Monday 4 February 2008

Taxpayer funding for political parties & MPs' expenses

OK, let's chuck everything in the pot, think about human nature, and see what we can achieve with as few rules as possible:

1. Typical MP costs £200,000 a year, there are 529 English MPs, an average Parliament runs for four years, so that's £423 million over the course of a Parliament. There are other bits and pieces, so let's round it up to £460 million.

2. Just under 23 million votes were cast in England (including 1.3 million for parties which obtained no seats) in 2005, so that means the average vote was worth £20 to the parties.

3. Recent events have shown that the Labour Party couldn't care less about complying with their own internal rules or electoral law that they introduced; the Lib Dems are just as bad (but on a smaller scale) and a couple of Tory MPs have been caught with their hand in the till. If MPs defraud their own party, what do I care, frankly? That makes the MPs concerned and their Party look bad, so that's a result AFAICS, if they end up having their collar felt, that's a bonus. But these fraudulent expense claims and massive salary increases, gold plated pensions etc are an outrage.

4. My problem with taxpayer funding is that my tax money goes to pay for all the parties I didn't vote for. Plus it leads to even more corruption, it isolates politicians even more from real life , does nothing to prevent large donors trying to influence party policy. In theory, you could make donations illegal, but I have no objection to them (it is a free world) and secondly such a ban would be unenforceable. However much money parties have, they will still end up spending all of it (or in the case of the Labour Party "all of it and more'), it all just goes on advertising anyway, I can make up my own mind, thank you.

5. The problem with MPs being able to write themselves cheques for their own expenses and vote themsleves pay-rises seemingly at will is that they all are all in it together, there are, in practice, no restraints whatsoever.

Right ... here are a my three simple rules that will fix all this ...

a) MPs' salaries and pensions and expenses claims to be scrapped.

b) Each voter gets an extra box on his ballot slip asking "Would you like candidate's constituency branch to receive a grant of £5 a year for the life of the next Parliament?". This will encourage people to vote for minor parties (which would add to the gaeity of the nation) and it will be very interesting to see how many people vote for a party but fail to tick the box (i.e. tactical voters). If the parties get greedy and increase this to £10 or £15 etc, more and more people will refuse to tick the box in protest, so ultimately we should end up at the 'right' amount of funding. Conversely, parties may even find that they can increase their total income by reducing the amount down to a more modest amount like £4 or £3.

c) It will then be up to each party to decide internally how much the constituency branch can keep and how much has to be handed over to head office; how much salary their MPs will be paid; and it will be up to each party to check MPs' expense claims. If MPs waste less on salaries and expenses for themselves and their family, the party will have more left in the kitty to fight the next election. If the Campaign for Real Ale Party want to spend their grants down the boozer, then good luck to them.

Right. That's that fixed.

5 comments:

sanbikinoraion said...

I think that there's still a flaw here of the "other people's money" variety, and that is that net beneficiaries from the State (ideally the working poor, unemployed, disabled etc) are effectively spending tax money that they themselves are not paying into the pot.

I realize that it is probably very unworkable, but it would be nice if in order for the State to chip in the £5 or whatever, that the voter themselves had to donate a very small percentage of their salary, thus meaning that everyone had to pay something relative to their means to secure funding for their party. Otherwise there's no incentive for people to not tick the box since by and large it's not their own tax money that is going to the politicians.

It's the same problem as with the "MPs write their salary expectations on the ballot paper" model, which otherwise I think is an excellent idea.

Mark Wadsworth said...

Yup, but that £100m a year is relatively small compared to £160 billion-plus a year on welfare, secondly, there is a lot of incentive not to tick the box - if you are a tactical voter or if you prefer one party to the others but think that they are all greedy bastards, for example.

Of course there is no perfect solution, I am a simplification campaigned, it strikes me (along with the "MPs writing salary expectation on ballot paper" idea - on which mine is based) that with two simple rules we achieve as much as ever be humanly achieved.

Mark Wadsworth said...

I don't get the 'donate a small percentage of salary'.

If you mean donate to your chosen party, surely people are free to do this anyway;

if you mean into a general pot for all parties, then only people on very small incomes would see it as a good idea - which gets back to the first problem you identified.

Plus it's too many rules - how are you going to tie in a tick on a tax return with a cross on a ballot paper - too much admin, hassle and missing CDs for my liking.

Snafu said...

£5 per ballot paper!?!

Electoral fraud would triple before you could say "postal vote"!!

Mark Wadsworth said...

Postal voting is an abhorrence, that of course will of course go straight out of the window.