New Labour washes fraud whiter than white!

Labour is not going to give up on it's corrupt practices, it is in too deep. While when in office Tories like Neil Hamilton sold Parliamentary questions Labour sells entire departments to the highest bidder. Hamilton stopped selling questions when he became a minister, which is why he got found out and disgraced, but Labour will never give up on Lord Sainsbury, he could bankrupt them if they tried. They would have been wiser to stick to cash like Tessa Jowell and here classic money laundering techniques rather than keeping two sets of books filled with loans and not informing the Labour Treasurer about it.

Since one of the excuses for setting up the UK secret police[1] was large scale fraud so I wonder if they are going to investigate the Labour Party? Unlikely I know, the probably have much better things to do like arresting people for wearing slogan t-shirts or commemorating war dead in front of the Cenotaph and other heinous crimes. That and they are under the direct authority of the rancorous thug that we have as a Home Secretary.

Or perhaps it wasn't corruption on a massive scale, but an attemp to become more like the people they are supposed to represent. We the people have been placed in hock for the tune of £70,000 for each household (excluding the Enron style off balance sheet trickery of PFI). We have acquired massive debts, that we aren't told about, in order to pay for very little in the way of services. So obviously Labour wanted to feel our pain.

No I don't believe it either.

There have already been Siren calls that all it will take is for the Parties to be funded by the tax payers and these corruption problems will all go away. If we do this they won't. Corruption will get worse. As can be seen by the example of our European neighbors and the EU:

Think of the sleaze that brought down Helmut Kohl a decade ago. German political parties help themselves to more than £100 million a year of public money, but this didn't prevent Don Kohleone's Christian Democrats from maintaining secret accounts and receiving briefcases full of used notes. Think of Italy, where subsidies turned the old parties into para-state organisations. Before the breakdown of the Christian Democrat/Social Democrat duopoly in 1994, a party membership card, jingling with ribbons and medals, was seen as an IOU, to be cashed in when your capo took power.

Or think of France, also awash with state funding, where some 700 politicians have been charged with corruption in the past decade, almost all in relation to party financing scams. A fair number of them have naturally been pardoned by Jacques Chirac, but I am not allowed to tell you who they are, because it is illegal even to mention the fact of their convictions.

These problems come from the fact that the parties are increasingly remote from their members and so unable to raise money in the traditional manner from their members. State funding of the political parties is not the solution, it would be like trying to put out a fire by pouring on petrol. The real solution is localism, reconnecting the parties with their members and voters. However this is something that the mainstream parties will be loath to do, it would mean that they might have to listen and represent the people that set them up with the massive salaries and extremely generous pensions schemes in the first place. No more shifting from an arts degree at university to a think tank to a safe seat in parliament, the type of career politician that makes up both front benches would be no more and they might have to actually spend time in the real world and work. And that would never do.

[1] Yes I am trying to set up a google bomb.

<a href="http://www.soca.gov.uk/" 
alt="uk secret police" 
title="uk secret police">
UK Secret Police</a>