The Costs of Democracy: Party Funding in Modern British Politics
Keith Ewing
Hart Publishing, 279pp, 30.00
In this timely new book, Keith Ewing addresses the root causes of the current cash-for-honours affair, which are the escalating cost of election campaigns and the reliance of the main parties on a small number of wealthy donors.
As for the first issue, Ewing rightly proposes a much lower national limit on election spending, and a limit on spending per constituency. On the second, he proposes a mixture of state funding (in return for greater internal democracy and membership recruitment) and caps on donations. The most original proposal in the book is to let parties set their own donations cap. This gets us out of the current stalemate whereby the Tories are insisting on setting a uniform cap for both individual and union donations, something which would disadvantage Labour and threaten the union link.
By allowing parties to set their own caps, Ewing recognises that each party is different: the Tories will always be better at attracting individual donations, while Labour will always rely significantly on the unions. The caps would be policed by the Electoral Commission which could force a party to lower its cap if it would lead to a serious inequality in funding.
As Ewing admits, however, he has no solution that would allow Labour to pay off its crippling £28m debt, without relying on yet more controversial private donations. Over to you, Mr Brown.