Monday 13 August 2012

Don't Spoil The Parties

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 that Polly Toynbee, the Lib Dems and the BBC are all so keen on the idea.

In the course of each Parliament, 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, by submitting the internally determined shortlist of two to a decisive ballot of the entire constituency or national electorate, as the case may be.

And each MP should 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 that allowance multiplied by twice the number of parliamentary constituencies.

Thus, MPs 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.

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