In defence of the political levy.

Buried at the bottom of this article is a little gem from the new
"moderate" Cameron's Conservatives:

"Mr Cameron - himself still under fire for allowing lenders to the Tories, some of them foreign,
to remain anonymous by repaying their loans - attacked the century old
tradition of union financing as "a hangover from the corporatist past"
and demanded a token £50,000 cap on donations. "It's profoundly unhealthy
and I'm offering a solution to Tony Blair and Gordon Brown," he said.

"Here is a solution: a cap on donations applying to everybody and modest state funding that can help you break that unhealthy link with unions and help you to be a genuinely social democratic party. I'm up for it: are you?"

"Big institutional backing of parties is unhealthy. Donations have to be an individual thing," he insisted."

I don't like state funding of political parties - I think if people don't want to have a particular party governing their country it's a bit of a slap in the face to have to pay in order to be persuaded. There is always the opt-out from the political fund for trade unionists - there's no opt out from tax.

What I dislike even more is hypocrisy. The fact is that it's a lot easier for businesses to circumvent £50,000 limits on donations than it is for unions. And Cameron's still not told us which foreign sources he got his loans from - so I'm not going to take anything he says on this issue seriously until he does.

This is all about rigging the ground in favour of the Tories. And it stinks.

And it's also based on a completely false premise. Trade unions aren't faceless institutions. They are mass membership organisations - which significant democratic control. The donations they make to the Labour Party have two levels of democratic control on them - there is a vote within each union to affiliate, renewed every 10 years. And there is an opt-out option whereby any individual can nevertheless opt out of contributing even if the affiliation is carried.

Both of these restrictions were imposed by right wing governments (sometimes repealed and brought in again) with a view to cutting Labour's ground from under them. The assumption being that most workers either don't know that they are or don't want to contribute. Yet at every hurdle the union funding model has survived an encounter with the broader opinion of union members. This has been true throughout history.

In 1910 the conservative judiciary combined with a minority of conservative trade unionists in the Osborne Judgment to try to block union contributions to Labour by insisting on an opt-in process for donations. But they failed to sufficiently block contributions, and hence the rise of Labour.

That's because most workers actually want to contribute - and it's the final realisation of that that makes David Cameron so angry. And why he wants to ban them doing so.

Ironically it's that model, of many smaller donations making up the funding of political parties so that no individual has undue influence, that most sensible people I've spoken to would want to see.

I think part of the future for party funding is tax breaks for smaller donations - and I think that applies to the political levy too.

now, get cross-party consensus on that!