In The Rigging

Apparently, it is scandalous that a trade union with well over a million members should seek to involve itself in the political process on their behalf and even pay some of their Labour Party membership fees.

Those fees are unofficially set in line with those of the National Trust in order to keep the party as middle-class as possible; this I know, because I was told it, some years ago when he and I could still have at least a strained or a mutually abusive conversation, by a gloating Neil Fleming.

But it is perfectly acceptable for the Prime Minister to surround himself with people who went to the same achingly expensive, all-male school (not university, school) as he did, and to be a member of the same essentially criminal student drinking club, also achingly expensive and also all-male, as the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Mayor of London and the presenter of Question Time.

As recently as 2007, David Miliband was unable to secure the nominations necessary in order to contest a Labour Leadership Election. Yet a mere three years later, after a General Election at which the highest number of MPs for many decades had retired, he topped the poll among his House of Commons colleagues. All but a handful of Labour MPs abstained when the Coalition retrospectively legalised workfare.

Entryism and selection-rigging, indeed.

Using the largely public funds of the Labour Party as of any major party, Jim Murphy was trying to do exactly that at Falkirk. But he was doing it with less success than Unite, which depends entirely on contributions from its members. Falkirk is a story only because the "wrong" side looked set to win. The "right" side wins so frequently that it is not treated as news.

The case is now unanswerable to declare all levy-paying trade unionists and members of other affiliated organisations members of their Constituency Labour Parties unless they are members of any other party apart from the Co-operative Party (which sends me emails refusing to readmit me in between its emails telling me what is going on for members, among whom it apparently counts me when it does not).

Progress and Movement for Change ought to become affiliated organisations. And everyone could then see, even those too stupid to grasp the point already, that trade union funding of the Labour Party had nothing to do with "donations". The payments are subscriptions, made entirely voluntarily by millions of ordinary working people who are more than happy to fund Labour in that way.

The Conservative Party, on the other hand, has to hold out its begging bowl to the bailed-out City, meaning that as much as anything else it is more or less entirely state-funded. As to who funds the Lib Dems or why, the mind boggles.