a good week for labour, bad for tax payers

This has been a very good week for Labour (and an even better ones for the Lib Dems). Despite losing a lot of votes in two safe seats the Conservatives did even worse, and that is what is going to be over the news.

There are to be no charges in against Labour for selling honours, the CPS has droped the case. This is despite the rather remarkable correlations between handing over a chunk of cash to Labour and getting a seat in the 'reformed' House of Lords and therefore a direct vote on legislation and the chance of putting forward your own.

The correlation between making large donations to the Labour Party and receiving an honour is extraordinary. Statistical analysis shows that 58.54% of all donors giving more than £50,000 to the Labour Party receive an honour. This compares to just 0.035% of non-donors. Large Labour Party donors are 1,657 times more likely to receive an honour than a non-donor and 6,969 times more likely to receive a peerage.

People paying Labour in order to buy their way into the legislature of Labour's 'reformed' House of Lords was very important to their precarious finanacial position.

• 80% of Labour's election funding came from the covert Loans for Lordship program.
• Every donor who has given the party more than £1 million has been given a knighthood or a peerage.
• Three quarters of those individuals who have given more than £50,000 to the Labour Party since 2001 have received an honour.

Already the calls for state funding of political parties have started up again. That the only way to avoid this in future is for the state to provide the cash rather than supporters. Bastards want the cash without having to do any work at all for it now the easy way of trading honours, which aren't theirs to trade, has become less viable. State funding of political parties **will not stop corruption**, it is used in both Germany and France both of which have also had corruption scandals reaching into the hearts of their respective governments. What state funding *will* do is make the political parties even more remote from the public as they no longer have to even pretend to listen in order to get the cash. State funding *will* squeeze out the smaller parties and independent candidates, because there will have to be a minimum size requirement in order to get access to the cash which will reduce the sccope of debate. State funding could even be used to directly control what can, and what cannot, be debated at all by ruling that any party which esposes certain views is unfit for public money as was used in Belgium an attempt to shut down debate over issues that the main political parties find unpalitable.