Via Craig Murray, this article by James Purnell.
The last few weeks have been deeply uncomfortable for anyone who believes that politics is not a means for enriching yourself but a vehicle for us to change our society. All politicians are under scrutiny and will have to answer to their constituents. For two weeks we have looked inwards. But now, as the whole country starts to recover from the shock of moats and mystery mortgages, it is time every member of parliament starts to contribute to the debate of what comes next.
Well, yes… Getting rid of them via a general election would be a start.
Everyone agrees we need to reform MPs’ expenses. A growing number agree we need to open up democracy. But the long overdue process of introducing transparency to the expenses system should only be the start of opening up politics.
I’m undecided on the matter of electoral reform. For a while I wanted to see the back of FPTP in favour of PR. Now I’m less certain. Still, James doesn’t stop there:
Yet a debate on constitutional reform alone would ignore the elephant in the room – money. Without recognition that in our society and in our politics money buys power and dictates influence, any talk of “power to the people” will be meaningless.
Ah, yes, money. Whose money? Why our money of course. You know where this is leading, don’t you?
Amid the current anger at politicians and politics we must bite the bullet of state funding for political parties…
No, no, no! A thousand times, NO!
If a party cannot secure funding from people who want to support it because they believe in its values, then it fails, pure and simple. I do not support the core values of the three main parties, I therefore do not want a penny of my money used to fund their election campaigns. Parties survive or die because of their grass roots support. If they alienate that support, then they must pay the price. I used to be a Labour party member and happily paid my membership fees. When I realised that the Labour party did not share my standards of ethical behaviour, I withdrew that support. I’ll be damned if they should take it back by force, which is what Purnell is proposing. This is highly unethical. If they cannot survive without voluntary funding from members and donors, then let them perish and good riddance to them. The commenters on the piece seem to agree with me.
Even LPUSA has wobbled badly on this one, public funding of election campaigns is simply not right, and it is wrong. The sole defense against “big money” campaigns is proper education of the young in constitutional history and moral science.
This last awaits urgent development all over the Old Atlantic West.
Perhaps we can begin with the resuscitation of the /idea/ of morality: “I will NOT do every God-damn thing that pops into my empty head just because I can and plus consensus omnium there is some God-damn fool(s) here standing around ready to join in!”
Whatever the rights and wrongs of ‘state funding for political parties’ are, it doesn’t make any difference – there are still back handers and bribes and scandals and so on in countries that have it, so in the light of experience I am also against.
“I used to be a Labour party member and happily paid my membership fees.”
Interesting. You were a Labour Party member, Tom Paine was a Conservative Party member, I was a Liberal Party member (before their merger with the SDP.) Libertarian Party supporters seem to come from every side.
(Well, almost every side.)
There was a period in the early eighties when I dallied with the Liberals – about the time of Michael Foot’s longest suicide note. I had returned to Labour by the early nineties as they seemed to be moving in the right direction. How wrong can one be?
What our diverse backgrounds does do is debunk the myth that “most libertarians” are right wing neo-cons. We are not. We are, from my experience, ordinary people who have become disillusioned with the erosion of liberty by the political classes – all of them.
Party is a convenient way of gathering together interests within the nation in order to seek and enact better measures to promote the life of the nation [‘nation’ being individuals and families living in neighbourhoods, within an identifiable sovereign polity under known and legitimate laws.]
But, oh brother! have the parties p****d on their chips this last decade or two.
And still the swine want us to bail them out.
I’m a conservative: not a libertarian, and as such I can see no prudential reasons here and now in Britain in the real world for the state funding of parties.
I think that breaking the whip system must the best start – if there are any vertebrates in Mister Cameron’s Tory party next parliament.
Concerning voting methods, I encourage you not to support calls for Proportional Representation (as in party lists such as for the current EU elections), and to support change to the Single Transferable Vote (STV, which is definitely different from PR).
A very brief comparison, along the lines of the trade-off between benefit to the electorate and to political parties, for PR, FPTP and STV can be found in my posting on Burning Our Money: http://www.haloscan.com/comments/mikedenham/6749458435141749590/#274473
My problem with political parties (all of them) is that they have become too powerful (and the electorate correspondingly less powerful). Even though this is currently a very serious problem, there is obviously no possibility of doing away with political parties, in fact they have their uses.
STV allows us to move democratic authority back towards the electorate, away from constraint by all political parties, and especially by the larger two. However, this has really only been practical since the advent of computers (to handle to complexity of the vote counting process).
STV allows voting for both individual candidates (party members as well as independents) and political parties, rather than effectively just for the political parties.
As for state funding of political parties, I am obviously as strongly against that as Longrider: political parties clearly need no state funding to stuff the electorate: they do well enough at that already. I would vote against anyone giving state funding any credence whatsoever, irrespective of their other political views: that one is just too important to balance against other things. It is bad enough at the moment, with the party in power leaking taxpayer money to others in return for party funding.
Best regards
I say no, and I say it so strongly that if there was a serious hint of this being introduced I would be in France on the first ferry and I wouldn’t be back…