The money does the walking and the media do the talking
On the day that the London Stock Exchange (LSE) announced a merger with its Canadian equivalent headquartered in Toronto (TMX), the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (BIJ) announced figures showing that a quarter of all Conservative Party funds derive from City donors. Under David Cameron’s leadership, the amount received by the Party from that quarter has doubled.
Anyone who’s awake will also have noticed that the Tory Party swung the whole of the Newscorp (Murdoch) press behind its election effort in May 2010. Having received that help, it is now looking kindly upon Rupert Murdoch’s desire to take over the rest of BSkyB. That is to say, when the Competition Commission recommended immediate referral of the Newscorp bid for BSkyB, Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt put that off ‘to give Newscorp more time’ to do something or other.
So in summary, the two groups Cameron seems keen to protect are the City (where he gets 25% of his funds) and Newscorp (where he gets all his support). It also looks like he protected Andy Coulson with the same aim in mind.
None of this is news, but written down like that, it does all look rather seedy, doesn’t it?
Most websites would stop there. But not The Slog.
The BIJ is a not-for-profit outfit trying to uncover nastiness and maintain at least some semblance of journalistic standards. It is funded largely by the Potter Foundation, the brainchild of Psion Organiser inventor David Potter.
There’s no doubting the BIJ’s laudable aims, but these are overshadowed somewhat by the lack of stories about trade union graft or Labour Party fiddling. The journalists tend to come from BBC, Channel Four, The Independent, Climate change, human rights and Guardian backgrounds.
This bias doesn’t invalidate the BIJ’s story – far from it. But it’s always helpful to know an agenda.
Now let’s turn to how Labour gets funded.
30% of its funding comes from the trade union movement, within which the biggest single contributor is Unite. (Until 20 years ago, the figure was 70% union funding).
20% of its funding comes from the very rich. This includes people like Greg Dyke (former DG of the BBC) and Lord Sainsbury (former Minister of Science).
Together, these sectors amount to twice the Tory Party’s dependence on the City. As for media support, the Independent, the Guardian and the Daily Mirror almost always support Labour, and all have sided with Labour and disaffected LibDems since the formation of the Coalition.
So there you have it. Or rather, they do. My mantra remains the same: if you want clean politics without fear or favour, take all the money out of it.
By the way, now the LSE/TMX deal has been done, the world’s stock exchanges have effectively created the same domino-falling arrangement as the banks. S&P owns TMX as well as the EU bourse, and the LSE owns both the Italian Borsa and Chi-X .
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