Buried
The report on political party funding by Sir Hayden Philips should have been big news. Instead the national newspaper subs, who know a thing or two, parked it on page 94.
The reason was that Sir Hayden – the mandarin’s mandarin with a manner as smooth as cashmere – produced a not very interesting report with some not very interesting recommendations. Yes, a suggested limit of £50,000 on individual donations, but suspicious signs of a fudge to let the trade unions continue to fund Labour. A bit more state money for parties – but not very much. A cap on spending, but not a tough one. The only people likely to be very gripped by this are politicians and people who watch the Politics Show on telly (two similar groups, come to think of it).
The problem with party funding has nothing to do with expenditure. In the UK, thanks to the ban on political advertising, expenditure is minuscule by US standards. Indeed, in real terms it is smaller now than it was in the second half of the nineteenth century, when it was all spent at constituency level on bribing voters with free beer (O happy days!).
The problem is on the income side. No-one joins political parties any more so they are now reliant on big donations and state money. Because of this everyone thinks they are for sale, so non-one joins political parties etc etc.
Here is a modest proposal. When people who sell things sell less of them, they normally go back, look at the product, and try to make better things that people will buy. They do not – unless they are the BBC – go off to the government and say ‘sales have dropped, so can I have some taxpayers’ money to help me?’ The decline in lots of people giving money to political parties whether by way of subs or tickets to raffles etc is entirely the fault of the parties themselves and their inability to think of innovative ways of appealing to voters. And don’t come up with the old excuse that people don’t join things any more or else I will threaten you with the National Trust, the RSPB and Make Poverty History.
So the best solution to the party funding problem would be to have told the political parties to go away and make what money they could how they could. All they would need to do is tell us where they got it from, and we could punish them at the ballot box if we did not care for their methods. And they would get no state money at all – not one penny. Why on earth should these expensive machines for producing unlistenable speeches, news-free news releases, and ideas-free policies be entitled to automatic subventions from their helpless victims, the voters?
This review was a huge and badly missed opportunity for some radical thinking. But then if you wanted that you wouldn’t ask a retired permanent secretary to lead it, would you?