Party funding: Does Clegg prioritise votes or reform?
The deputy PM is gearing up to make party funding the battleground for his next big fight with the coalition.
By Alex Stevenson Follow @alex__stevenson
Next week a government-commissioned review of political party funding, conducted by the committee on standards in public life, publishes its final report. Press reports over the last month have heavily trailed its main finding: that a cap on individual donations is needed to improve transparency in politics.
This would suit the Liberal Democrats, whose leader Nick Clegg is charged with advancing the coalition's political and constitutional reform agenda forward throughout this parliament. It's thought a donation cap of £50,000 would reduce the Conservatives' income by as much as one-third. Labour and the Lib Dems would also be hit, but not to the same extent. On partisan grounds, Clegg has much to gain from getting a donation cap in place.
Experts have assumed that achieving consensus on these grounds would be impossible. They have suggested additional state funding as a potential solution. Taxpayers already contribute to the political process through a myriad number of ways – 'short money', paid to opposition parties, being the most well-known – but it would take a big injection of cash to replace the millions lost through a donation cap. Most other countries in the world have significant state funding of their political parties. Presumably, it was thought, Britain would go the same way.
Today Clegg made clear that, come what may, the coalition would not be going down this path. "This is not the right time to ask our hard-pressed taxpayers to pay out more to political parties at a time when they're having to deal with so many cuts and savings elsewhere," he told the Commons.
Clegg-haters might suggest he's expressing the will of the Conservative party, but it looks like he's merely bowing to political reality. After the expenses scandal and with the coalition's austerity drive ongoing, any kind of extra money for politicians would only be greeted with cynicism.
What happens next? Well, a senior Lib Dem source has told me that after next week's report the government is going to adopt a donation cap regardless. "We know this isn't going to be easy," the source explained. "Did you really expect the report would produce a solution that would be immediately acceptable to all three parties?" The Lib Dems are going to stand up and make the case for a donation cap, come what may.
Matthew Ashton, a politics lecturer at Nottingham Trent University who has written on state funding of political parties for politics.co.uk, told me this afternoon that the Tories backing a donation cap would be like "turkeys voting for Christmas".
"It would be hugely damaging to their own interests, however good it might be for democracy," he said. Dr Ashton suggested Clegg might be looking to propose a £10,000 cap as an initial bluff designed to make a higher cap more palatable. An alternative strategy might be to secure greater transparency in return for abandoning the measure.
I sense that, judging from my source's language, the real approach may be a bit of long-term political game-playing. The Lib Dems have always been an enemy of the party funding system. They reject the "un-transparent, inaccessible system where money buys influence".
Clegg may be preparing to take on both Labour and its big vested interest, the unions, at the same time as he does battle with his coalition partners.
It is a battle, surely, that he cannot win. But perhaps he calculates that the arguments are on his side, and therefore that – even if real reform is not achievable – there may be political capital to be gained.
I'm looking forward to the launch of the party funding review report next week, when we'll get a clearer sense of the coalition's – and Clegg's – direction.
