Engaging Voters
Matthew Parris is one of our most sought after commentators and rightly so - because he brings a sense of mischief and of humour to the subjects he writes and talks about in the newspapers and on TV.
Here's his take on Ed Miliband's attempt to end the undue and often undemocratic influence that trade unions exert over the Labour Party - which Matthew writing in the Times believes will have a wider knock on effect as well.
And you know what, I think he's absolutely right - but the country pays out plenty of public money even now on supporting the UK's political system - and I think there's a strong argument for investing a little bit more while encouraging all parties to engage more with ordinary voters.
Guess who's going to pay for politics? You
The political parties will ask the taxpayer to pay their bills once unions and tycoons have walked away
By Matthew Parris
From far, far away this weekend, very faintly and borne on the wind from the other side of mountain, can just be heard the whistle of an approaching train. Yes folks, she’s coming round the mountain: state funding for political parties can now be only a matter of time.
When it comes to small events with big consequences, the alleged attempt by the Unite union to rig the selection of a parliamentary candidate for Falkirk may soon deserve comparison with the proverbial flap of a butterfly’s wings in the Brazilian jungle. History was waiting for something to tip.
Everybody knew that unions get up to monkey business to wangle preferred candidates into Parliament, but in Falkirk it took one flap of a butterfly’s wings to tip Mr Miliband into a show of defiance. Cornered into courage, he will destroy his leadership unless he’s seen to win this fight.
And everybody knew that collusion between Labour and the unions to diddle vast quantities of money out of individual trade unionists by inertia-selling was indefensible. Their money is used to create a terracotta army of phantom not-quite-members of the Labour Party, their “votes” then marshalled at the union leadership’s behest.
Everybody knew this has been, since 1945, a disgrace. Nobody in recent decades has ever seriously tried to defend the extortion. Labour has always ducked, muttering that it wasn’t an issue. Now it is.
The result? So much more than you may think. For there’s a reason the Conservative Party hasn’t exactly taken to the streets in indignant protest against the link between Labour and the trade unions; a reason that library shelves (as the Cabinet Office Minister Francis Maude has remarked) “groan with unimplemented reports on party funding”. Here follow a few further “everybody knows” . . .
Everybody knows the Tory party’s growing dependence on a small number of very large private donors is a shabby business. And not just the Tories, who raised some £13 million last year from only 707 donations; Labour raised some £12 million from 661 donations. What parties raise from the wider party base in voluntary membership subs and small donations is chickenfeed by comparison these days: and the yield is plummeting.
Everybody knows a multimillion- pound donation to either main party can ease a rich man’s passage on to the Honours List, and always has. Everyone knows it has helped a few into the Lords, where they become legislators. Nobody approves of this.
Everybody knows that cash gets you access at Westminster. It’s rarely directly corrupt: ministers may honestly change their minds after hearing a persuasive case put to them in genial circumstances. But donations create those circumstances.
It simply won’t do. It taints public life. As Tory party membership shrinks and the money that used to come from a large number of small donations dries up, the smell grows more pungent.
Defenders of the status quo can rationalise until the cows come home, but the best way of testing a case for the defence of any arrangement is to try to imagine who would continue to defend it if it were terminated. No senior Tory I know would seriously defend the way we fund our party now, if another way had been found. Few senior Labour voices would defend the present arrangement with the unions if they could only think how else to raise the cash. On party funding none of Britain’s mainstream parties can really look the electorate in the eye, and they know it. Privately they say it.
Mr Miliband’s (presumed) proposals for reforming Labour’s links with the unions will lose his party most of what has been coming from union members, few of whom will actively choose to become individual party members. Within five years Labour will be contemplating bankruptcy; but with their heads held high at least. The heat will by then be on the Tories. Between Labour, Liberal Democrats and Conservatives, half a century of unspoken truce on funding will shatter. I don’t think Tory fund-raising from the very rich could survive the onslaught that would then follow.
All at once — and probably believing the argument has only just occurred to them — our major parties will discover an interest they’ve only fitfully felt so far, in the idea of regular state funding for their administration and campaigning costs.
The very notion will be massively unpopular. There will have to be a tacit deal between party leaderships not to break ranks and exploit public indignation. It’s too early to discuss the nuts and bolts of any proposed system beyond remarking that Sir Hayden Phillips’s 2007 report offers a solid and well-reasoned foundation for that discussion. Like him I favour capped spending and “matched” funding, because letting parties spend what they like and paying them according to how well they poll makes for an unwelcome bias towards big, incumbent parties. Instead the State should match the smallish donations a party can attract from ordinary members (perhaps from £5 to £500 per annum) and give such gifts the same tax advantages as charities enjoy.
Thus to incentivise small donations would help enormously with a drive that 21st-century parties should already be launching: to use the internet and internet-based party membership as the foundation for mass-appeal fundraising. PayPal, text-message donation and JustGiving are showing how custom can be attracted simply by making it quick and easy. Party appeals that are issues-based could exploit waves of public sympathy or outrage driven by the news. Any broadcast appearance by Polly Toynbee could have a thousand Tories clicking a “donate £5 to the Conservatives” button on a special Toynbee-tagged Tory website; my esteemed fellow columnists Simon Heffer and Peter Hitchens could fundraise for both left and right simultaneously whenever either popped up on TV.
I’m serious. But until we pluck from our major parties’ lips the reliable teats of just a few tycoons and union barons, they won’t move seriously into the business of raising money from large numbers of real people. When they’re ready to, then the taxpayer, who has an interest in uncorruptly funded parties, should be prepared to chip in. There’ll be a hurricane of protest. The shake of a butterfly’s wings in Falkirk looks likely this weekend to have made that hurricane inevitable.
