The real question... [purplecthulhu]

While I'm happy to see Hain's resignation add to the troubles of the Brown regime, the reason for it is unclear. Yes, he screwed up the donations he received for the deputy leader competition, but why did he need thousands of pounds for this competition at all?

I suspect this is because of the one-person-one-vote system that Labour uses for the election of its major posts, but surely a clear, fair and equitable approach for such competitions would be to have the party fund each candidate at the same level. That way you have a level playing field for all candidates and there is (a) no risk of anyone buying the post thanks to vast funding (b) no issues with candidates screwing up their accounts and (c) there is no opportunity for corruption because there are no outside donors to be brought in.

Why have they gone for a system that invites this kind of problem? I can see arguments for external funding for whole parties (though I'm not convinced by it) but why do you need external funding for an internal election? Is this all part of the labour party's emulation of all things American?

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*humour on* Could it possibly be because none of the candidates could even persuade their own supporters that they are worth electing without the use of huge brib... erm, externally funded campaigns? *humour off*
Revolution anyone?

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a) All political parties are chronically short of cash, and probably can't afford to fund internal election campaigns themselves.

b) You either allow candidates to spend their own money as well, thus giving an advantage to those who are wealthy or you don't, thus giving them even more scope for screwing up their accounts by accidentally (or "accidentally") spending some of their own money.

c) You can hardly stop candidates' supporters from working on their campaign for free, so you'll certainly be tipping the balance in favour of candidates who have appeal to demographic groups that can spend a lot of time working without being paid (e.g. pensioners, the unemployed).

d) If candidates don't have to do the hard grind of raising money but just get the fun of campaigning, you'll have a lot more of them (and so it will cost the party even more; see a) above).

e) There's still plenty of room for corruption and screwed up accounts. Suppose candidate A has a supporter who provides some office space for a nominal rent, while candidate B has a printer who runs off some leaflets for him at cost. Does this not sound like corruption and mis-accounting?

a) A campaign doesn't have to cost 100 grand. Set the national figure at 10 grand. Level playing field. Alternatively you can have the party accept donations from outside parties to fund the election not any individual candidate. Then you just fall back to the risks we have for general party funding.

b) Yes you can. This is just what happens for normal constituency elections in the UK.

c) I don't see a problem with this. If a candidate can motivate their supporters, whoever they might be, that means they have support. Volunteers are a better sign of electability than paid mercenaries.

d) See (a). As long as the playing field is flat I don't see the problem. And more candidates mean more TV airtime so it could be seen as good for the party.

e) They have to keep accounts for parliamentary elections on this basis anyway, as well as for normal Westminster operations. It's business as usual but without the extra madness of thousands coming in for an internal election.

Frankly I'd rather see state funding of parties (perhaps with the French system where every party getting 5% of the vote or more gets something in proportion to their vote) than have the current system where people pay parties for influence. If donors are sufficiently keen on democracy they want to donate to politics they should give it to a central pot that gets distributed evenly.

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In case you hadn't noticed, the spending limits for Parliamentary elections cause lots of problems with accusations of over-spending, corruption and false accounting, and certainly don't solve your original list of problems.

For point a), £10K is simply not enough money to have any meaningful communication with a large electorate (in Parliamentary elections, the free postage available to candidates helps a lot, but the limit per constituency is still nearly £40,000 (£8,000 actually for each constituency, and over £30K as a share of the £20 million national limit) for an electorate a quarter the size and much more geographically concentrated). So if you have such a small limit, you essentially ban candidates from communicating their platform to voters, which seems undemocratic.

No one would donate to a general party fund for internal elections, because their donation would not influence the outcome. You donate in order to either (acceptable version) give your preferred candidate a better chance of winning or (unacceptable version) gain influence with your candidate after he wins.

I'm not saying that the current system is perfect, just that all systems are deeply flawed and you can't wave a magic wand and produce a good system; you'll just get a different bad one.

Point c) makes me shudder to think of the horror of Labour ministers who might feel they ought to consider people who are old or need a job! I thought we'd seen the last of those days.

It's a little more subtle than that. If this were the case there would be an incentive for the minsters to have policies which appealed to the unemployed, whilst also keeping them unemployed, since the moment they become employed you're no longer getting an advantage from them.

I'm not sure that's the way we want it set up...

That's ultimately an argument for not having a Labour Party.

Not really. The labour party was originally set up to represent the political needs of workers, which is generally taken to include the unemployed as well, but not management, bosses, etc ... These days they've drifted pretty far away from that.

The spending on internal elections always perplexes me.

Which is why I am utterly confounded by the vast sums that the American political system seems to demand be spent on the elections just to select the candidates who will go forward to the real elections.

I'm glad we haven't got to that stage yet, but equally I can't help feeling there's better things to spend the money on. Surely a leaflet to each party member detailing the policies/ideologies of each candidate is all that is needed? Cheap, fair, and it would compel the candidates to distil their actual politics down to a sensible length, instead of filling it with waffle and spin. It's harder to argue your way out of an empty promise if your entire campaign literature is a few hundred words in length.

Where does the money go in an internal election?

Good question. Good story, too, if one of these political journalists ever actually did some journalism, rather than selectively misreporting the spoon-fed confidential briefings.

if one assumed the ideal of a 'party' it wouldn't matter who was leader - so long as they could chair meetings ...

but given that, I thought one of the issues was that a lot of the money arrived after the election even. I presume it was (she says, putting on her cynical hat) to fund that post resignation holiday in the Caribbean ... :)

off topic but ...
No student loan without ID card, says government
http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/news/story/0,,2246086,00.html

Hadn't seen that report but I had seen others saying much the same thing. Oddly, the banks don't seem to be aware of this, according to ElReg IIRC.

The tory quoted is right - it is straightforward blackmail and demonstrates the bankruptcy of the justifications behind the ID cards. If they were as popular and as well founded as the government claims they wouldn't have to force people into them.

If this goes through I can see the 'free university of north london' happening for those who choose not to become numbers on the database.

Now if only we could set up our own free university - with physic and philosophy and politics and chemistry and other marginalised subjects, where only sensible non-backbiting academics were employed and the students were all keen and wanting to learn ...

*ah* fantasy.

purplecthulhu

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