Help Yourselves!

One aspect of the fall-out of the Labour ‘Cash for Peerages” and ‘Cash for Access’ culture which this Dead Duck Prime Minister has done so much to foster is the impact it may have upon the funding of political parties.

The taxpayer should beware what the political elite has in mind for their money. Plan ‘A’ is for political parties to receive a big annual dollop of public money based upon a formula that will give each party £0.50p a year for each vote cast for it at the previous general election, plus £0.25p for every vote it secured in elections to the European Parliament, Scottish Parliament and the Welsh and Northern Ireland Assemblies.

Other proposals seek to cap the amount of any one donation to £50,000 which will be resisted by Labour who rely on six-figure handouts from their political masters, the Trades Unions. But it is the proposal to dole out £25 million to political parties that will stick in the craw of the British people.

Our political elite already have their snouts firmly stuck in the trough of public money: now they want more. Such a system already exists in Germany, for example, yet German politicians have continued to be involved in scandals concerning political fundraising. This proposed largess will have the immediate and deleterious effect of making our political parties even more detached and remote from their own activists, let alone ordinary voters, In future they will not have to go out so much on the ‘rubber chicken circuit’ and spend interminable evenings being harangued about the virtues of nationalizing the railways or bringing back the birch: the money will arrive every month in the party bank account, all ready for whatever junket the politicians can devise for themselves.

This scheme will simply entrench the existing parliamentary parties still further, making it yet harder for a new party to break into the mould. Party politics will atrophy as the parties no longer have to go out and work for their funds. The activists and the ordinary voter will find themselves at an ever greater remove form their party leaders who will rarely deign to bother with a fundraising event unless it’s a £1000-a-plate champagne supper to meet and greet the great and the good.

Not one single brass farthing should be given to political parties. They should have donations capped at £50,000 a throw and the existing funds now given to them (The so-called “Short Money”) should no longer be paid. One sure way of forcing politicians to get to grips with real people with real problems and aspirations is to force them out of the MetroBubble into the real world to compete for the more modest donations of ordinary citizens. If a party cannot raise the funds to stay in business, then it does not deserve to survive. Paying parties fat sums of Taxpayer’s money will simply have the same effect that propping up Nationalised industries, creating a class of fat lazy inefficient complacent political parties that do not have to work to maintain a relationship with ordinary voters.

Not the least important factor here is the body of polling evidence which so strongly suggests that electors do no want to see their political parties funded out of public money. For politicians to vote themselves a further heavy dollop of their cash would be, of itself, to widen the chasm between governing and governed. You would have thought that politicians would recognise this easily for themselves, but, so filled with amour propre are they that they believe we actually love and value them such that we would not notice an extra £25 million or so. They are hopelessly deluded if they think that we care for them enough to bankroll without question all the spin, smears and lies.