The Armchair's Web

It’s yet another tough week for our beleaguered Prime Minister Gordon Brown. The Labour Party is involved in yet another cash-for-access row. They had been found out by the press for failing to declare donations from a wealthy supporter.

David Abrahams had donated around £600,000 to Labour through third parties (in this case, asking several others to donate the money on his behalf) over a four-year period. It was this failure to reveal this which lead to the resignation of the party’s general secretary Peter Watt.

But the problem didn’t stop there. It was later revealed that Harriet Harman accepted around £5,000 of Abrahams’ cash at the height of her deputy leadership campaign. She claimed that in declaring the donation, which was from another third party, was perfectly legal… except that it wasn’t…

Brown was forced to admit that Labour broke the law and pledged to pay the money back, despite the fact that the party itself is around £20million in debt. He was mocked repeatedly in Parliament, not just from the Conservative opposition, but also from some of his own MPs. Indeed, it was left to the caretaker leader of the Liberal Democrats, Vincent Cable, to say that he “had turned from Stalin to Mr Bean in a matter of weeks”.

The issue here is about party funding. Political parties need money to fund their campaigns, but in recent years, membership of most of them have fallen like a lead stone, so they start to rely on wealthy people who are able to donate large sums of money, mainly to fight elections. This latest scandal means that reform of party funding has to be a major priority, but nothing has happened on this.

There has been speculation that the police will be called in to investigate this blatant abuse of the law. If there is enough evidence to prosecute, what are they waiting for?