Same spin, different day

Say what you like about the Tories when it comes to their spin machine, they’re remarkably consistent.

The ability of Grant Shapps and his team of attack dogs at Tory HQ to take money from the business elite, while simultaneously delivering a kicking to working people is such a finely honed reflex action, it’s almost as if it is part of their DNA.

The spin I am talking about follows the latest figures released by the Electoral Commission, which records and regulates donations to political parties. As sure as night follows day, the figures for the second quarter of the year were met with two inevitabilities.

First, we found that donations to the Tories came from the overflowing bank accounts of the privileged few. More than a third of the ÂŁ7.18m that flowed into Conservative campaign coffers came from just 10 donors.

Secondly, the trade unions were Grant Shapps’ target of choice when trying to deflect attention away from who has been donating to his election war chest, and what they may have received in return.

You may choose to support or disagree with our members’ decision to fund the Labour Party, but you’d be hard pressed to truthfully argue that trade union money is anything other than the cleanest in politics.

It’s democratically decided upon, it’s regulated by two independent bodies and, let us be frank, we make no secret about it.

End austerity. Abolish poverty pay in the public sector. Invest in decent jobs. Save our NHS from the Tory’s sell-off. And kick-start a mass home building programme. These are the ideas our members campaign for across the country and we want them to form the programme of the next government.

In contrast, you won’t see working people lining up to hand over £160,000 to David Cameron in exchange for a tennis match. You won’t see nurses, librarians or teachers receiving peerages after making hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of donations.

And you won’t hear Grant Shapps explaining what his generous benefactors may get in return. He won’t talk about Adrian Beecroft, the venture capitalist who donated up to £60,000 to Tory coffers before proposing the slashing of decades of employment law.

He won’t talk about the 2013 tax cut for hedge funds worth £145m or that, coincidentally, one of the largest contributors to Tory coffers is hedge fund mogul Sir Michael Hintze. One thing Shapps will certainly keep silent about is the money which is being siphoned through private members clubs to battleground seats.

The Electoral Commission has revealed that the United and Cecil club, to which David Cameron is honorary president, has donated £238,900.00 to battleground marginal seats since December 2013. By May 2014, the Cecil Club had become the Conservatives’ seventh-largest donor and it’s just one of many clubs the Tories use to keep their election machine moving. It’s underhanded, unaccountable and undemocratic.

You would have thought in this age of transparency we would know who these diners are who are giving so much to the Tory Party – but we don’t. We don’t know who they are, we don’t know how much they donate, hell we don’t know what they gorged themselves on at these dinners, or even if these dinners ever happened.

What we do know is where the Tory dinner money is going – it is being force-fed into marginal seats up and down the country. Take the highly marginal seat of Ealing Central where Tory Angie Bray has received £5,500.  Perhaps she’ll use the money to explain to the voters why the Health Act she voted for has resulted in local A&E services closing and being downgraded.

And of course there’s Grant Shapps himself, who without a whiff of irony has feasted on the fruits from this private dining club to the tune of £3,000. And as is so often the case with Grant Shapps, irony quickly turns to rank hypocrisy. His Welwyn Hatfield Conservative Association has received an estimated £140,000 from Conservative Club (Hatfield) Ltd, (pictured) a private club which has been fined for failing to file legally required annual accounts for more than four years.

Conservative Party membership has almost halved since David Cameron become leader. The truth is the Tories are financially reliant upon, and as a result are governing on behalf of, an ever shrinking class of people. The more they attack working peoples’ attempts to have some influence on the political landscape, the more they reveal that they govern for the millionaires, not the millions.

This article originally appeared in Tribune, September 12, 2014