I can’t really add much to Timmy’s point here. The very idea of the parties stealing more of our money to make up the shortfall in donations is obscene. I have no desire whatsoever to fund any of the repugnant little turds, so fail to see why I should be forced to do something that I have failed to volunteer to do.
So my response to Donald Macintyre is: No! No! and No!.
And that makes the search for an alternative more plausible. Both Sir Hayden and, more recently, Sir Christopher Kelly, chairman of the committee on standards of public life, proposed additional taxpayer funding to make up the shortfall from a donations cap. Politicians ritually argue that the public will not like forking out for a system it does not trust. This now beginning to sound like an increasingly flimsy excuse – and a circular one.
Taking our money and giving it to the political classes will merely add to that distrust. None of them, not one deserves a groat of my money. How dare anyone suggest I be forced to pay for the bunch of lying, thieving charlatans who spend their time thinking up new ways to curtail my freedoms and spy on me. I hate them with every fibre of my being. I despise and revile them with my last breath. And you think that I should pay for them? Fuck off! Fuck right off! I don’t care how “little” it costs. The principle is what matters and the principle is morally bankrupt.
As Timmy says:
A political party is simply a private association of individuals banding together for mutual benefit. As such there is no call whatsoever for the taxpayer to fund them. The Conservative Party has no more claim on tax revenues than the Co-Operative does, Labour no more than Littlewoods. All four of those being private associations of individuals banding together for mutual assistance.
If the parties cannot raise the money they think they need (or more accurately, the cash they desire) from those who support them then they’ve no more right to everyone else’s money than I do. Which leads to my proposed slogan: no taxation for representation.
I think we have the start of a meme here: No taxation for representation, repeat after me, no taxation for representation…
“No taxation for representation” is a worthy battlecry. Possibly just as valid as “No taxation without representation” which is happening to thousands of expats across the world who receive their employment (as opposed to their State) pension from the British Government. Retired servicemen and women, Police officers and civil servants, who have chosen to live abroad for whatever reason, receive Government funded pensions, taxed at source, yet only have to live abroad for a set period of time before they lose any right to vote or even to access a Member of Parliament, despite those taxes being used to contribute to Government policies. Perhaps the more suitable battlecry for these would be “No representation, then no taxation”. Either way, the less the parasites in Parliament receive from the public through taxation, the better.
Penseivat