MORE PARTY FUNDING

[Stanley]

MORE PARTY FUNDING

28 March 2006

It’s almost thirty years since I had the privilege to spend some time with a very small, fierce Jewish lady who had spent almost fifty years teaching in some of the toughest schools on the Lower East Side in New York City. She told me a story one day about going into school to prepare for the new session and having two very enjoyable days doing what she knew best. She said it was only on the second day on her way home that she realised why the experience had been so enjoyable, there were no children there!
BBC Radio 4 is a marvellous medium first thing in the morning for touching base with the country and the world and getting an idea of what is going on. Lord MacAlpine was being interviewed this morning about the propriety of accepting loans from supporters on the basis that they would only be paid back when the party could afford it. Apart from being a successful businessman in his time, he was Treasurer of the Conservative Party for many years. He was quite cagey on the subject of the loans, all he would say was that if he went to his bank manager for money on those terms he would get a dusty answer. He was even more cagey when asked what the objection could be to disclosing the names of the lenders. I think he may have been slightly disingenuous here, he said that he couldn’t think of any circumstance in which such disclosure could cause any problem. Being a cynic I suspect that the reason for anonymity is that this prevents anyone finding a link between the loans and favours received. One aspect of party funding on which he was totally transparent and I believe totally correct, was that the only proper source of funding was the constituency. He said that knocking on doors and asking for support at grass roots level was the classic way of raising funds and was the proper process.
This chimed in with a train of thought I have been grappling with for a while. I’m not surprised to find out that the leaders of the Labour Party have been caught out in some very dodgy practices which resulted in £14,000,000 appearing in time for the last General Election and solving a funding crisis. I’m not surprised to hear that knowledge of these loans and their source was kept from the properly elected and responsible officers of the party. I’m not even surprised by the fact that this demonstrates a lack of moral fibre that would be worrying in the smallest local organisation let alone a major national political party.
So what’s been puzzling me, quite simply, it’s the old question: Why? By this I don’t mean why did they allow standards to be thrown on one side, I can explain this by the desire to control, all the evidence we have from the last ten years is that control, used to garner central power, has been one of the key strategies used by the Blair hegemony. Nothing wrong with that actually, any efficient management needs a measure of power in order to function efficiently. This is where the braking effect of morals kicks in, in an ideal world a sound ethical base will guard against any overstepping of what a reasonable elector would regard as a boundary.
No, my problem is not how they arrived at the present position but why? This is where my Jewish schoolmistress on the Lower East Side comes in. I believe that a key decision was taken very early on in the process of regaining power. This was to simplify the management structure by distancing themselves from the children, sorry, electors. Actually I think there is a better description of the process they envisaged, not simply distance but reduced influence. This was applied to the Parliamentary Party as well, the backbenchers and party officers were to be sidelined. The most direct route to this in respect of the local parties and the electors was to remove the power of fund-raising from them. All administration of membership and subscriptions was transferred to Party headquarters.
The combination of ditching Clause IV, distancing the Party from the unions and bringing fund raising in house to London, in effect to Downing Street, meant that the only function the electors retained was to vote in elections. The result was complete control through a perfect management structure where the levers of power were easily grasped at the top. Funding, patronage, media management and control of the agenda were all under one roof. A school without children.
I have to go back now to Lord Acton. “All power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely.” All right, it’s a cliché but I remember hearing someone say that a cliché is an oft-repeated truth. I think this is the case here. I am not saying that all the members of the cabinet are corrupt, I believe that they all started out as idealists with sound morals. What I am saying is that by distancing themselves from the ground swell of the electorate they created an artificial environment in which it became very easy to accept and endorse practices which would have been anathema to them earlier in their careers. How else can you explain the £14,000,000 suddenly being discovered down the side of the sofa in Number 10? One assumes that the Cabinet had a reasonable idea of the standing of the party finances. One assumes that this was discussed in Cabinet. Is there an official minute buried in the files somewhere that records the point where Tony said “Look here, don’t worry about the deficit, I have it in hand”? There must have been some process and I believe that it required blind eyes to be turned. If it wasn’t like this it is an even more terrible indictment of the Cabinet process.
This is as far as I want to go at the moment. It would be very easy to descend into a rant against what I see as a betrayal of the electorate who gave power in the belief that it was going to responsible politicians. I think we may have learned a lesson and the results of this could become obvious in the May Council Elections, it will surprise me if the government doesn’t see a massive loss of support at local level. The only problem is that it will not have any impact. The only sanction that will carry any weight is the loss of a General Election. What a choice for a long serving supporter, leave a corrupt system in place or vote your own people out. Now that’s a question that will require the exercise of some real moral choices. I am not looking forward to it.

28 March 2006