topic 2 : political parties
debates
Political Party Unit Definitions
Concept Definition and example
Old Labour
New Labour
New Right
One Nation
Classic Liberalism
Modern Liberalism
Democratic Socialism
Liberal Democracy
Faction
Manifesto
Mandate
Short Money
Cranbourne Money
Factfile: Political Parties and their Features (pages 52-57 of textbook)
Definition: Political party
Key features
Making policy
One of the main functions is making policies , the process involves lears are civil servants , advisory units,
committees and private advisors, the rest of the part members have some say but ultimately down to the
ministers
In the opposition the general membership has more influence tend to depend on parties
Political education
Parties have a role in rasing awareness about their values. E.g. green party raising awareness about the
climate.
This role has reduced due to pressure groups and social media has taken up the role of supplying people
with information
How are UK political parties funded and why does
it matter? A timeline
1990s Cash for Access Scandal
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, ian greer was alleged to have paid two backbench conservative MPs go ask questions for
Harrods founder and non UK citizen Mohamed al-Fayed - 1994
2000- Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act
The Act created an independent Electoral Commission to regulate political parties and their
funding arrangements. It also required parties to submit statements of their accounts on a
regular basis, and prohibited the receipt of funds from foreign or anonymous donors.
2006: Sir Hayden Phillips inquiry
Set up to create proposals for campaign finance reform. Happened after in 200, it was revealed
that the labour party was secretly loaned £14 million and the conservative £16 million in the
2005 electoral campaign. This recommended caps on spending and donation
(£50,000).Suggested increasing state funding by £25 million
2008 Ministry of Justice report
Followed the 2006 and 2007 cash for honours scandal (seceral men who were nominated for
life perrages by tony blair had donated several sums of money to the labour party)
2011 Committee on Standards in Public Life report
It ended the “big donor culture”
It recommended: - a limit of £10,000 should be placed on donation, the limits on campaign
spending before and election should be cut by 15%, the donation cap should apply to al
donations, including trade unions unless individuals make a positive decision to ‘opt-in’ to the
affiliation fee. And it also said that existing public support to the political parties should be
supplemented by the addition of pence per vote funding and the addition of tax relief on small
donations
How are parties funded:
Donations - loans
Short money (opposition) - self funding
Fundraising - Membership fees
Trade union
benefits weakens
-short money helps opposition -Potential advantage to “business friendly” parties
-it directly shows what the people want as parties -potential to create wealth divide
with more members would have more funding
(more representative) -smaller parties can tend to be lost /drowned out by
larger parties so don't stand a chance
-we do have some regulations
-membership fees aren't that influential
-plurality of ways you can collect money
-self-finance supports the hereditary wealthier
parties and hurts the working-class parties
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, -do donations skew the plurality of the ways you can
collect money
Define:
Define:
Short Money
Cranbourne Money
Short Money is the common name given to the
annual payment to opposition parties in the United Cranborne Money is the common name given to the
Kingdom House of Commons to help them with annual payment to opposition parties in the UK
their costs.it depends on the number of seats held House of Lords to help them with their costs.
by the party , labour -8 million
Britain’s parties should be funded by the state
Public suspicion that donors can buy influence is corroding trust
February 2015- Financial Times
As Britain heads for a general election in May, the political parties are not only competing over
policy. They are also in a contest to see who can raise the most cash to fight the campaign. As
ever, the Conservatives and Labour are looking to their traditional backers — business and the
trade unions respectively — to help fund what may be the costliest general election ever.
A report published yesterday from the independent Electoral Commission is the latest sign of
how they are boosting their coffers from these and other sources — taking in some £13m
between them in the final three months of 2014 alone. UK election — big donors pile in.
Compared to the US, where private backing for presidential candidates is on an altogether
more lavish scale, party political funding in the UK is modest. But the British system should
prompt concern all the same. This is because the main parties are becoming ever more reliant
on a small number of donors to meet their funding needs. The risk is that such individuals —
whether they be company executives or trade union bosses — exercise undue influence over
political leaders.
A report by the Electoral Reform Society this week highlights how narrow this pool of big
donors is becoming. In the past decade, more than three quarters of donations received by
Labour and half received by the Tories were from individual grants of over £50,000.
Speculation that such donors might be looking to buy access to power have been at the heart
of a series of scandals in recent years, such as cash for honours or cash for peerages. If public
suspicion grows, trust in politics is inevitably corroded. A system increasingly reliant on party
funding by a few also helps to destroy mass political participation. Most ordinary citizens will
wonder why they should bother paying their more modest fees and donations.
It is little wonder that the main parties have seen their memberships plunge over the years, with
the Tories down from more than 2.5m in the 1950s to little more than 150,000 today. For
decades, the parties have recognised there is a problem. The Conservatives have been
prepared to accept a cap on individual donations as long as it encompasses money given by
the trade unions; Labour, by contrast, has been in favour of a donations cap as long as it
excludes the unions. Negotiations have always ended in deadlock. Once the election is over,
the party leaders should make a renewed effort at reform. The framework for a new funding
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