Interesting Links for 24-10-2011

[andrewducker]

• What happens when a British delegation visits one of the most corrupt countries on Earth.
  (tags: corruption politics africa uk diplomacy )
• Someone found a use for Wolfram Alpha
  (tags: mathematics wolfram funny )
• Iraq By The Numbers: The World's Costliest Cakewalk
  (tags: iraq war cost )
• Microsoft Research shows off "HoloDesk" project - Amazing tech demo, not sure of the applications
  (tags: microsoft Holograms technology thefuture )
• When journalists decide to ruin someone's life.
  (tags: journalism uk )
• Children with certain dopamine system gene variants respond better to ADHD drug
  (tags: adhd genetics )
• People use different parts of the brain to judge the value of actions and objects.
  (tags: brains decisions )
• Cameron trying to sway independent inquiry on political funding.
  (tags: davidcameron politics funding money uk )
• Saddam double kidnapped by smut flick gang.
  (tags: porn saddam iraq weird )
• Can the Cult of Bang & Olufsen Last?
  (tags: design technology )
• The Men Who Stare at Golducks - why Pokemon is still going after 15 years
  (tags: pokemon videogames design )
• There will be no fifth season of The IT Crowd
  (tags: ITCrowd grahamlinehan comedy tv )

Comments

[philmophlegm.livejournal.com]

"...the Committee on Standards in Public Life is to propose a £10,000 cap on donations to parties by individuals and organisations to "take the big money out of politics".

Good.


"The parties would be compensated by a multimillion-pound increase in state funding."

Bad. Why do we need state funding of political parties? Is the budget deficit just a bad dream? Since the media will cover politics for free, and the parties have access to armies of committed volunteers, why do they need extensive funding at all?



"There would be stricter controls over the affiliation fees paid by the unions to Labour but they would not be subject to the cap."

Why should trade unions be treated differently to any other pressure group? Answer: they shouldn't. There should be the same limit of £10,000 in donations from each union.



"There is a fundamental principle at stake here –the rules on donations should apply equally to all parties and should apply equally to individuals, companies and trade unions alike."

Lord Feldman added: "The argument for introducing a cap on donations is to deal with the perception, accurate or not, that big-money donors buy influence over political parties in a way in which the public would not approve. The trade unions are the clearest example of a donor having policy influence as a result of their donation ... It would be perverse if a cap were to be introduced which did not address this most obvious issue."

That seems pretty fair to me. Unless that is, the Labour Party is trying to argue that the trade unions have no influence on party policy.

[andrewducker]

The difference between companies and trade unions, as far as I can see, is that the employees of a company aren't the people paying the donation, it's the management/owners that sign off on that.

The unions seem to be donating in two ways:
1) A block amount from the union itself.
2) Acting as a channel for their members who are optionally making individual donations.

The first should absolutely be limited in the same way that other organisations are.
The latter I'm not so convinced - I can see arguments in both directions, depending on whether you see it as more of the union making donations, or the members making donations using the union as a Paypal equivalent.

(I don't have a player in this game - I'm not a union member, and when I temporarily was I didn't pay the donation to the Labour party that they made possible.)

[philmophlegm.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure that it's the employees of a company that are relevant so much as the shareholders - they are the members of the company and as such the equivalent of trade union members.

Which brings me to another suggestion - why allow corporate donations at all? If you changed the rules so that only private individuals were allowed to donate to political parties, then you remove a lot of scope for corruption.

(And by 'corporate', I mean any corporate body, not just businesses - so pressure groups, charities, unions etc would be included in that definition.)


I see what you're saying on 2), and I'm broadly sympathetic. However, there would always be the suspicion (especially with trade unions, who, let's be honest, have a history of this) that the union wasn't so much as a channel for freely given personal donations, as a way of bullying people into paying whether they wanted to or not. I don't know if this still goes on, but in the 70s and 80s, it wasn't uncommon for workers to be subject to threats of violence if they didn't join the union.

I would have no objection to a union or a charity or a business saying to its members "We think your interests are best represented by political party A - why not give them some of your money?" That seems less open to corruption than the current system. It also avoids forcing people to contribute to the political campaigns of candidates they despise, which taxpayer-funded parties would do.

[andrewducker]

Actually, I could go with that. Remove all organisations from the mix, put in a limit for personal donations, and if Greenpeace, UNITE, or my boss want to hand me a direct debit form and suggest that a particular party is jolly spiffing then that's up to them.

[philmophlegm.livejournal.com]

Can I refine my earlier statement? I do actually believe that charities should be non-political, so can I remove the word "charities" from the sentence "I would have no objection to a union or a charity or a business..."? That's the distinction between a charity and a pressure group, and I think that is a reasonable and useful distinction to stick to.

[andrewducker]

I don't agree about charities having to be non-political. If a charity is set up to help the homeless then raising money to help them is part of their remit, but so is lobbying ministers so that effects of laws which increase homelessness are taking into account is as well. Making charities purely funnelers of donations/goods/effort to the needy strikes me as rather limiting, and you'd end up with a firewall between two organisations that were basically the same people.

[philmophlegm.livejournal.com]

The current rules allow some political activity, but not funding or support for parties or politicians. That seems sensible to me:


"In the political arena, a charity must stress its independence and ensure that any involvement it has with political parties is balanced. A charity must not give support or funding to a political party, nor to a candidate or politician." - The Charities Commission

[andrewducker]

That makes sense - lobby all you like, but don't get too cosy, especially fiscally.

[skington.livejournal.com]

"Why do we need state funding of political parties"? Because political parties need money, and it's better to get it from the State than private donors with vested interests in influencing party policy.

Volunteer labour is one thing; paying staff and suppliers is another.

There's already a fairly reasonable cap on campaign budgets as it is, unlike in the US where it's a free-for-all; if you set the State contribution such that any party with between 10 and 30% of the vote gets a significant proportion of the allowable budget from that, with the possibility of making up the rest through individual donations, that seems sensible enough to me.

Oh, and publicise every single donation, in a searchable online form, obviously.

[philmophlegm.livejournal.com]

That's a solid argument, and I agree completely that the US situation is intolerable (and anti-democratic since only those people able to solicit campaign donations from the rich stand a chance of election to high office).

But...

I'm still left with the feeling that if they didn't have the money from the current system, parties would just reduce expenditure on advertising (no great loss to country I would argue), central office staff (again, no great loss if it would mean that young political wannabees would have to go out and get proper jobs), spin doctors (again...) etc.

[skington.livejournal.com]

The Tories' supporters are richer than other parties', and they'll sure as hell find ways to get money from them somehow. That's why we need a level playing field.

[anton-p-nym.livejournal.com]

My point exactly. Campaign funds are like water; they'll find every crack and (loop)hole to go through. Better by far to have a dedicated channel for it to flow in and examined than it slip underground and go largely unobserved.

-- Steve is dismayed that his newly-elected government may be axing public election funding during its tenure, and hopes that doesn't lead to more corruption.