Anonymous Donations as Party Funding.

The perception that individuals and organisations donate to political parties in order to influence policy and/or receive honors makes the public, rightly or wrongly, view politics and politicians as self serving and corrupt.

In order to correct this, it has been suggested that parties should either be funded out of taxation or there should be a cap on the amount each donor can give.

I don’t think either of those two are satisfactory, and would like to suggest another alternative. Legislated anonymous donations.

Anyone wishing to donate above say £500, would have to send their cheque to the Electoral Commission nominating to whom it should go. Once a year, those donations would be passed on to the relevant party aggregated and without the names of the donors.

It should also be made an offense to let a party know, directly or indirectly you’ve made a donation, or colluded in this as a party official. The only possible reason you would want to make yourself known, would be to buy political influence.

Even if you did attempt to let yourself be known, there would be no proof you’d actually made that donation. It would be just your word. I therefore doubt any party officials would want to get involved, let alone pass on the message to politicians who actually influence policy and hand out the gongs.

Of course, there will always be those who seek to circumvent such rules. But that's isn't a legitimate argument, else we wouldn't have any rules or regulations. Making donations anonymous by law would draw a line, which people would then have to carefully weigh up the pros and cons before deciding stepping over.

Two cheers for Nick Griffin

From The Huffington Post:

The BNP leader also alleged the "United States" had offered him money "to concentrate only on Islam, they wanted us to drop our criticism of the banking system. I refused, in 2007, and all hell broke loose."

This seems perfectly plausible to me, the financial services sector is far and away the largest donor to political parties in the UK (Tories and UKIP being the main beneficiaries).

Labour still gets a lot of money from trade unions (it's mainly ex-Prime Ministers who get lots of money from banks), which is fair enough, seeing as originally The Labour Party was the political wing of the trade union movement. Where this has gone horribly wrong is the fact that trade unions nowadays are mainly for public sector workers.

Nick goes a bit off-piste here though:

Griffin used his speech to plea for other far-right splinter groups to rejoin the BNP as well as espousing his theories about the English Defence League, calling the group "a serious, systematic, hugely-funded effort by the Zionist, neo-con clique, to dominate nationalism, to use as a tool to encourage the white working class to go and fight their wars, and so when the banking collapse comes, people will be looking for blame in the wrong direction."

It's quite true that the "neo-con clique" do spend a lot of money on this sort of thing, but I'd be surprised if the EDL receives a penny of it.

Annotated No2AV donor list

Over at Poplarmark's.

Highlight: GMB Union £10,000 - Probably not a Conservative party donor.

Via Neil Harding

More Lib Dem Fun

From an article on the BBC regarding donations to the Tories which were allegedly made via a front company:

Liberal Democrat Treasury spokesman Lord Oakeshott said he would be asking the Electoral Commission to conduct an inquiry. "Back-door gifts through front companies blatantly break the spirit of the law on cleaning up Britain's moneybags politics," he said, "If the Conservative Party have nothing to hide, why not declare straight out their thousands instead of using the cover of Unicorn Administration? It is hard to see how these can be simple errors."

*ahem*

5th Avenue Partners

*/ahem*

Free markets in everything ...

From the BBC:

Israel is to become the first country to give donor card carriers a legal right to priority treatment if they should require an organ transplant. The law has been changed to try to boost donation rates, as there is a shortage for organs for donation.

Seems fair enough to me.

Critics say patients should be treated on the basis of clinical need.

Well, they would say that, wouldn't they?

There was a similar moral dilemma posed on my law degree: should racist organ donors be allowed to stipulate that their organs may only be given to somebody of the same race? It struck me, yes of course they should. If you're a white guy at number ten on the list and a black donor insists that only other blacks may have his or her organs, then as long as they give it to a black person above you on the list, that still moves you up the list, doesn't it? And if the organs go to somebody below you on the list, well, what have you lost? Nothing, AFAICS, and the black person below you has gained enormously.

What's not to like?

There's one law for them and another law for us (Part 94)

From the BBC:

The elections watchdog has ruled that the Liberal Democrats can keep £2.4m in donations which it had been suggested came from a man convicted of fraud.

Michael Brown was convicted of stealing more than £30m from clients last year. The court case heard he channelled money through a company called 5th Avenue Partners to the Lib Dems. But the Electoral Commission said there was no "reasonable basis" to conclude that he had donated the money.

Wot?

Whether or not "he" donated the money and what the source of that money was is irrelevant. The only question is whether 5th Avenue Partners Limited was carrying on a business in the UK, see Section 54(2) of PPERA 2000.

The first place you look when you're trying to find out about a company is Companies House Direct, which tells us that neither this company nor the similarly named 5th Avenue Partners (UK) Limited ever filed accounts, i.e. there was no reason for anybody to assume that they were trading in the UK, unless of course the company proved to the Lib Dems that it had already started carrying on a business but, being newly incorporated, had not yet filed accounts.

El Comm say that they examined an "accountants' analysis", I'd love to see that, as I am in this line of business myself. I'd assume it includes stuff like an 88(2) subscription for share capital, bank account details, rental agreements, employment contracts, PAYE and VAT registrations, payments for this, that and the other. You don't exactly need to be an expert to understand this, do you?

End of discussion.

UPDATE: Back in October 2006, a High Court, in a separate case brought by aggrieved investors, ruled that the company had not traded, although from the circumstances, what the judge meant was the company had not traded [in bonds on behalf of its investors]. Hmm.

According to El Comm, the Lib Dems managed to produce loads of evidence suggesting that this was an actual business. Ho hum.

One rule for UKIP, one rule for them ...

From the BBC:

The Liberal Democrats broke electoral rules when accepting donations from a south London MP's son, it has emerged.

Jonathan Kramer, son of Susan Kramer, MP for Richmond Park, donated more than £1,300 to the Liberal Democrats between December 2008 and March 2009. But the party was forced to repay the money when the Electoral Commission discovered Mr Kramer was not registered to vote in the UK. Parties can only accept donations from those on the electoral role [sic]...

Parties have 30 days to check whether donations are permissible or return them - something the Lib Dems failed to do. Legal action against the party was not necessary because the money was repaid as soon as the error was pointed out, the Electoral Commission confirmed.

Pathetic rebuttal of the week

There's a fine article in The Independent about donations to political parties (as reported to El Comm), which points out that the 'consultants' have greatly increased their donations to the Tories, who are likely to win the next election, and reduced donations them to Labour.

As the article explains, these are 'donations in kind' of seconded staff:

PwC also provides support for Mr Osborne, and two of its staff worked part-time with the Tories on their work and pensions proposals last year. This month, the party revealed that the firm also provided specialist advice and a member of staff for the party's shadow Treasury team.

And here's that rebuttal:

"The firm does not make any cash donations to any political party or other groups with a political agenda," a PwC spokeswoman said. "However, in the interests of the firm and its clients, we seek to maintain constructive and balanced relationships with the main political parties."

IMHO, a straight cash donation seems a lot more above board and honest than sending in some weasels to try and actually influence policy as it is made.

Troughs. Snouts.

"Donor unlikely to get cash back"

Excellent news indeed!

El Comm appear to have finally read PPERA 2000 s65(6), which says basically, if the failure to comply with the rules on how donations should be reported (in this case, no anonymous/proxy donors) was attributable to intention on the part of anybody in the chain, then El Comm can make application to the Court to order the party forfeit the donation.

So, trebles all round!