According to the Guardian yesterday:
State funding of political parties could rise to £28m a year under one of the proposals being put forward by the former civil servant charged with seeking a cross-party agreement on cleaning up the system.
Sir Hayden Phillips has drawn up proposals under which parties would earn 60p for every vote they received in general elections or byelections for Westminster seats. Up to 30p would be earned for each vote in European or Scottish, Welsh and Northern Ireland assembly elections.
They went on “Under the most generous of his schemes, 60p for a Westminster vote and 30p for a devolved vote, Labour would receive £7.4m, the Tories £6.8m and the Liberal Democrats £4.5m.”
Do political parties need financial incentives to get out and campaign?
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4 Comments
What is he saying about deposits?
On that scale a party would “earn” the £500 deposit with 833 votes in some cases 833 votes would not get them to deposit saving level.
I hope if they go down this route they only include election candidates that save their deposit in the calculation. Otherwise it could be a cash cow for small fringe parties such as pro-life or the new party to gain money from the taxpayer.
No indication either of whether it will be based on FPTP or list votes in Scotland & Wales – which could further exacerbate the issue of one vote being “more important” than the other.
In Northern Ireland it’s even harder as deciding who the vote is for is not particularly clear under STV (first preferences can’t be regarded as an indicator – eg the DUP and Sinn Fein get lots of first preferences but do badly on transfers and – on occasion – have won fewer seats than their rivals).
Well one key question with any system of public funding, if you agree the one is necessary, is the qualifying criteria that any public funding scheme would have so as not to unfairly disadvantage other parties.
If you base the ‘Westminster component’, at least in part, on Westminister representation you would (if based on the number of MPs) often disproportionately disadvantage the second and third parties or (if having an MP “activated” entitlement based on vote shares) advantage those smaller parties that have localised support (Respect, Kidderminister Health, etc) over other smaller parties without localised support but which do far better across the country as a whole (e.g. UKIP, the Greens).
If you base it on getting deposits then you either (if you only count the votes of candidates who save their deposit) create a financial disincentive for smaller parties to target individual constituencies, as they have to get a certain level of support across the country, or (if you allow saving one or more deposits to ‘activate’ entitlement based on vote share, perhaps the better option) you might allow parties to ignore large and pour large resources into one constituency.
It gets more complicated when you add a devolved element – since with the Scottish Parliament arguably in Scotland more important than Wesminster, why should the Scottish Greens or the SSP (who do better at Holyrood elections) be significantly financially worse off because they perform badly under FPTP?
And then you need to think of new parties – if another SDP were to emerge how ought the system cope with it? It wouldn’t seem fair to leave them with no funding at all, but then with their support base being effectively speculative, exactly how much ought you give them?
While it’s not insurmountable, any system of public funding needs to be carefully planned to prevent disproportionately favouring one party over another – and with the Human Rights Act serving to prevent clearly unjustified discrimination in this field – it’s something that can’t be ignored.