Of Parties and Funding

State funding must entail some degree of State control, which can often be necessary and beneficial. But, for political parties, it would be lethal. Only parties that met the organisational and political requirements of some committee of Notting Hill and Primrose Hill diners would be able to afford to contest elections. No wonder Polly Toynbee and the BBC are so keen on the idea.

But the existing parties are literally dying out anyway. Hence, in fact, the clamour for State funding. What if this process were accelerated by constitutional reform, killing them off once and for all, rather than letting them die slowly, kept alive artificially for years or even decades at public expense? This could be done, and here is how.

Each of the 99 areas having a Lord Lieutenant should have six Senators, with each of us voting for one candidate and the top six being declared elected at the end. There should also be a further six Cross Benchers elected in the same way by the country as a whole. The House of Commons should be elected by dividing the country into 100 constituencies of equally sized electorates, with each constituency electing six MPs in the same manner as above (and, wherever possible, with constituencies straddling the United Kingdom's internal borders). Thus, there would be 600 Senators and 600 MPs. And after all, the means of electing the Senate would guarantee strong representation for natural communities on the ground.

There would thus have to be at least six parties; there could not be any fewer. But there might well be eight, there could be 12, there might even be more. And then there would be Independents. Remember, six people per constituency would be bound to get in. Quite an incentive to stand, especially if deposits were replaced with a requirement of nomination by five per cent of the electorate, allowing in principle for up to 20 candidates at a time.

Each party should give the whole electorate the final say in the choice between two potential PPCs (at constituency level) and two potential Leaders (at national level) in the course of each Parliament.

And each MP or Senator elected would be given a fixed allowance transferable to a party or campaign of his or her choice, conditional upon matching funding by resolution of an independent membership organisation such as a trade union, the name of which would then appear in brackets after any party or other designation on the ballot paper when next that politician sought election. All other funding (i.e., neither by such resolution nor in the form of this allowance) would be made illegal, with spending capped at 2400 times that allowance.

Thus, MPs and Senators would be required to have such links to wider civil society that wider civil society was prepared to pay for their campaigns, as well as the local bases necessary to secure selection or reselection. People without such links and bases would be kept out of Parliament.