...no political party has the right to exist, indefinitely. Talk about dependancy culture.
The state, under no circumstances, should be financing any political party - if supporters of New Labour, the Tories, or the Lib-Dems cannot cough up monies in support of their own parties, then why should we?
Wednesday, June 28, 2006
State Funded Parties
A nice exposition by Courtney Hamilton at “A neo-Jacobin” criticizing (and rightfully so) the state sponsorship of political parties.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
4 comments:
The worse is still yet to come - for the first time (as far as I can remember) there is an all cross party agreement on this very issue. Surprise, surprise, all three main parties believe that the public should be funding their parties.
I think this is a little taste of the kind of political discourse we would expect from our political leaders in the future, bland, managerial, bean-counting agreement on absolutely everything. That's not politics - that's the civil service, and we need to remember also, that civil servants are not supposed to have political views while on duty.
No public money for dead-beat political parties - not one pence. In mine eye, that's akin to throwing away good money and bad rubbish.
I'm actually in favor of publicly financed campaigns. Perhaps the situation is different in GB, but here politicians are greatly influenced by their largest contributors, generally big business. Having more money come from the public keeps them accountable and prevents them from being corporate run (to some extent). My biggest problem is that there is a high threshold to these funds, which contributes to the two party system. Dems in particular are always trying to raise the bar or just keep it in place.
There is a lot of that here too Charismatic Megafauna. Laabour still gets a lot of its funding from unions, teh troeis from business although labour's funding from business has incresed substantially over the years.
It is inevitable that the donors will have some influence over the parties. It may not necessarily be blatant but they wont fork over the loot without some payback. State funding happens elsewhere , if it reduced the level of overt and covert corruption in government then perhaps if might not be to bad a thing
Jams o Donnell argues that if we as a society start giving the main political parties that cold cash they want, then, according to Donnell, this would 'reduced the level of overt and covert corruption in government'. But, why should it?
There is no evidence that after political parties help themselves to millions of pounds of public money that levels of 'overt and covert corruption in government' would cease to be a problem.
In the past, the Unions were the major financial backers of the Labour Party, so they had a right to 'influence' the direction of the party.
State funding of political parties is no guarantee that corruption in high places will dissapear. Who's to say that those who have already 'loaned' the New Labour Party millions of pounds, won't have any influence over them, after Tony Blair helps himself to £20 million pounds per year of public money?
I think if Cherie Blair wants to travel first-class on the electioneering campaign trail - then they should pay for it using their own money.
As I've argued before, there is no democratic reason why we as a nation, should keep bankrupt political parties on some kind of everlasting life-support system. Our democracy can't afford that.
Post a Comment