Party Funding (The most expensive haircut in Politcal history)
Read it and weep.Labour has defended Cherie Blair over a £7,700 bill for a personal hair stylist during the last election campaign.
When I read this, I laughed for about five minutes. Then I was siezed by the insatiable urge to share the story with as many people as possible.
It raises a serious point though, one I haven't seen before on here (as far as I recall at least), and that's issues of funding for political parties.
Unless you've been living under a rock for the last month then you'll probably be sick to death of the sleaze accusations bouncing back and forth between the three main parties, all of whom seem to have recieved substantial 'loans' in the past from various businessmen, many of whom were subsequently (and entirely coincidentally...) nominated for honours.
The dilemma is that political parties have to recieve funding from somewhere, and while Teflon Tony shelling out seven grand on his wife's hair (should have done something about her face too...) is something of an alarmist example, without that money, parties could never put their election message across to the public, and we may as well decide the result of the Election by rolling a dice.
That money has to come from somewhere, and donations are as good a source as any (note that most of the ones in the news recently were 'loans', but where is a political party going to find the money to pay those loans back?).
But this raises questions of fairness. After all, a party that gets several million pounds worth of donations has better election chances than one with only a few thousand, and that's hardly democratic. What about the influence of business on the democratic process? If Party A announces the noble aim of imposing significant tarriffs on businesses that cause pollution, business leaders who'd rather not pay those tarriffs can make donations to Party B, who intends no such thing. That influx of cash enables the B's to mount a more effective campaign than their rivals, with a more persuasive message (dreamt up by some expensive psychologist), that reaches more of the electorate (more bill-boards, more canvassers travelling further, slots on the TV etc). It rather makes a mockery of the democratic vote (lot's of Tony's generous friends have done rather well out of things like privatised hospitals and City Academies by the way...)
One alternative is for the tax-payer to provide funding, doled out equally to all parties. It certainly makes things fairer, and goes some way to subduing the tarnishing influence of the tentacles of big business, but opens up a new question of who gets the funding. While you can't very well choose who gets funded and who doesn't, neither do you want your taxes going to fund the rantings of the BNP, Sinn-Fein or the British Society for Islamic Extremism (I made that one up, but I'm sure there are plenty of lunatic-fringe relegious parties out there, of all creeds and faiths).
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Originally Posted by Freddie
