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Left hand holds the purse strings

Feb 15

Posted by Kirsty in Democracy, Parties, Westminster | 6 Comments

Ed MilibandParty political funding is the reform behemoth that refuses to die.

Several times it’s been through the wringer of inquiry and report to being roundly ignored in the last decade –the 2000 Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act, the 2006 Sir Hayden Phillips inquiry, and most recently Sir Christopher Kelly’s Committee on Standards in Public Life.

The proposed reforms to party funding never secure parliamentary support, as they fail to reach agreement from all three main Westminster Parties.  The Phillips inquiry collapsed over deciding the best way to deal with Labour’s funding from trade unions, while Sir Christopher Kelly’s proposal, of £23m a year in state funding of political parties, met with disapproval from all corners of Westminster, reluctant to commit to such spending of taxpayer’s money during a period of austerity.

Last week Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg called for a revival of the behemoth, writing to Ed Miliband and David Cameron asking them each to nominate party representatives for three-party private talks, aiming to set out some form of political funding agreement by Easter.

According to The Guardian, this agreement would “cover individual and company donor limits, the treatment of union affiliates, spending caps at elections and the distribution of existing state funding between parties, currently estimated at £7m a year.”

Additional state funding has been ruled out from these discussions, and this means the agreement will not include much reduced donation limits – such caps, minus funding from the state, could entail bankruptcy for the parties.

Much reduced donation limits from individuals or an organisation is the most frequent sticking point for the Labour Party in these discussions. Heavily dependent on trade union affiliation fees for income, any moves which limit or alter how these are made threatens Labour’s continued existence, whether it’s severely capping the amount a union can donate or proposing that political levy-payers have to contract in, rather than opt-out, when joining.

So while ruling out additional state funding and thus much lower donor limits means Miliband is likely to be more sympathetic to joining Clegg’s talks, another worry about party funding could be looming for Labour – this time from within.

A quarter of motions to the GMB’s annual conference in June are debating the trade union’s future relationship with Labour. The GMB describes the actions of so many of its branches raising this issue as “unprecedented”.

Giving around £2 million each year to the party, the GMB is Labour’s third largest donor. Of its 600,000 members, around half are either employed by the public sector, or in private companies contracted to the public sector. Comments by the Labour leadership in January regarding public sector pay constraint have ignited the union members’ ire; particularly Ed Balls’ statement in a speech to the Fabian Society that he could not promise to reverse the coalition’s spending cuts if Labour were elected in 2015.

In a statement on Tuesday, the GMB’s executive noted the concerns of its membership and said:

“The executive expressed concern and disappointment with recent statements made by senior party officials and registered their growing frustration at the lack of a cohesive policy to protect working people from the ravages of the Tory-led coalition Government.”

Being attacked by union activists while trying to woo middle-Britain back to Labour may not feel like being in ‘Red Ed’ Miliband’s best interests for positioning himself and his party to win the next election, but only a fool would dismiss these calls by the GMB’s activists.

Labour can’t try and defend the trade union link and its generous funding on one hand, while that crucial link and all its cash is slipping away from the other. Miliband is going to have to choose exactly how he wants his party to have a future; just have to wait and see if it will be a well funded one, with committed union activists campaigning on the ground, rather than skint attempts at triangulation with the Daily Mail reading masses.

Prediction 2012 – Death of the Cybernat

Jan 5

Posted by Kirsty in Democracy, Elections, Parties | 13 Comments

 

To my ears, 2012 is a fantastic, futuristic,far-off place, populated with daleks and space odysseys. But the future is now, and like all good science fiction, this prediction is probably as preposterous and as far-fetched as its title suggests, but with that tiny grain of truth that makes it plausible.

Unlike the poor badgers, the death of the cybernat this year won’t be as a consequence of a cull. More accurate would be to say this year will see the demise of the stereotype negative cybernat. But that would make a more boring, less Doctor Who-esque post title. Nationalists and independence supporters will continue to dominate Scottish politics’ digital sphere. They’ll just do so in a relentlessly positive fashion.

To win in politics needs professionalism and edge. Professionalism in standing good, able candidates, in communicating your message to voters and in calculating your strategy and tactics to defeat your opponent. The experience of 2007 and 2011 demonstrates the SNP has this in spades, while every sudden unexpected Subway sandwich stop and rolling news headline crash of Scottish Labour demonstrates otherwise. No doubt the 2012 Local Government elections will continue to demonstrate this trend in results in May.

Edge is harder to define. It’s the magic ingredient in any election which decides a winner between two even candidates. Even taking the above, for all the SNP’s success, to most voters there is little in terms of policy, or outlook, or local representation, to separate most SNP candidates from most Labour candidates. It comes down to which party has the edge, the slight nose in front of the other, to give it the win.

Political parties try to win the edge off the other by framing the debate on their own terms and then amplifying their message within the frame. The simplest and often most effective way to do this is to go negative. In Scottish terms, it helped Labour claw back to within one seat of the SNP in 2007, but wasn’t a stratagem it could employ in 2011 after lifting the SNP’s manifesto.

The harder, but in the long run more effective, way to gain an edge is to go positive and stay positive. And this is where our beloved negative nasty cybernats will disappear, as a sacrifice for the good of the independence referendum.

The referendum won’t be in 2012, but the SNP’s campaign, given Scotland Forward‘s launch, is already in action. Compared to referendums, elections are a piece of the proverbial to win – I jest, but if you turn up, look and sound good to enough voters, don’t do anything stupid and spend wisely you’re most of the way there.

To win a referendum, however, requires a paradigm shift in people’s minds, an act of persuasion so big and inspiring they become willing to rewrite the base codes of how they live and are governed. Much easier to be on the side of No, where I suspect Labour will entrench itself,  where you simply have to tell people such a shift cannot be done, for positive and negative reasons, although I also suspect the latter will dominate.

But one way the independence movement can persuade people of the need for this this shift is through relentless positivity. If the transition from devolved Scotland to independent Scotland is associated with positive words like fortunate, blessed, diverse, beauty, unique, rich, colourful, potential (and all these words are just from Alex Salmond’s first paragraph of the introduction to ‘Your Scotland, Your Future’), then the paradigm shift won’t seem so big and scary, and the unionist side’s claims won’t ring so true.

I’d be shocked if several copies of George Lakoff’s ‘Don’t Think of an Elephant’ weren’t knocking about Gordon Lamb House, which explains in beautiful detail why this might just work for the Nationalists. The positive frame is where the SNP need to keep the independence debate to have a chance of winning, and the opposition haven’t yet managed to steer them off it. And this relentless positivity won’t just be from parliamentarians, but from party members, both online and offline. There will of course be outliers, but the SNP’s professionalism as it operates towards achieving its ultimate cause will ensure it amongst its membership.

So farewell cybernats. Given Scottish Labour’s new Twitter Tsar, negative digital discussion has probably just moved across to the other side of Scottish politics, but I look forward to editing your relentlessly positive commenting below and in the future. Remember, after all, a referendum is at stake..

Cash for Campaigning

Nov 22

Posted by Kirsty in Democracy, Parties | 58 Comments

For a woman who’s yet to be convinced by the merits of independence, I am oddly delighted Chris and Colin Weir have chosen to donate £1 million of their tremendous £161 million EuroMillions win to the SNP, to swell the coffers of the independence campaign together with the incredibly generous bequest of £918,000 left by Edwin Morgan.

While it does make me scrabble around in my mind for who would be on the rather blank list of prospects who might be willing to make a similar donation to the unionist campaign, I still feel delight. Why? Simply, I’m a great fan of philanthropy. It pleases me to see money donated by ordinary people (albeit made extraordinary by luck) being spent for a cause instead of just sitting gathering interest in a bank account.

This week should see the final report published by the Committee on Standards in Public Life into party political finance. This review – like all of the others into political funding before it – has been extensively leaked and already rubbished by the three main Westminster parties.

Nonetheless, it is rumoured to put forward a case for extra state funding – a provision already dismissed by Nick Clegg as untenable during a period of austerity – and proposes to cap individual donations at £10,000, panicking Tory City grandees and Labour trade union bigwigs alike.

I would hate to see individual donations capped at one-hundredth of what Mr and Mrs Weir have chosen to give, for any party. I would equally hate to see political parties gain more funding from the state and taxpayers. This is because I believe parties and the causes they stand for should stand or fall based on what support from voters, and therefore donors, they can garner.

Political parties are certainly not charities. But in a way similar to charities, if they can’t fundraise to keep themselves afloat and keep fighting for their cause, then they deserve to go under. After all, just like a charity, each political party was founded to put right a supposed wrong.

If you’ve got a cause and you’ve got someone – an individual, a community, a company, a trade union – who wants to donate to further that cause, then most times you should be able to take that money.

There should of course still be conditions and there should certainly be more transparency – some being individual donors should not be able to give anonymously or through third-parties, and they must be registered to vote, or, for companies, registered to pay tax in the UK.  Political parties, overseen by the independent Electoral Commission, should conduct fit and proper person tests and not take donations if they come from a source that could damage the party’s reputation or unduly influence its work – raising eyebrows over whether Ecclestone and Souter’s gifts should’ve been accepted by their respective beneficiaries, and inhibiting funding by loans and speculation.  And in the same way charities take on state contracts, there’s still scope for some short money funding to ensure effective opposition, in recognition of its importance to democracy.

Does it give too much power over our democracy to the wealthy? Only if you aren’t willing to embrace either new forms of fundraising like crowdsourcing, as Obama has done so successfully, or indeed accept the unions and the political levy donations of the millions of working people they encompass, purposefully designed to take on the rich behemoths of society through the trade unions’ political wing of the Labour Party. (Or at least that’s the theory.)

But building on the crowdsouring idea a little more: right now all political parties spend all their time talking to target voters, and ignoring the great masses of the unaligned or the uninterested. If they had to talk to more people, and to make a case not just to get them to vote, but to get them to give as well, just think how much better political discourse in every constituency would have to be.

But whether it’s a jumble sale or a gala dinner, political parties should be responsible for raising their own money from their supporters. It should be more open, but it shouldn’t be inhibited by caps on spending, and the majority of it certainly shouldn’t be funded by the state. After all, if you care enough about a cause, or are persuaded to care about it, you’ve got to be able to give it what you want, be it time, action or cash.

Read Ed? – We should show leader’s conference speeches on prime time

Sep 28

Posted by Jeff in Democracy, Westminster | 18 Comments

Yesterday evening and tonight, football fans all across Europe will have settled down with their cans of beer, pizza boxes, team colours on and watched the people they support deliver hopefully their best performance of the season. Games are played at a convenient 7:45pm and the only barrier to entry is typically having Sky Sports and an interest in football.

However, for the world of politics, despite the lack of barriers, there is no prime time equivalent.

Ed Miliband delivered his set piece speech yesterday early afternoon, arguably his most important of the year. The speech itself had been heavily trailed such that those lucky enough to see it live largely knew what was coming. So, not many people will dig out the footage and watch it in its entirety and certainly very few people, if any, will call in pizza, get their friends round and have a few beers on the go for the occasion.

Most people, probably myself included, will learn of Ed’s speech through the prism of the television and newspaper media. I’m certainly not going to give in to the Labour leader’s game of kiss-chase to see what was said, as it was said, for the same reasons for why I wouldn’t watch games of football in the evening if they had been played during that day.

I believe this is a terrible shame.

The expenses scandal, the tuition fees issue, the too-centralised party structures and so on has resulted in a public regard for politics being stuck in a rut. There is too little access to the decision-makers of parties these days and, even when they do appear on our screens, it is often to deliver well rehearsed lines that have had their life spun out of them. Who can forget let alone forgive Robotic Ed’s delivery of the same line over and over again?

Well, here was a chance for Ed to show that he has some life about him, to cut out the middle man and tell us all something from the heart, with passion, in the hope that we’d sit up and take notice. Hope that we’d fall a little bit in love with Politics again. Just a little bit.

Alas, Ed went with the media-friendly option of remaining largely anonymous to the UK and deprived us of getting to know him a bit more.

The Telegraph can’t say Barcelona didn’t score a goal when they actually did, but it can say Ed Miliband missed an opportunity with his speech when he actually delivered a barnstormer, because barely anyone is going to tune in and watch the delivery to check.

The thing is, Labour even know this is the case. Ed Miliband has been talking for months about how he needs to stand up against the old broken ways of the mainstream media and stand up for Britain and yet here is providing advanced copies to journalists and delivering speeches to their timelines. Furthermore, Sadiq Khan MP told a Fringe event “many of you will wake up tomorrow and be disappointed by the coverage Ed gets”, which makes it all the more bizarre that the message isn’t sent to us directly.

It’s not for me to say how political parties should run their affairs but imagine David Cameron or Alex Salmond or Nick Clegg or Ed Miliband taking to the lectern in the evening and noone knowing what they are about to say, nothing has been leaked to the press. The speech is delivered to sizeable television audiences and a packed to the rafters conference hall. The public discusses the content from sofas in the evening and, who knows, maybe even the next day at work with colleagues. Meanwhile delegates at the Conference celebrate the end of a hard day and head into the hotel bar or local pub, swiftly followed by the party leader, also done for the day, who is welcomed with rapturous applause before he or she does the rounds talking with party members from the top of the tree to the bottom in a scene of general bonhomie.

You can keep your Man Utd vs Basles or your Celtic vs Udineses, that’s your Theatre of Dreams right there, that’s a political Paradise as far as I can see.

So come on, let’s bring back great political speeches. Let’s not just leave it all to Obama. A good place to start is bringing a bit of theatre to proceedings, or even just showing some of them on TV.

Anyway, I might as well go off and watch the end of the Man Utd game now, there’s precious little else on after all…

God help Glasgow

Sep 20

Posted by The Burd in Democracy, Elections, Parties | 12 Comments

Hot on the heels of dissent in the ranks of the SNP come tales of woe from within the ruling Labour party in the City of Glasgow.

There’s a lot at stake. A resurgent SNP has taken the prized political scalp of the City Council as its number one target in next year’s local government elections. It signalled the seriousness of its attempt by appointing Cllr Alison Hunter as the opposition group leader after James Dornan won election to the Scottish Parliament in May.

Yet, there are internal problems over the campaign strategy, essentially over the number of candidates to field. One group advocates a 40 candidate approach while, it has been rumoured, a group backed by Nicola Sturgeon MSP, Depute First Minister (from whose constituency Cllr Hunter hales), want more candidates to stand. It has resulted in bad tempered city association meetings and resignations. For what it’s worth, the Burd reckons the latter strategy – of more than 40 candidates – is the right one. In some wards, a carefully targeted 1 – 2 voting scheme could pay dividends. Labour has managed to get more than one candidate from wards elected in the past. But the way the party is behaving it will be lucky to win any wards at all.

The party is undergoing a purge, removing dead wood in the form of sitting councillors to make way for fresh faces. But newspaper reports suggest the scale of the scalping is causing deep divisions with some who have been dumped threatening court action over claims of procedures not being followed properly. And worst of all, the party might find itself embroiled in financial irregularities with allegations against former Shettleston MSP Frank MacAveety, hoping to return to active politics as an elected member, currently being investigated by police. It might come to nought, but the publicity will be damaging to a party already in the doldrums and still recovering from the resignation of its energetic reformist council leader, Stephen Purcell.

God help Glasgow. For in amongst this morass, the city faces huge economic and social challenges. Even during the boom years, Glasgow featured in all the “worst of” rankings. Lower life expectancy, high levels of poverty, long term economic inactivity, huge social dislocation – these are Glasgow norms. And things are about to get worse. The city council’s budget will be hit hard by cuts coming downstream from Westminster via Holyrood. Services are bound to be affected. And measures like changes to benefits through the welfare reform bill will cause unprecendented strain on families and individuals. If folk who have not worked in 20 years are thrown off the new universal credit after 12 months, where will they turn to prevent themselves and their families becoming destitute and homeless?

The ropey economic recovery will also require careful stewardship to ensure that Glasgow, with its lower skill base and more fragile base, is not impacted disproportionately. Investment means new jobs are still being created but it is hard to tell if it amounts to growth or simply displacement. And in amongst it all is the prospect of the city showpiece of the Commonwealth Games in 2014. Glasgow has a chance to shine on the global stage and the city has to be ready for its big moment.

At a time when the city needs strong and energetic leadership, the two biggest parties, vying for the right to rule, are fighting among themselves. We are less than eight months out from the election, and neither of them have all their candidates in place nor evidence of a campaign strategy in the pipeline. To be sure, the SNP’s problems are fewer than Labour’s and it has the bounce to be expected from an outstanding performance across the city.

Perhaps the internecine troubles over candidates point to an obvious solution, that of allowing city folk to participate in candidate selection through primaries. Seeing as the parties are having a little difficulty working out how many and whom, handing the whole process over to the public might work? There have been others touting the use of primaries for candidate selection for Holyrood, mainly I think from the Labour camp. Not only would such an innovation sort a little local difficulty, it would provide a useful road test of a different way of selecting candidates that might result in quite different candidates being put forward.

And Glasgow might just get the candidates and councillors it deserves, rather than the ones the parties think it does.

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