Party Funding.

Those who inhabit the blogosphere can't have missed the various scandals around how parties currently get their funding. Guido Fawkes has been one of the main people writing on the subject, and the issue has come up for discussion on politicalbetting.com.

There is therefore the sticky question of how we fund party campaigns.

Various ideas have been floated around as solutions to these problems, in my view they may well end up causing more problems.

One idea being touted is of state funding. Well there are a number of problems with that:

1. It is not popular with the tax payer.
2. What happens when the BNP come asking for funds?
3. It allows the party leadership to distance itself from its grass roots.
4. How do you dish the money out?
   

Some people have suggested that we can come up with wheezes to exclude people like the BNP, but this is dangerous thinking. Firstly the old "No platform" thinking is anti democratic, secondly they can use the wheezes as a political weapon to get more votes.

There is also the problem of how you dish the money out? Is it on seats in parliament? Seems unfair to the Lib Dems, though it is a wheeze to squeeze the BNP. What about vote share? The arguments would be endless, and further more the party in power could well fiddle it to their advantage and their opponents disadvantage.

The thing that concerns me most is that the party leadership can then distance itself from its grass roots. Labour have already done this by loosening the relationship with the Unions, but is that a good thing? Is turnout going down because the grass roots are not being energised? How is a party that has lost its grass roots going to pick a new leader, candidates and policies?

There is currently some state funding of campaigns, which consists of a free mailing to all households in a constituency, but only for the parliamentary seat. The candidate has to pay for the envelope and the contents.

Others have suggested a cap on party spending and a cap on maximum donations. This seems most sensible to me as you still need to have a grass roots base, still need to talk to people and above all the spending cap will mean far less money is wasted in the dreadful ways it normally is during elections.

There are also hybrid suggestions such as giving more than just a free mailing to candiates, but not anything like full funding. Well, that may also be a way forward.

What seems clear to me though, is that what we are doing at the moment can't carry on. We are in a strange arms race of dirty tricks, back room deals and general all round mendacity that is poisoning our democracy.

Any ideas for a solution?