morning that as soon as she uttered a word against austerity the response was ‘what about the deficit’ and the evil of ‘passing debt on to future generations’ – as if the austerity agenda isn’t going to leave us with a massive legacy of human, social and economic costs to pass on to my children and their children and so on. Truly depressing.
I have come across it too
A teaching wholly dependent on state employment and benefits told me recently she’d only vote for a party that cut spending
I asked if she realised that meant she’d pay
She looked shocked, but only for a second or two
Did you happen to ask your colleague about her objection to raising taxes in terms of her own direct interests? To it is long past time we put some numbers on that because the fact is that raising, for example, income tax makes very little difference to the vast majority of people in terms of take home pay.
“raising tax” is a boo phrase relentlessly denigrated by the media and by now it has become unthinkable in the most literal sense. That is people do not think about what it actually means for themselves; for the deficit they are so concerned about in another part of the forest; or for its effect on rising inequality
It is astonishing how seldom there is any analysis of what it would mean at different income levels in the media; it is not hard to do, I imagine.
If income tax was raised by a few pence most folk wouldn’t even notice
Indeed Richard, anything other than state funding of political parties makes a mockery of the very idea of democracy. Private funding virtually guarantees the 1% will rule us forever-more.
PS Can’t believe some of the other comments here to the effect that they “don’t like the idea of state funding” – talk about brainwashing!
I too find the idea of state funding of political Parties worrying, but it is, in current circumstances, by a LONG WAY, less worrisome than our current system, especially as exercised by our current Government, which must easily be the most corrupt in the last 100 years, at least – and by corrupt, I do not necessarily mean actual money in brown paper parcels a la Neil Hamilton (though that surely happens – look at the number of Tory Lords who gave £x in donations to the Tories, and received back in favourable legislation £50x – a bargain for the shysters they have put in the Lords), but as not even recognizing that what they are doing has a moral dimension, and that it is behaving amorally.
It seems to me that we need a voter-wide equivalent of the political levy, along the lines mentioned by Steve Davies above (a box on the ballot where you could indicate which party you wanted your £5 or whatever of tax to go to. Why not do that directly though?), and have this part of the Electoral Register: just as you can ask not to be publicized on the Register, so you should be able to indicate whether you are willing to see State funding be given to a Party.
The clear difficulty with this is that it would end up becoming like the “registered Democrat/Republican voter” system, as exists in the USA, so that people might have to declare their political allegiance to the Registrar – a GIFT to political campaigners.
So, let it instead be an agreement that funding be allocated to Parties on a £x per vote basis (even, alas, for Parties such as the BNP, if they stood for election – taking the very rough with the smooth), with ALL other funding, except limited personal donations prohibited. Trade Union funding (which is already the most democratic funding in play, as it is all voted on by members) could then be applied to Union political campaigns, with an extra rider that permitted the Union to allocate part of a member’s political levy to the PArty of the member’s choice – which might be Conservative or even UKIP, but if that is the wish of the member, it should be respected.
But please could we have no more of equating Union support for Labour (all done above board, democratically, and in keeping with the fact that the Labour Party was originally the Labour Representation Committee of the Trade Union Movement), with the “sticky finger” of hedge-fund managers and various other commercial pirates bunging money in the direction of the Tory Party with NO democratic accountability, and using their money to “buy” seats in the House of Lords, from where they are able to influence the laws of the UK – a scandalous state of affairs.
Agree with a great deal of that Andrew
Lee
if we adopted a more PR system of election, marginals would play a less important part. There are a number of reforms needed in our constitution.
“a box on the ballot where you could indicate which party you wanted your £5 or whatever of tax to go to”
What happens if you don’t want it to go to any of the parties listed on the ballot though? Do you get a tax refund of a fiver?
And isn’t the real problem with state funding is that it is basically a bar to freedom of expression and assembly? If I don’t like any of the current lot I could put up my own capital and set up a new party. How can anyone set up a political party with just £1,000?
Richard,
Was it your well-researched estimate that the UK currently pays 4.21% of all spending on debt servicing (after the furore sparked by the Osborne “spending breakdown” that lumped all form of pensions etc into “benefits”) and this will more than double given Osborne’s borrowing requirements in the next parliament?
Not sure
In haste……
Ed Ryan – as I understand the proposal the Power Commission made it was that you could indicate whatever party you wished regardless of whether they were on the ballot in your constituency and you could also indicate that you didn’t want any money to go to any party. That did seem quite reasonable to me. I do think there is a danger that state funding could consolidate the position of existing parties but there are so many other factors that play an even larger part in that such as the electoral system for example that it has to be a lesser worry. I would be strongly opposed to a simple or direct system of state funding or the kind of system they have in Germany with state funded think tanks for each party, the crucial thing would be to have some element of voter control. In any case there is no way you can stop either individuals or unions or companies from spending money on campaigns (subject to membership or shareholder approval in the latter cases of course).
As important as party funding is vis-a-vis election campaigning it is a drop in the ocean compared to the Neo-liberal capture of the media.
Press regulation is a dangerous field but we need something that demands higher standards of editorial ethics. (For some reason the word ‘Leveson’ keeps drifting into my mind, but I can’t recall why. Like ‘Rosebud’).
I’m not suggesting censorship, but a requirement for weighting, the drawing of clear lines between editorial and opinion, and the right to reply. (I think the disgraceful smear campaign against Ed Miliband via his Father illustrates what I mean quite well). Oh, and perhaps a requirement that the media tell the truth.
Limiting the spend of Parties at election time does nothing to counter the drip drip drip of propaganda for the other 4 years and 9 months of the year.
(Incidentally did anyone else notice the assertion on the part of media commentators last night about the repercussions the HSBC issue will have on Ed Miliband (as a result of his comments about Lord Fink) with only the small aside ‘and possibly even the Prime Minister’?
One way to go would be for Labour to monitor the TV News output especially the BBC. I say this because the Tory Press will dominate for the next 3 or 4 months and the daily danger is the replication of this big Tory press agenda everyday on the Public broadcaster. It is the News of what 5 or 6 Tory editors. ( Sun,Mail,Express,Star, Times, Torygraph and I am not counting the FT but fear its getting more Anti Labour by the day so will rethink my subs).However I fear Labour are too soft, meek and mild to take on the BBC unlike Osborn and his ilk.
There is already a degree of state funding of political parties, from the funding of the office of the Leader of the Opposition (£600,000, I think) and Short Money (about £5.5m for Labour alone), through free meeting rooms, free delivery of election material, free party political broadcasts, and the IHT exemption.
See paragraphs 16 to 19 here – http://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/party-finance-and-the-constitution
And section E of this note – http://www.parliament.uk/briefing-papers/SN03138.pdf