OUR VIEW

EDITORIAL ELECTION GARBAGE UK STYLE

There are a lot of stupid editorials in media around the globe everyday. One of the latest and dumbest appeared in the Financial Times, "Britain's parties should be funded by the state."

With an upcoming general election slated for May, concerns grow about private political donations or, in more crude terms, buying political sway. 

Citing a recent report from the so-called independent Election Commission, the editorialist laid out how two groups, business on the right and unions on the left, the two parties are "boosting their coffers."

Why the concern, so asks the writer, because "the main parties are becoming more reliant on a small number of donors to meet their funding needs." The implication here is that this represents something new. It doesn't, not in the UK or the U.S.

Undue political influence, so the claim goes, of individual donors is the risk. The study highlights how narrow the pool of big donors is becoming. To wit, more than half of the funds over the last decade went to Tories and three-quarters to Labour where these so-called grants, more crudely known as bribes, of £50 000 ended up.

Then this brilliant piece of editorial babble states: "Speculation that such donors might be looking to buy access to power have been at the heart of a series of scandals in recent years, such as cash for honours or cash for peerages."

That pathetic, naive sentence is followed up with this one: "If public suspicion grows, trust in politics is inevitably corroded in the end." Really?

Like all good card-carrying Keynesians, the writer then suggests the usual solution, more government intervention by taxing the public to pay for these circuses. Membership in both parties has declined over the years, the writer laments, implying that this is one of the main reasons.

Well, we have another suggestion, one we think much more germane, incompetence.

As with all politics--as most of us already know from long experience--big things always start out small. The sum put on each taxpayer, the writer projects, would be modest. Now there's an abstraction for you. Sure it would. For the nonce.

Then the editorial concludes with this gem.

If the political class at Westminster is to have any chance of winning back public trust, it needs to end the suspicion that the culture of political donation is corruptible. The only way to do this is a system of taxpayer funding that leaves the politicians at arms length from businesses and the unions.

There's at least three things amiss with this beauty.

To begin with, the Brits are masters of understatements. Next the public should be forced to pay up for honest politicians. Sounds a bit like sticking the horse behind the applecart. And finally, though it might remove them to arms length from businesses and unions, it puts then a hell of a lot closer to taxpayer purse strings.

Somehow that hardly sounds like a decent trade off.

That's our view. We hope you know yours.