Crash Bang Wallace

Just as politicians’ attempts to get hold of more power will likely never cease, the same is almost certainly true of the attempts of political parties to get their hands on taxpayers’ money.

This week we’ve seen yet another push to give taxpayer funding to political parties – under a system once championed by Chris Huhne where parties with sitting MPs would get a set amount of cash for every vote they win. Let’s call it the “cash for votes” system, a negative name for a negative idea.

This time round, the main parties have publicly distanced themselves from the plan – a welcome sign that at the moment the political class are afraid of public opinion on the cost of politicians to the taxpayer. But we can’t rely on that always being the state of play. Privately, all three parties would love to have a guaranteed income from taxpayers without having to do all that tiresome fundraising – they just can’t get away with saying so in the current climate. We need to be constantly watchful to ensure they never succeed in this private desire.

So let’s look at exactly why taxpayer-funded political parties are such a bad idea.

First off, there’s the ethics of the matter. It’s deceitful to equate a vote for a party with a desire to donate to it. If a vote indicated a happiness to donate, then people would donate. The fact is that they don’t – often because they don’t have money to spare, but also because they may be voting begrudgingly or even tactically. The supposed link underlying the cash-for-votes system simply doesn’t exist.

Why should anyone be forced to fund a political party if they don’t want to – and even one they would never consider supporting? After all, if voter A who is a net beneficiary of the state votes for party A, then their “donation” is subsidised by voter B, a net contributor to the Treasury, who might well be a supporter of their deadly enemies party B.

Just as important are the practical effects on our democracy.

The reason this system is regularly put forward is that the parties struggle to raise money. We should look at why that is the case, rather than simply crudely address the symptom. In truth, our politicians fail to really inspire people – voting, party membership and donation have dropped off, as what used to be called apathy has grown into outright anger and disillusionment.

From the point of view of many, our political class are too self-interested, too out of touch and too close to each other ideologically. Unsurprisingly, that failure on their part has put people off donating to fund them, just as a company giving dreadful service and neglecting its customers will lose business and see turnover and profits decline. Rewarding that failure would be to allow them to escape accountability for their actions and – worse – guaranteed taxpayer-funding would serve to reinforce this disconnect from the public by removing the pressure to inspire people.

At the same time as it would protect the main parties from the consequences of their failure, taxpayer-funding of those parties with MPs would also serve to fossilise British politics in its current, unpopular form. The current big parties would be in a bolstered, protected position, with even more of a headstart than they currently have over insurgents and upstarts. Proponents of taxpayer-funding are effectively saying that the Labour, Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties have some form of divine right to exist indefinitely.

In reality, what would be wrong with one or all of them being put out of business  if a new, more active and more popular party emerged on their patch of politics? It can happen – the emergence of Labour in the late 19th Century, the strange near-death of the Liberal Party in the inter-war period, the emergence of the SDP in the 1980s, the growth of the SNP and Plaid Cymru and so on.

We should have a system that allows that to happen – both because it’s right that such change should be able to occur and because the possibility of it will keep the current parties on their toes. If anything, we need to make our system of politics more open to new competitors, not less. Bunging taxpayers’ cash to reinforce the status quo would make things even worse than they already are.