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Remember who is funding these hypocrites

By Alan W Collins on Tuesday 2nd March 2010 10:57 / 2 comments

Labour activists have been on the offensive about Lord Ashcroft’s non-dom status, despite the fact that their non-dom donors have given more freely than Ashcroft.

In particular, the leading Labour blogger in Medway, Tristan Osborne, has been spewing his bile about Ashcroft’s funding of Tory posters in his new locale of Chatham.

However, the Labour candidate for Luton and Wayfield has clearly not read the latest party donation reports, which show how little Lord Ashcroft has donated to the Conservative Party when you look at received Party donations overall.

Or how trade union funding – often without members’ knowledge or consent – is all that stands between Labour and bankruptcy.

Nor has Osborne examined his own Party’s non-dom donors, who have donated a total of over 6 million pounds compared to Ashcroft’s 5 million pounds.

There was once an unwritten convention that politicians avoided attacking their opponents’ donations lest they opened a horrific can of worms.

Perhaps party-affiated bloggers using these figures for party political point-scoring should follow suit, if only to save themselves the embarassmet of realising, quite publicly, that their party is not whiter-than-white either!

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2 Comments

Tristan Osborne says:

Tuesday 2nd March 2010 at 12:49

From my recollation of previous election campaigns the tory drum thumping on trade unions has been as old as Labour drum thumping on big business links to the Conservatives.

The clear difference is that Union money is the aggregation of individual donations as opposed to one man funding a political campaign. The Labour Party was created by trade unions and so perhaps you would expect a funding link.

Secondly as the press and BBC have rightly commented upon. Whilst no party has a monopoly on virtue I would reform the entire system. If Cameron came out and said now that he would favour state funding, he would come out well. He lacks the vision. The fact is Ashcroft in essence has concealed his tax status for years, playing on a definition when he knew he wasnt paying tax in the UK. He has made a mockey out of the Shadow Cabinet who have looked like idiots trying to justify the situation.

Lastly and most crucially Ashcroft has massive influence over the day-to-day Tory campaign within marginal seats. He not only donates money, but also controls how it is spent and actively manages strategy in marginal areas. Couple with that he has a habit of visiting countries where has ‘business interests’ with William Hague.

Ashcroft also incidently has big stakes in PoliticsHome and ConservativeHome. So the control he exerts over your democratic structures is also dangerous for your own party. He could control leadership elections on a whim to his editorial staff, just like Murdoch puts pressure on his publications.

In a modern democracy, one man, irrelevent of how wealthy should not hold so much power, and even if he does he should pay tax in the UK as per the tenor of his agreement on becoming a Lord.
John Ward says:

Tuesday 2nd March 2010 at 23:50

The first comment seems back-to-front to me. Misappropriating others’ contributions ostensibly paid for representing workers’ interests *in their own workplace* is unacceptable and should be made illegal. If Unions wish to set up a completely separate voluntary contribution scheme for political donations, acting as no more than a convnient collection agency, then that might still be acceptable.

Especially as it is well documented that it is the Union barons who are dictating much of Labour’s policy, using clout from other people’s money (the involuntary siphoning-off of their members’ contributions), I’d say that is complete corruption, whereas anything Lord Ashcroft has done as an appointed Lord is appropriate for someone appointed to that House. Lords don’t pass legislation anyway ? that’s for the elected Commons..

Beyond all of this, though, I’d still like to know whose money is going into political party donations, rather than it being hidden by lumping lots of separate contributions together.

I’m not against the practice, but there can be no doubt that making single donations from a declared source if far more honest and open than “laundering” funding and making the contributors’ details invisible: although, to be fair, most of those would be relatively small amounts individually.

The Left will never accept or understand this, of course, as their entire ethos revolves around appropriately as much of others’ money or whatever as they can for themselves and their buddies, in pursuit of their own ends. It is one of the three tenets of the Left.