Some reflections on the day - party funding and climate change

A couple of political stories in the news today - apparently Tory donor Michael Ashcroft has now admitted that he has "non-dom" tax status and consequently doesn't pay any UK tax on his overseas earnings - just one day after David Cameron assured us that is was our patriotic duty to vote Conservative. But no worries, apparently Lord Ashcroft will do the right thing and condescend to pay tax along with everyone else in the increasingly unlikely event of a Tory government getting elected (if the opinion polls are to be believed).

Michael Gove's response to being questioned on Newsnight seemed to be along the lines of: "Well, this is bad, but Labour (who have several non-dom donors) are just as bad if not worse." If this is the "moral compass" we can look forward to under a Tory government, then I'm afraid I must downwardly revise even my modest expectations. It seems even the Lib Dems have been accepting money from non-doms as well - just to make sure that all of the main parties will think twice about reforming the tax status of this priveleged minority.

The difficulty that is skirted around here is the whole issue of party funding in general. My consistent but unpopular view is that there should be state funding for political parties - something guaranteed to produce a gruff reaction from the average taxi driver: why should we fund that bunch of so-and-sos?

The reality is that such a state funding scheme would cost at most around £50m a year - less than £1 for every person in Britain - so it would hardly bankrupt the country. Instead of this, our current system ensures that a small number of major donors, some of whom give many millions to their chosen parties, are able to exercise vast and disproportionate influnce over the legislature - or, to put it another way, we have the country run by crooks. The small amount of money that a state funding scheme would cost - along with a complete ban on all large donations - would be an investment in a cleaner political system.

This episode also gives us a clue as to why, after thirteen years of Labour government, the House of Lords still does not contain a single elected member. Both the main parties have rewarded their donors with Lords appointments - so they have been able to buy influence within the legislature. It's high time the House of Lords became a properly elected and accountable body, not a social club for cronies of the rich and powerful.

And yes, just for the record I can confirm that the Green Party isn't bankrolled by non-doms and neither is my campaign in York Central. I expect to spend about £2,500 on my campaign - around one quarter of the maximum amount allowed. This money has been entirely raised by local fundraising - such as music events and stalls, as well as by the small printing operation that I run myself as a volunteer (which also prints most of our election leaflets).

Climate change

Professor Phil Jones of the UEA was questioned by a parliamentary committee today about the hacked e-mails from the Climate Research Unit. According to Newsnight, he was pretty robust under most of the questioning but did struggle to respond to a query from Labour MP Graham Stringer about why the basic data and computer code for the climate calculations had not been made publicly available.

This really gets to the key error of judgement made by the CRU in the whole affair - all the station readings and methods of collation should have been published on the internet from the beginning. Attempting to treat this information as proprietary has allowed climate change "sceptics" to spin ludicrous conspiracy theories about "falsified data."

On this matter, we could take some lessons from the United States, where NASA published the basic data and full computer code for its GISTEMP temperature series in 2008. And what devastating demolition of these figures have we heard from climate change sceptics since then? Perhaps they're still preparing something.....