The latest quarter's funding of political parties has just been released:• Conservatives continue to broaden the base of support. In the last calendar year (2009), the Conservative Party received a total of 1,037 individual cash and in-kind donations. This is an increase of 40 per cent on the 742 cash and in-kind donations received in the previous calendar year (2008).
• Conservatives have five times more individual support than Labour this year. The Conservative Party received over five times as many individual cash and in-kind donations as the Labour Party in 2009 (199 for Labour, 1,037 for the Conservative Party).
• Labour Party still relies on a few big individual donors. In 2009, Labour received 199 cash and in-cash donations totalling £3,655,929.91 from individuals. Three quarters of this money came from just three donors – Nigel Doughty, Ronald Cohen and Lord Sainsbury. Between them, they donated a total of £2,810,201.
Labour’s Reliance on the Unions
• Labour more reliant on trade unions for funding in 2009 than in 2008. In 2008, trade unions provided 52.2 per cent of funding for the Labour Party. In 2009, this rose to 60.3 per cent – trade unions gave Labour £9,784,232.43 of the £16,220,694.64 it raised from other sources.
• A third of all donations come from the trade unions. The Labour Party raised £5.3 million in Q4 2009, of which £1.9 million came from trade unions.
• Union reliance up on the last quarter. In Q3 2009, the Labour Party received 87 cash and in-kind donations from the trade unions. In Q4, there were 138 cash and in-kind donations from trade unions, representing a quarterly increase of 59 per cent.
• Union behind planned BA strikes gave Labour millions. Unite, the trade union behind the BA strike action, gave the Labour Party £3,642,919.06 in 2009. This equates to 22.5 per cent of the funding the party received last year. This is up on 2008, when donations from Unite amounted to £3,958,915.79 – 22.0 per cent of the total funding they received (Electoral Commission).
• Labour received over £30,000 from unions in staff secondments in the last quarter. Unions seconded staff to Labour in the last quarter to the value of £30,680.42. This brings the total donated to Labour in staff secondments in 2009 to £138,042.86 – a huge increase on the £51,918.10 in staff secondments received by the party in 2008.
Total Support for Labour
• Since 2001, unions have donated over £86.5 million to the Labour Party. Since donations first had to be reported to the Electoral Commission in 2001, Labour have reported receiving donations totalling £86,503,718.41 from the unions. This equates to 60 per cent of all the donations that they received since recording began.
Responding to the latest figures released by the Electoral Commission on party donations, Conservative Party Chairman, Eric Pickles, said: “It’s frightening that day by day the unions’ stranglehold on the Labour party is tightening.
“As millions face air travel misery, we now discover that the union behind it is bankrolling the Labour Party, and its Political Director is back doing Gordon Brown's dirty work.
“This really is a Government that has lost its moral authority.”
Quite. But since we now know that they can and do unleash the forces of hell even upon their own, one can expect a hint of amorality.
