Opinion: Party funding

"How bad does it have to get before we're shocked out of our complacency".

The debates on party finance reform on each side of the Atlantic could not be more different. In the UK, politicians have spent the past 30 months attempting to thrash out a reform programme following the loans-for-peerages controversy. This resulted on Monday in a white paper in which Jack Straw called for some modest tightening of the rules but nothing substantial. It is reform of a kind, but being conducted at such a glacial pace that you could be forgiven for not noticing.

By contrast, the two US presidential candidates have a record in campaign reform, are pledging to keep the lobbyists at arms length during their campaigns and are committed to further reforms if they get into office. No one is pretending that American politics is a haven of integrity; far from it. But we have the unprecedented prospect of both candidates attempting to out-cleanse each other.

Why these wildly differing approaches? Partly it is because the US has, over many years, come to accept that it has a mess which needs cleaning up. Mavericks like Ross Perot and Ralph Nader have kept the issue in the public eye over successive presidential campaigns and it is now generally accepted that politics and business are too close. In the UK by contrast, we haven't had a bogey man figure like Jack Abramoff to contend with - at least not yet. While there continue to be scandals in the UK, there is a tendency to downplay their significance and dismiss them as isolated incidents.

In the loans-for-peerages episode for example, it was established that Lord Levy made recommendations about who should be awarded peerages. It was also established that Tony Blair knew that Levy's nominees were likely to have given the Labour Party substantial loans. So long as the Chinese walls between the two men were maintained however, the argument went that there is no provable direct link between the making of loans and awarding of ermine. Remarkably both the political class and the commentariat have broadly swallowed this argument as it satisfies the strict letter of the law. We need to be shocked out of this complacency, but how bad does it have to get before we are?

The other reason campaign reform has been driven to the top of the agenda in the US is that McCain and Obama are both anti-establishment figures who have depended on mobilising mass popular support to get where they are. Obama is particularly interesting in this respect. Marrying his natural charisma with the sort of online fundraising techniques pioneered by Howard Dean in 2004, he is understood to now have in excess of 3 millions individual donors, a number which is set to grow now Clinton is out of the race. And it isn't just about money; a call for volunteers in April netted 3,600 individuals willing to give up 6 weeks of their lives to campaign.

The standard British response to such figures is to point out that we simply lack America's culture of giving and volunteering and thus the chances of replicating such active support for politics here is slim. Yet the evidence for this is questionable. The UK gave 40% more per capita to the 2004 tsunami appeal than the States, for example. We remain a nation of joiners, as the RSPB can happily attest; we just don't join political parties any more. We have it within ourselves to revive popular politics; we merely lack the will.

Of course there is one big factor in the States that we currently lack: necessity. In the US, no individual can donate more than $50,000 per year to partisan campaigns. Even with Public Action Committees and the help of "bundlers," all candidates have to rely on large swathes of individuals to fund their campaigns. In the UK we have no such limit and Jack Straw has no plans to introduce one. Until that changes, parties will continue to suck at the teat of rich individuals, corporations and trade union leaders.

This week's white paper was a wasted opportunity, but it would only require a few parliamentarians with vision to turn the situation around. With the opposition parties combined having a majority in the House of Lords, they could force the issue of a cap on donations if Cameron and Clegg were determined to do so when the issue comes up for debate there. In the meantime, there is nothing to stop our party leaders from taking a page out of the McCain-Obama book and abide by a voluntary code.

Peter Facey is the director of Unlock Democracy

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