Dear Chief Secretary to the Treasury,
I'm afraid to tell you there's no money left.
Signed, Liam Byrne

(Outgoing Labour Chief Secretary to the Treasury. May 2010)
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Saturday 8 May 2010

Is it all about money?

Read this comment (no 88) at Political Betting where they're discussing whether Mr Brown's temper may have blown a deal with the Lib Dems
FPT - Ted - “… does strike me that if there is a Cameron Government the Labour Party Campaign Dept run by Mr Murphy no longer has use of taxpayer funded initiatives or “information adverts”. Labour will go into Scots elections with no outside help and, other than councils, no part in governance of Scotland. Mr Murphy himself will presumably be Shadow SoS for Scotland so still be involved in campaigning but Labour high point might well be this year, a year early for their hopes in Scotland.”
and
The Scottish Labour Party have just lost a multi million pound free (taxpayer funded) campaigning organisation: the Scotland Office. The significance of that fact is hard to underestimate.
Interesting, because if that principle is applied to the whole of the UK it means that, if Mr Brown can't organise a coalition then Labour has to rely solely on party finances, private donations and money from the Unions - because the plug would be pulled on all the 'government information' initiatives that have painted them as so benevolent.

It also means that the country will no longer be having to pay for all those posters, booklets, newspaper and TV adverts - so will be saving significant amounts of cash - which has to be good, surely.

Labour cannot remove Mr Brown now. Perhaps they should have done so when they had the chance, instead of letting him (and Mandelson) decide who was in control of both the party and the country. Perhaps these two men between them will, ultimately, be Labour's downfall, and perhaps the inaction of the rest of them shows a significant weakness in the party and party organisation.

And in the meantime the rest of us wait. We wait for them all to finish their discussions and their wheeling and dealing - throwing away electoral promises to get, or keep, the reins of power.

It's quite dirty really, tawdry.
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4 comments:

Captain Ranty said...

"Is it all about money?"

Was it ever about anything else, Mrs R?

"Dirty" and "tawdry" come close, but I would have used something more base.

They are beneath contempt.

CR.

Anonymous said...

Moreover, the scandal of millions of pounds of public money being fraudulently laundered to the Labour Party through the Unions by means of the "Union Modernisation Fund" scam should be ended immediately.

Labour must live on its own or die.

Mrs Rigby said...

@ CR - Well, it would have been nice to think they were more worried about getting the country back in its feet, and clearing the debts. But ...

@ Marcellus - Labour is the Unions, and both are strapped for cash hence the additional levy after the BA strike. Labour has also, more recently, been showing its Marxist roots.

JohnRS said...

I support the comments for closing down the various taxpaer funded NuLieBore PR and support agencies.

In addition I would also suggest that the current dirty little power squabble as well as being most unseemly is also a good reason why we should split the role of PM from head of the political party and go for a directly elected PM instead.