Party Funding - Union Donations to be Capped

According to reports this morning, amongst the recommendations from Sir Hayden Phillips will be that individual donations to political parties should be limited to £50,000, which will include donations from Unions.

This is a bold recommendation, but the right one, there is no reason why the Labour Party should be seen to owe the Unions anything because of the amount of funding they receive, in the same way that it is wrong for any political party to be perceived as owing something to big businesses or wealthy individuals. It will be interesting to see if Blair listens.

Accepting it will mean political parties having to reach out to the "common man" for funding, something that is bound to lead to an improvement in the way politics is delivered.

I also suspect that the Unions may be encouraged by the Labour Party to re-organise and split into smaller units (back to the 70s I would suggest) to maximise the potential level of contribution. It will be interesting to see if such a move would be supported by more Government "modernisation" funding.

There don't seem to be any comments on the more controversial aspect of the report from Sir Hayden Phillips - taxpayer funding for political parties (which I do not support).