Anthony Barnett (London, OK): Four points on the scandal of Labour funding. A fifth on what the implications for the New Labour project will be a post on its own.
1. While it is tremendously revealing and could even bring Brown down if it continues, it is not as important as the threat of the database state. That is not just a passing story about missing discs. It is important that the corruption of party politics does not become a diversion from the more looming danger. More on this soon.
2. Is Brown a Blairite after all? Blair was originally responsible for building the centralised, high cost system and its actively permissive culture that encouraged cheating and, as it is now put, being "close to the wind". He was at the centre of the loans for peerages. David Abrahams was sitting in the front row when he made his final constituency farewell, it is inconceivable that Blair did not know he was a high value donor. The question is what is the nature of Brown's inheritance. Is he the decent man of integrity struggling like Laocoon to wrest himself free of Blairite influence? Or is he the man who knew Blair better than anyone for nearly twenty years, helped to create him and has been created by him in turn? Brown's appointment of Jon Mendelsohn as Labour's fundraiser was a strike for continuity of regime not change. Mendelsohn's letter justifying his failure to make a clear transition is absurd. He writes that,
I was very concerned that these arrangements did not meet the strict transparency test that I wished to see in place.
As if the "arrangements" were in the past. But there were hidden donations - for whopping amounts - which had not been published. In other words the process was still ongoing. All Mendelsohn had to do was to call up Abrahams and say that he would have to make his wonderful gift public. I leave aside that if he believed it was legal he should resign for complete incompetence. Mendelsohn has to go. Why has Brown supported him?
3. It is the centre not the periphery that matters. So Harriet Harman took £5,000 from a woman called Kidd and wrote and thanked her. She was so desperate that although a leading woman candidate on the left and married to the party's Treasurer and a top union official, she could barely raise money from anyone and had to take a £40,000 mortgage to pay her debts. What this really shows is the thiness of her political base and the paucity of her feminist network, a result, surely, of New Labour politics with its lack of democracy and independence of spirit. Despite the blogs, intent is legitimate aspect of deciding guilt in criminal law, as it should be. The serious issue is that capital sums of over half a million were accepted from a known property developer in a way that conspired to prevent his identity from being known. This cannot be right.
4. Which takes us to the moral issue. In The Triumph of the Political Class, Peter Oborne argues that the new inter-networked elite enjoy the spoils of office and share a key characteristic which is that they think that the rules which have to apply to everyone else do not apply to them. (We have seen a recent example in the case of Sir Ian Blair who defied any admission of systemic or was it systematic fault on the part of the Met when an innocent man was gunned down and took it to a jury who found the Met guilty on 19 instances, but still he didn't resign.) Oborne also sees the media are part of the ruling political class. Without going on about it, which I'm longing to do, just take this editorial from the Guardian, published when the scandal started to role. It says that Labour officials should have asked,
Who were these donors? Was it politically wise to accept their donations? And, most importantly of all, was it lawful?
No, no, no! The most important question is not "is it lawful?", it is "is it right".
If people are going around - and this includes the Guardian - saying to themselves "is this lawful?" then they are doing wrong. The culture of permission is at home on the Guardian (and thus there is little prospect that Alan Rusbridger will resign). Just as the donations scandal threatens to divert attention from more serious issues, so the way the press is running with the latest little revelation it is missing what should be the defining issues of right and wrong.
Guy Herbert (not verified) said:
Tue, 2007-12-04 08:08I think that there is a category mistake being made here, partly prompted by your residual loyalty to what you conceive to be Labour ideals. (You imagine there to have been a pure politics, corrupted in a moral sense by New Labour, hence, is Gordon a disciple of the Satan Blair?)
Actually it is you who have been fooled by a New Labour framing exercise. There is nothing corrupt about receiving anonymous, pseudonymous or foreign donations. There is nothing corrupt about taking donations from anyone. What would be corrupt would being bribed to do something that it is your duty to others not to do. Politicians, per se, have no duty to have particular policies, so corruption of politics, as opposed to the corruption of government or the electoral process - both of which I suggest are dangers - is essentially impossible.
Anonymous, pseudonymous or foreign donations were made illegal not because they were immoral, but because it denied resources to the Tory party in particular, That also consolidated the advantage for the new Government of (corruptly in the proper sense) employing public resources for political promotion. This was presented as "cleaning up politics", thus multiplying the partisan effect, by implicit accusation. What it was was a step towards nationalising politics (remember the authoritarian conception of the no-party state?) and that is how it is consistently being used even now by ministers as an argument for accepting a new funding settlement that suits them - and implies yet more official control and incumbent advantage.
You have to admire their strategic consistency under fire.