Climate sceptics and the gambling industry fund MPs offices
JVL Introduction
As part of its Dark Money Investigations openDemocracy has published Andrew Kersley, reposted below, on private donors to political parties, in particular to individual MPs to support their private offices.
It neatly complements John Booth’s Why do private donors fund Labour? which we posted recently.
In this case, it is gambling firms and climate sceptics, which apparently handed over more than £1m in just one year recently.
Particularly interesting – and alarming – from our point of view is that almost half of this went to just four Labour frontbenchers: Rachel Reeves, Yvette Cooper, David Lammy and Wes Streeting.
Susan Hawley, executive director of Spotlight on Corruption said “The public needs to be assured that these advisers are acting in their best interests – not the interests of the donor signing their paycheques.”
A wider probe into party financing is long overdue…
This article was originally published by openDemocracy on Mon 23 Jan 2023. Read the original here.
Revealed: MPs’ staff bankrolled by climate sceptics and gambling industry
Exclusive: Campaigner warns of ‘conflict of interest’ over donors who gave £1m to fund MPs’ staff and offices
Loading article text…
Chicken coup scabs still showing their true views of self interest. Socialists democracy plus calmer,s Stalinist tendencies looking after the few and turning backs on the many
Whilst these corrupt MPs are accepting bribes, they cannot do the job what they were elected to do….They cannot serve the people whilst they are being bribed to do the bidding of the few….Those guilty of accepting dirty money, must be sacked and prosecuted for corruption!
They may be corrupt so and sos,,,but they are OUR so and so, Wish I believed that!
They are Parliamentary Gravy Train Riders, they couldn’t stop themselves from taking money from any organisation that was offering. It’s been going on in Parliament probably for ever, right now it is part of being a politician, except for those that have strong principles ie Jeremy Corbyn.
Some years ago there were proposals for neutral ways to fund our politics with a small levy on individual electors. It could have resulted in an infinitely superior way to support political candidates that avoided completely, any suspicion of bias, of buying influence, or of subverting the interests of the public at large. I still believe it should be possible to conceive of a viable, minimal cost scheme which would ensure confidence in the belief that those elected to serve us aren’t also serving commercial interests.