The Electoral Commission’s latest release on donations to political parties in the second quarter of 2013 are quite handy for the Tories. Firstly, there’s the caveat that no party really benefits from discussing funding because everyone ends up looking a little bit grubby, and because the only thing grubbier and more unattractive to voters would be full state funding of political parties, then this will always be a grubby-looking business. So of course there are donations from big business to the Conservative party (although the biggest individual donor to the Tories was in fact a woman who wanted to donate money to the ‘government of the day’ in her will, which meant her legacy was divided between the two Coalition parties).
But the detail of donations to Labour is useful for the party’s opponents, no matter what their own arrangements are, because it highlights how very dependent the party has become on donations from trade unions.
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