Guido Fawkes is hot to trot against those who fund Labour. But Insiders and wonks have known for years why the political system in this country favours the powerful: because they pay for it

Today we have seen two apparent micro-sketches on the political drape – but they nevertheless hide a gigantic canvas of greedy control behind.

The deeply unpleasant and amorally urbane not-so-whyte Andrew Mackay is to become a lobbyist.
He will be working for tired old dump Burson-Marsteller at the fag-end of
the PR trade, but I suppose if you owe sixty grand of embezzled money, you have to pay it back somehow. Rumour has it that Ms McBride his former partner in Rypoff & Sidesteppe will also seek employment in the grovelly sector that lunches the fatties of Westminster. (There is a mandatorily sanctimonious piece about this in today’s Grauniad.)

So much for the Tories. Now let’s keep up with semi-retired Guido at the other end of the spectrum. In his never-ending quest to portray anyone of the Left as a corrupt and dangerous lunatic, Senor Fawkes still occasionally hits the target fair and square.
Former advisor to the buffoon Prescott, the appalling Mike Craven was accused of having waged a ‘massive disinformation campaign’ on behalf of SKB in 1998 – during his spare time while acting as chief Labour truth-bender. He now specialises in more complete corporate shits such as the GM-peddling Monsanto Corporation – and very large pharmaceutical companies in charge of most of South America. Guido has him nailed as a source of Labourlist funding.

Nice work Guido – but the guy gave them three grand. What about all the Unite perks which (for instance) gave Harriet & Jack Dromey a heavily-subsidised mortgage on their home at No 1 Winterbrook Road SE24? Their gaff might be the scene of endless demos against Harriet’s madness, but the house must now be worth a cool million at least.

A lot of Guido’s fun and games are a minor sideshow compared to some of the bigger fish out there ensuring that things go their way.

Uncle Roop as we all know has decided the last four UK elections (or so Kelvin McPansy, the anti-sleaze Italian tank, would have us believe). Lord Fumblebum screams in pain that it is now Dave Cameroon inserted in the Sino-American Aussie bottom, but of course he and chum Tony Bluurrgh had little but their feet showing for nigh on ten years.

However, what of lesser-known oinks like former HBOS Chairman Dennis (now Lord) Stevenson – who went (so to speak) the other way from lobbying into finance…and even higher things? Once partner of ‘Sloane Ranger’ inventor Peter York (nee Wallis) Dirty Den wound up in the big chair at HBOS without so much as a City & Guilds in banking…and thence to the Zanulab-cronied House of Lords. He presided over the daftest and most ruinous business plan in UK banking history after RBS….but having been a fixer for the world and its ugly sister over three decades, Stevenson knew he could rely on the System to find him both a fat salary and a title. This is what Dennis (63) does today:

President of the Employers’ Forum on Age. He is on the Board of the British Council. Lord Stevenson sits on the cross-benches at the House of Lords. He has been Honorary President of St James’s Place Capital plc., since 1997. Lord Stevenson has been First Chancellor of London Institute since 2000 and Chancellor at University of the Arts London.
He is on three Boards across seven industries, and so will not (we can assume) be feeling much of the chill to be experienced by the rest of us come the dawning of the Age of Reality.

Stevenson and his ilk (and to be fair, there are thousands worse than him) represent clients whom political textbooks call ‘interest groups’, and real people call fatwads. They ensure that bus services are first privatised and then plundered, half-tested drugs allowed to go onto the market (or be withdrawn without proper notice), hospitals built badly by cowboys – and a plethora of other similar get-rich wheezes allowed to become law via an injudicious melange of getting questions asked and inquiries ignored. Lobbies are filled with yes-votes, and committees with yes-men; pockets are lined and ‘fact-finding’ trips paid for.
But the net result is always the same: our Parliament of the People for the People is hijacked and corrupted for their own ends.

This really is Page One: until these foul practices are removed entirely from money – and private money is removed entirely from the funding of UK political Parties – no amount of new voting systems and process reforms are going to make a scintilla of difference.

I know funding Westminster idiots even more than we do now sticks in the craw: but funding by the State will bring in genuine new blood, reduce the cost of entry for new Movements, and see off the idiots of the ancien regime more quickly than most commentator realise.

Labourlists? Don’t make me laugh.