Sunday, December 29, 2013

The New Year Dishonours

From 2006 to 2012, donors giving £50,000 or more were 6,000 times more likely to receive a peerage than the man on the street.

Unless you believe that big donors are just very, very lucky, year after year, there has to be an underlying explanation.

Tony Blair’s chief of staff Jonathan Powell, it’s “clearly true” that your chances of a gong are “greatly enhanced by donating to a political party”.

“Every one of the donors had done other things for the party”, says a former Liberal Democrat fund-raiser Lord Razzall. But, he adds, “if they’d done just those other things and not given the money, chances are they probably wouldn’t have ended up in the House of Lords”.

It’s the money that talks.

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