Balance of Payments

Here we go again. If ever you wonder from exactly which world the two Coalition parties, the Blairites and their media cheerleaders recruit, then take a look at the reaction whenever the question of party funding comes up. Auctioning off City internships after fabulous West End dinners is perfectly acceptable, obviously. Doesn't everyone live like that? How else is anyone supposed to get any work experience? (Well, I say "work". That is like suggesting that these people now have, or have ever had, "jobs".) But a trade union's mere collection of two or three pounds per year from each of millions of ordinary working people, whose contributions are entirely voluntary unlike those of shareholders in the companies that bankroll the other two, is the biggest political scandal that it is possible to imagine.

The BBC's campaign for State funding continues apace. State funding of anything must entail some degree of State control, which can often be necessary and beneficial. For political parties, however, it would be lethal. Only parties that met the organisational and political requirements of some committee would be able to afford to contest elections. Imagine who would be on that committee. Well, there you are, then. Except that all of this is already the case. The Big Three, in actuality tiny organisations in the country at large, are already maintained at enormous public expense. The rest is made up by a small number of mind-bogglingly rich individuals with very specific political agenda economically, socially, culturally and constitutionally. Just as the BBC requires. Of course.

The funding of the three parties now mirrors the government of the City to which that of the two in the Coalition is so intimately linked. British human beings have almost immeasurably less clout than foreign corporations, and even that little is bitterly resented and treated with habitual demands for abolition. Similarly, the parties approved by those corporations, together with a similar but infinitesimal faction nominally within the Labour Party, enjoy limitless, fawning media access. Everyone else is ignored completely, even a party which now consistently has a poll position within the margin of error of the Lib Dem one, and even the party that is now consistently ahead of the Conservatives. When Labour wins the 2015 Election, how will the entire corporate media avoid mentioning that fact? But then, will they have time before "the markets" stage a coup? There is nothing more anti-conservative than capitalism, and that is as true of national sovereignty as it is of everything else.