One of the most curious aspects of the cash-for-access scandal if that no one has made the case for a major reform of political funding so that the scandals that keep on erupting can finally be killed off. Instead there has been a ritualised round of mutual accusations which once again utterly alienates most voters.
Again and again, Tory ministers and their faithful echo chambers in the press denounce the notion that the taxpayer should fund politics. This is curious as the Labour party receives £5.5m directly from the taxpayer as did the Tories when in opposition. The taxpayer also pays £90m year for MPs’ staff who help ensure the profile and contact with voters of MPs necessary for re-election.
The parliamentary expenses body has just authorised MPs to place party logos on their websites, a further modest contribution by the taxpayer to politics.
Yet still political parties are addicted to external funding. The Conservatives are squirming over their rich donors. Labour is enjoying Tory discomfiture. But it was only yesterday that Labour suffered quasi terminal damage over loans for peerages.
Moreover, every time a Labour MP attacks David Cameron over donorgate, the counter-accusation is made that Labour is paid for by unions who selected the leader, dictate policy, choose candidates and ensure Labour spokespersons have to equivocate on unpopular industrial action.
To be sure, anyone inside the Labour party knows how wrong the accusation is. The unions have pushed middle-class university graduates to be MPs with a working-class trade unionist a rarity in the Commons. Far from dictating policy, unions complained in the Blair-Brown years that key issues like the working time directive were sidelined. John Monks said, accurately, that for Labour after 1997 unions were like elderly relatives at a wedding – no one quite knew who they were and no one took any interest in their views.
In contrast to the mammoth donations from rich Tory supporters the union finances which support for Labour are an aggregation of hundreds of thousands of small monthly contributions.
But has the time come to admit that in as far as voters are concerned the public view that a few trade unions pay for and thus have a great deal of influence over Labour is as damaging as the charge that rich hedge fund bosses have access and influence over the Conservatives?
Perception matters and for every attack on Tory financing the counterattack that unions buy Labour sticks. So when will the time come that Labour decides that it will join the rest of Europe and major Commonwealth democracies and renounce all external funding?
The debate over capping funding is a fake one. Sir Christopher Kelly like all the Whitehall mandarins who are charged by prime ministers to produce reports on party funding came up with the classic mandarin fudge of splitting the middle. Any upper limit whether £10,000 or £50,000 massively tilts the balance in favour of the party that draws support from the wealthier half of the country. There are plenty of people in David Cameron’s or George Osborne’s constituency for whom £10,000 is small change. There are none in my or Ed Miliband’s south Yorkshire constituency.
Labour after 1997 was awash with business donors’ cash. So rather than adopting a modern approach to party funding by getting democracy to pay for democracy the approach was taken to set up reporting and accounting procedures via the Electoral Commission. This has proved almost worthless as, once the principle of external financing is conceded, simply declaring and listing the donations matters little.
The objection is made that cutting the unions’ financial link means an end to the party-union nexus. Why? In Sweden or Australia, unions support centre-left causes and campaigns just as business supports policies it wants to see legislated. Unions and Labour would benefit from each campaigning for common causes instead of being a Siamese twin with limited independence of movement.
There is no need to change the constitution on union affiliation and Labour should remain proud of being the party of working people and their democratic institutions without being beholden to them for the finance necessary to maintain democratic party activity as the core of all parliamentary and representative democracy.
Then the argument is made that raising cash keeps parties in better contact with voters. This is patronising drivel. Dutch or Spanish or Danish parties are every bit as much in contact with voters as are British parties without always expecting a cash donation from those who come to political. events. It is getting elected that makes parties reach out to voters. If they don’t they lose elections.
The Conservatives might benefit from being a party that, as in the 1950s, focused on policy and adapting to social change rather than this demeaning, corrupting trawl after rich men’s spare cash that have made Tories seem so sleazy in the last quarter century.
In fact, if there was a forward-thinking Conservative who wanted to set the agenda it may well be from the right that effective calls for full democratic funding of party work may emerge.
Labour should be swifter off the mark and offer the 2012 Clause IV moment which said that Labour should no longer seek to be dependent on trade union cash (while preserving cooperative friendly relations) as part of a wider reform to clean up and modernise party political funding in Britain and make it fit for the 21st century.
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Denis MacShane is MP for Rotherham and a former Europe minister. Follow him on www.denismacshane.com and @denismacshane
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No political party should be funded by the taxpayer. It is not fair on the taxpayer who are already funding in part with Short Money (which should be stopped).
With the right Checks & Balances in place, funding from individuals can be made to be above-board.
The taxpayer already pays enough without it’s money going to parties whose ideology they are diametrically opposed to and that is without money going to racist parties like BNP for example.