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Politics

At the heart of the Labour funding scandal is the moral collapse of a once-great party

Peter Oborne

Wednesday, 28th November 2007

What the Labour fundraising scandal reveals

Last week Lord Harries descended, deus ex machina, into the Labour party’s latest funding scandal. The Bishop will preside over the internal Labour inquiry, announced by Gordon Brown this week, into the circumstances which allowed Peter Abrahams, a businessman from Newcastle, to keep party donations worth £600,000 secret.

Doubtless Lord Harries, who stepped down from his Oxford see last year, has knocked about a bit. Nevertheless it is very doubtful whether anything in Lord Harries’s previous experience can have prepared him for what lies ahead. He is not just dealing with a funding problem. At the heart of the matter is the financial, organisational and above all moral collapse of a once great political party. When Tony Blair and Gordon Brown seized control of Labour 13 years ago in what the former Cabinet secretary Lord Butler last week accurately described as a coup d’état, they made a deliberate decision.

Blair and Brown resolved to sever Labour’s historic connection both with the trade unions and, more striking still, with ordinary party activists. They sought instead ruthlessly to pursue alliances with people from the business world. In some cases — the Formula 1 racing tycoon Bernie Ecclestone is a case in point — ministers received financial contributions and then changed government policy on vital issues. In other cases peerages were awarded to cash donors, a scandal so great that it led to an 18-month investigation led by Assistant Commissioner John Yates of the Metropolitan Police.

For Labour, though bankrupt, had one price-less asset possessed by nobody else. It controlled access to the resources of the state. Its consistent policy from 1997 was to barter these resources for donations. This methodology sustained Tony Blair in government, but is now being exposed under Gordon Brown.

Though some of the Labour donors during the last decade were thoroughly respectable people, others were less so. David Abrahams, a property developer of doubtful credentials, falls into the latter category. Labour high command bent over backwards to make life easy for Mr Abrahams. From appearances Peter Watt, general secretary of the Labour party, seems to have entered into some kind of conspiracy to break the law concerning party political funding. The Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act, which was made law by Tony Blair in 2000, is categorical that party donors must not use proxies to conceal their identity. It states that failure to provide full and accurate information about the identity of donations to the Electoral Commission is punishable by a fine, or by a jail sentence of up to 12 months.

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Tony Marsh

November 29th, 2007 1:07pm

If the Labour Party is shown to have accepted anonymous donations , how have they coplied with money laundering regulations ? Worth including in any investigation ?

Ausin Barry

November 29th, 2007 4:10pm

A hopeless government in disarray, a bolshy military, an increasingly resentful public watching despairingly as the country descends into a dystopian nightmare...coup d'etat anyone?

Margaret, London

November 30th, 2007 12:51am

"Peter Abrahams, a property developer of doubtful credentials..."

David?

Alec in France

November 30th, 2007 9:35am

Yet - although UKIP cash was confiscated on a technicality, these donations can simply be repaid. Just like Blunkett's "erroneous" expenses claim. Scum!

Alan Myers

November 30th, 2007 11:08am

The Garden Girls? Is the suggestion that Clunking Fist's treatment of these admirable Crichtons will be as harmful as the graft at the heart of The Project really serious?

alan maddox

December 1st, 2007 3:41pm

The Labour Party has it's roots in the wish of the working class to have their say and be represented and that is perfectly in order. The rot started when the loyalty and naivety of the labour voters and officials in local parties were used by the Trades Unions and plum,safe Labour seats were "kidnapped" by specific Unions so that one of their members would then have a voice in the House of Commons. Hence morons like John Prescott appeared.He had never set foot in Hull and probably didn't even know where the place was when he was told to go there by his Union and present himself to the local party,who were leaned on by the top dogs at Labour Party H.Q.,much as were local Tory parties lent on by Central Office when they wanted a seat for their man. The poor die hard Labour supporters in Hull had Prescott plonked upon them and this happened in many seats,e.g. Dennis Skinner. The Blair/Brown new wave quite rightly disliked this and hated relying on the Unions and ,in particular,the Labour Party HQ in England. They realised they could rid themselves of these traditional Labour shackles by putting up for bidding the resources of the state as the author says in his article,and let's throw in a bit of patronage,for good measure. Despite the lack of violence what is the difference beween the current so called "New" Labour party and the regime led by Mr Robert Mugabe?

steve

December 5th, 2007 10:00am

Alan it may not be as serious, but if Brown is treating his most junior members of staff with this sort of contemptous, nasty, bullying, then it says much about the moral fibre of the man and certainly makes him shrink in my eyes

Dave Burns

December 8th, 2007 2:29pm

Brown and Darling are bullies. The lost CDs were blamed on a Junior Civil Servant rather than accept the systemic failures in their own leadership. The bullying of the Garden Girls is a flaw in Brown's makeup. Rather than analyse the problem and come up with a solution he blames the most junior person possible.

jkmccarthy

February 15th, 2008 3:42pm

Could Mr Oborne please give the provenance of Lord Butler's declamation as given above in par.2. Further, can he provide with information as to where I can find his statement in written form? Many thanks

Christopher Davison

April 8th, 2008 10:28am

The elephant in the room is wearing a burka and Labour is going out of office for decades due to mass immigration, many reserved British people will not admit that this is the reason.

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