While I agree with much of Polly Toynbee’s opinion piece (How will we know Labour is really cleaning up party funding? When Reform and the Tories fight like hell to stop it, 26 March), I was left a little concerned about the tone, which seemingly presented this as uniquely a Tory/Reform UK matter.
Dirty money (or just opaque funding) in British politics is not really such a sectarian issue. The proposals would appear to do nothing to prevent a party from accepting, for example, £4m from a hedge fund in the run-up to an election, and not declaring it until afterwards (Labour/Quadrature). Nor would they prevent a party engaging a thinktank that had itself accepted £200m from a rightwing American tech oligarch, bringing them into government, and installing staff in the heart of the policymaking process (Labour/Tony Blair Institute/Larry Ellison of Oracle).
But it was heartening to see Toynbee begin to address the way that disparities in funding distort the democratic process.
Once all of these are addressed, perhaps we can move on to deal with our unhealthily biased and unbalanced media, where owners of the press and broadcasters can openly cheerlead and campaign for the party that best serves their vested interest and/or protects their privilege. Obscuring their true motives with a veneer of platitudes about freedom of speech and respect for the plurality of opinions is no longer sufficient.
Barry Phillips
Fochabers, Moray
• Polly Toynbee is right to say Labour’s move on crypto donations and foreign money is an important step forward but can’t be where reform stops. As our new report, Credible Deterrence, points out, it’s not just about rules, it’s about enforcement of those rules. Our research shows that no one has ever spent a day in prison for breaking political finance laws, and the highest criminal fine ever imposed is just £6,000 – a derisory sum given modern campaign spending and donor wealth.
The Electoral Commission needs much stronger powers and a bigger budget to be able to play its crucial role as a regulator, and we need a new stronger criminal offence, policed by a specialist police unit. It doesn’t matter how good your rules are if no one is properly empowered and resourced to enforce them.
Susan Hawley
Executive director, Spotlight on Corruption
• The suggestion that donations from UK citizens living overseas should in future be capped at a level between £100,000 and £300,000 is welcome. The measure would be to help prevent the foreign “buying of elections”. But the same logic should also be applied to all donations to political parties, including those from people resident in the UK.
The current elections bill does not go far enough in preventing the scandalous ways in which influence can be bought. The Conservative party before the last election raised the national spending limit in the year before a general election to £35m. This allowed a single donor to contribute £20m in total to it. We need an annual spending limit, and a much smaller one, with all donations capped at a level to be set by the commission.
Chris Rennard
Former chief executive, Liberal Democrats
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