Wednesday, 5 December 2007

Transparently Worse

Everyone used to know that the unions funded Labour, and no one used to have a clue who funded the Tories. Are things any better now that the laws relating to these matters have been changed? And are they really more "transparent"? The Tories' funding is at least as opaque as ever. And now Labour's is at least as bad.
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8 comments:

  1. Anonymous6 December 2007 at 11:31

    David, can you confirm that the National Executive of the BPA is in discussions with the Electoral Commission about registration of the party. I'm worried that if this doesn't happen then the BPA will be unable to field candidates in the London Mayoral and local elections next year?

    What is the National Executive's position?

    Also, have the BPA given an undertaking for full transparency in party funding and will you publish all details of donations made to the BPA so far. So we can teach the skeptics a lesson.

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  2. David Lindsay6 December 2007 at 16:35

    We have the forms, if that's what you mean. As for donations, we wish! But there certainly won't be an Election before June 2010 now, so there's plenty of time to raise the funds necesasry to stand the ant-dodgy funding candidates. Having no money would be disastrous, of course. But not having too much is a positive selling point.

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  3. Anonymous6 December 2007 at 16:40

    The really dodgy people would have no cause to fund the BPA. It stands for everything that they don't.

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  4. David Lindsay6 December 2007 at 16:40

    Quite.

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  5. Anonymous6 December 2007 at 16:55

    They'll never register the BPA. Communists, Trotskyists, Fascists, strictly local campaign groups and student-type jokes are all right. But proper alternative parties are forbidden. Just look at the persecution of UKIP, and you are more serrious than that. They'll never register you in the first place.

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  6. David Lindsay6 December 2007 at 17:41

    J, we know what we'd do in that case. Our candidates will be standing as such and will be known as such, whatever it might say on the ballot paper.

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  7. Anonymous6 December 2007 at 22:49

    Hmm, that's tricky. Because if that happened, then the candidates wouldn't be allowed to say they were part of the BPA, else they would fall foul of the rules. And you could claim they were all your supporters, with no way of falsifying that claim. You see where I'm going with this.

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  8. David Lindsay7 December 2007 at 16:24

    It's not tricky at all, Reg. We just publish a list saying "these are the people for whom our supporters should vote". If necessary, we do this on a website based abroad; but I doubt that it will come to that.

    Even the SWP is not a registered political party, and nor is the Muslim Association of Britain. But between them, they managed to get Galloway in. Yet Trots and Islamists have nothing approaching the potential support that we have, especially now that we have until June 2010 to publicise ourselves.

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