The subject of how we fund our political parties reared its head again this week. Sir Christopher Kelly’s eagerly anticipated report into party political funding couldn’t have come at a worse time; we are, after all, a few billion pounds in debt and youth unemployment is at an all-time high.
Nevertheless, each political party responded cautiously and decided it really wasn’t the right time to discuss the matter (in words ot hat effect.)
Sir Kelly’s report recommended that a cap of £10,000 on money given by individual donors, this he believes means that people will be giving to their party of choice not to influence but rather to show support.
I believe this will continue for some time yet and I am interested to see how it plays out. David Mitchell, gives an interesting view in his column for the Observer today. You can read his column here.
I’ve just stumbled across this article by Jason Beattie, the Daily Mirror’s political editor, who wrote this piece about the Tories European plan.
Although he wrote the article a couple of weeks ago it remains relevant. In it he says, the Conservative’s strategist, Steve Hilton, had three tasks to detoxify the Tory brand. These were: Firstly, to present Cameron as socially liberal and environmentally aware who was at ease with contemporary Britain. Second, Cameron would stick by Labour’s spending plans on education and the NHS. And Hilton’s final task was to ‘neuter the issue of Europe for the Tories. If they could resolve the Europe question, then they could claim empirically that the Conservatives had changed,’ he said.
Clearly Hilton has failed and Cameron remains in a perilous state over Europe which clearly even his own people do not know how to get him out of. You can read Beattie’s piece on line here.
