Funding of Political Parties

I have just left the following comment on the site of the Review of the Funding of Political Parties.

The idea that caps on donations will in any way prevent political parties from eliciting and receiving large donations suffers from the all too common an idea that banning an activity will prevent people from engaging in that activity. It may prevent most people most of the time but it will not prevent all of the people all of the time. In the case of donations to political parties the effect will merely be to move large donations off balance sheet via affiliated organisations or some other method of concealing donations. All we can really hope to do is impose transparency so that we at least know who the paymasters of our politicians are.

This, the funding of political parties that is, is actually an issue that annoys me a lot these days. Not because I have sleepless nights worrying about the funding of political parties. It is rather the suggestion that taxpayers money should be used to fund political parties that absolutely horrifies me.

Apart from my rather strongly held views that the entire current political class is corrupt I honestly think that a political party that can not sell its ideas in the marketplace of ideas, and thus obtain funding, deserves to disappear. Having the poor taxpayer fund political parties is simply a recipe for stagnation. Not only will there be no turnover of parties (as is already the case) intellectual stagnation is almost guaranteed. It is the need to obtain funding and participation from within society that is the principal drive for political parties to remain relevant.

Here in the UK we basically have a two party system with a completely entrenched funding and power structure. The two big Parties, the Tories and Labor, basically only update their policies and ideologies in response to disasters that nearly destroy the parties. Thus, Labor needed 18 years of Tory dominance, mostly under Lady T, to abandon (well radically change) their pro Soviet heavily centralized socialist platform. But even though the party had become a total irrelevance it did not disappear.

Very much the same can be said of the Conservative Party which has received three total trouncings in general elections to wake up to the fact that maybe, just maybe, the electorate thought they needed to change. If there was any kind of fluidity in the market for political parties both the Tories and Labor would have seen new parties rise to challenge them for the votes of their natural constituencies.

Now imagine a system whereby the need to sell your ideas to feepaying members and donors is removed...