Donate


Tuesday, March 27, 2012

How to raise party funds and make British politics popular again


This piece of mine on the 'Cash for Access' scandal, appears in The Week/The First Post.

Neil Clark: State funding is not the answer: parties need to chase new members and donors with non-elitist policies



"WHEN we talk about your donations, the first thing we want to do is get you at the Cameron/Osborne dinners... If you are unhappy about something... we'll listen to you and put it into the policy committee at No 10."



However much Conservative party apparatchiks, currently engaged in a desperate damage limitation exercise, try to portray the party's former Treasurer Peter Cruddas as a braggart and a bullshitter, the damage has surely been done. Peter Cruddas's words, captured on film in a Sunday Times sting, have exposed, for anyone who still had any doubts, the rottenness at the heart of British politics.

You can read the whole piece here.

1 comment:

Douglas said...

I'm noticing both you and Melanie Phillips writing on this subject. I wish I had a good answer for this, but I don't.

Face time with the chief executive of any nation is a precious commodity with a limited supply. It's no great shock that the inexorable law of supply and demand holds sway, and people are willing to pay a great deal for that precious commodity.

The best answer I have for this is transparency, where it is known who gave what, and who the PM had dinner with. In the immortal words of Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis "Sunlight is the best disinfectant."