It’s a sad fact of life that political parties need money in order to function. Money is needed to run campaigns, pay for staff and facilities as well as to ensure that all the functions of a modern political party are funded. A proportion of a party’s money, which varies between parties and in different times in a party’s history, comes from members, those individuals who agree with the aims of the party, officially join it or one of the party’s supporter groups and give money to the party to enable it to operate. In other words people join political parties in order to promote the politics that they personally support and involve themselves in politics in order to influence it in whatever way they are able to.
Other money that can be accessed by a political party is in the form of large donations from wealthy people and organisations. Some of these wealthy individuals give money to parties because they agree with the aims of that party but others may give money in order to try to influence the policy of the party. All three of Britain’s current main parties and UKIP have or have had a long history of taking donations from the wealthy who support a particular party and such donations have repeatedly given arise to suspicions that donors to political parties have used their wealth for the purpose of having disproportional influence over the party.
Now don’t get me wrong. People should be allowed to spend their money on paying for Sir Keir Starmer’s office staff or the Tory Party conference or Lib Dem campaigners. It should be their choice to do so. Whether a party member doesn’t have a pot to piss in or is a person who has just taken delivery of their second luxury yacht, they still have the right to support the political party of their choosing. However it’s difficult to get away from the worry that wealthy people, whose interests may not be in complete alignment with the views of either the British people as a whole or party members in particular, are calling too many shots and have far too much influence over party policy.
One case that illustrates quite clearly the possibility of there being undue influence from donors to a political party comes from an excellent article by the gender critical feminist blogger STILLTish about the massive donations given by a pharmaceutical company that makes puberty blockers to the Lib Dems. STILLTish, who I will from here on in refer to as ST, said in a post from April 2022 that the story of the Lib Dems taking money from Ferring Pharmaceuticals broke in 2019 following an article in The Times, but ST said that although the Times stated that Ferring had given £100,000 to the Lib Dems, the Times understated the amounts of money involved.
ST’s article, which can be found here and via the link at the bottom of this post, dug very deep into the history of donations from Ferring to the Lib Dems using information from the Electoral Commission. ST found that the amount of money that the Lib Dems have got from Ferring is much greater than £100k and instead is in the region of £1.4 million over the period 2013 to 2019. This is a lot of money for a small party like the Lib Dems who in 2014 (during the 2013-19 period in question) had a total income of £7.3 million.
It’s right and proper to ask the question of the Lib Dems about whether this money from Ferring is having an undue influence over the party. Those who see the party’s capture by gender ideology to the extent, as ST shows, that the party now considers those who want single sex spaces in sport, prisons and things like toilet facilities are not welcome in the party, may wonder whether massive amounts of money from puberty blocker manufacturers is guiding the direction of the party?
I’ve never really trusted the Lib Dems and my distrust goes back a long way and from long observance of how the Lib Dems have played the all things to all men lines in different areas and are the living embodiment of the Groucho Marx quote about lacking moral principles which is ‘Those are my principles, if you don’t like them, well I have others’. My trust in the Lib Dems is lowered further by seeing the party, a party that is now almost completely captured by the gender identity cult, taking money from companies who make their money from selling puberty blockers which in turn will be used on so-called ‘trans children’ to stunt their natural development.
The Lib Dems are major cheerleaders of the gender identity cult which is something that anybody who believes in sex based rights, or child safeguarding or the rights of LGB should be worried about. If you believe in such things as sex based rights and the rights of children to be unmolested by the modern day witchdoctors of the gender cult or for Lesbians and Gays to be able to choose partners without being screamed at for being ‘transphobic’, then the Lib Dems are not a worthy repository of your vote.
The fanatic adulation that the Lib Dems have for the gender identity cult is not something that the party makes a big thing of at election time. The party’s chameleon-like apparatchiks and activists promote the party as the voice of the people in the area that they are campaigning in, often with a different message for urban, suburban and rural electorates.
Lib Dem activists like to talk big on the subject of the EU or the economy or social cohesion or other issues that they believe will chime with the voters but behind the scenes the Lib Dems are very much in favour of promoting policies that would see children and young people, often in a state of mental and emotional distress, put on medications that have appalling and irreversible effects on those who take them. The Lib Dems take money from companies who make drugs that put young people on a path to sterilisation, mutilation and life long medicalisation.
It is quite possible that the Lib Dems foolish and somewhat disgusting policies towards gender identity and sex based rights is an organic one created by party members. But it’s quite possible that large dollops of money from companies that benefit from the growth of the narrative of the existence of the ‘trans child’, must be a particular incentive for the party to carry on with policies that are increasingly being questioned and challenged.
Link to ST’s piece
https://gendercriticalwoman.blog/2022/04/03/liberal-democrats-big-pharma/
As a resigned in disgust former member of the so called Conservative party I find it hard to think of a reason to give a penny to any of our failed political parties. I guess if your one of the privileged few who can afford to pay their energy bill and you fancy a seat in the lord’s then it might be different. Our politicians are rapidly reducing Britain to the status of failed state and they deserve nothing.
The tragedy is that they could have done the opposite. Brexit was a massive opportunity. Freed from the monstrous lumbering bureaucracy of the EU, abundant energy below our feet, Britain could have become the best place in Europe to do business.
We are certainly not being well served by too many of our politicians both local and national.
I know, but the refusal to vote always worries me a bit. On the one hand in the West we pride ourselves as supporting democratic systems of government as opposed to authoritain states or theocracies. On the other hand we have a large number of people not voting, and arguably they should not be complaining when the least awful as opposed to the more awful gets elected.
It’s quite possible our societies could be reformed with totally different systems of political power more locally based? Quite a revolutionary thought, but when rare initiatives do happen and have successful outcomes we should be looking at them and learning, as opposed to being doom-mongers all the time?
I’m with you on the idea that not voting ends up with bad politicians. I believe that someone else said it better than I could when they said ‘not voting means we get the politicians we deserve’.
Local power and local decision making can work but unless there is input from the majority of local voters what we might end up with is government by whoever is the loudest and most well connected demographic or interest group. However for localism to truly work both the costs and the benefits of localism need to be borne by those in that particular area and mistakes not bailed out by central government. Otherwise people in an area will vote for freebies or sparkly gee gaws safe in the knowledge that Westminster will bail them out when it all goes tits up.
*authoritarian