City's influence over Conservatives laid bare by research into donations
Donations from finance account for half of payments to Tories since 2010 general election


Rajeev Syal, Jill Treanor and Nick Mathiason
guardian.co.uk, Friday 30 September 2011 23.13 BST

The influence of the City over the Conservatives has been laid bare by new research showing that more than half of the Tory party's donations since the general election have come from individuals and businesses working in finance.

Hedge funds, financiers and private equity firms contributed more than a quarter of all the Tories' private donations – which this year poured in at a rate equal to £1m a month – the study by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism has found.

The figures show an increase in the proportion of party funds coming from the financial sector, raising fears that the City's financial influence over the Tories is on the rise as key pieces of legislation are discussed by the coalition government.

They come amid growing concerns that some parts of the financial sector, described by Labour leader Ed Miliband this week as "asset strippers" or "predator financiers", are profiting from financial instability.

The senior Labour shadow minister Peter Hain said the figures confirmed that the Tories remain wedded to the few who do well out of the financial and political system. The Liberal Democrats used the research to step up their campaign for changes to party funding.

The Bureau of Investigative Journalism has mapped, for the first time, donations to the Tories from business to the year ending 30 June.

Using analysis from the Electoral Commission and Companies House databases, the researchers found City donations in the 12 months to July accounted for 51.4% of the £12.2m of funds received by Central Office. Hedge funds, financiers and private equity firms contributed £3.3m – 27% – while 50 City donors paid more than £50,000. All donors contributing this amount or more become members of the Leader's Group and qualify for a face-to-face meeting with the prime minister.

The largest contributor across all the business sectors studied by the bureau was hedge funds which donated £1.38m (11.4%). Three of the City's biggest name hedge fund bosses – Michael Farmer, Lord Stanley Fink and Andrew Law – together contributed £636,300. Fink is the party treasurer. The top financier donor was David Rowland, who contributed £1.1m. Rowland has a colourful City career and was forced to resign as party treasurer before he even took up the job because of links to tax havens. He now controls Banque Havilland – which used to be the crashed Icelandic Kaupthing bank business – in Luxembourg and the hedge fund Blackfish Capital Management.

Outside the City, the sector that donated most was industry, including manufacturing and defence. This sector contributed £913,411 (7.5%). A company controlled by Michael Spencer, another former Conservative party treasurer, donated £163,350. He is campaigning against the EU's attempts to introduce a transaction tax on financial trades and threatened on Fridayto shift some of his company's operations from London "extremely rapidly" if the tax was introduced.

Peter Cruddas, the multimillionaire currency trader who grew up on a Hackney housing estate and left school with no qualifications, handed over £123,600, while his business, CMC Markets UK, donated £100,000. He is co-treasurer of the Conservative party, alongside Fink.

But while Spencer and others are now campaigning against potential tax changes, since the coalition came to power several key measures have been introduced that could benefit the Conservative's City backers. Among them is a commitment to reduce corporation tax to 23% by April 2014 and exempting UK resident companies from corporation tax on all profits for their foreign branches.

The figures show the insurance sector has donated £189,400 as the government discusses radical plans to slash the legal aid budget – a measure which critics claim will benefit insurers. Construction companies have donated more than £220,000 amid a lobbying campaign to relax planning rules covering the green belt.

In a separate survey, the Labour MP John Mann disclosed figures that showed that the top three donors – Rowland, Farmer and Fink – had donated almost £10m since 2005. Stuart Wilks-Heeg, executive director of Democratic Audit, said: "What this study tellingly reveals is the scale of the Conservative party's reliance on a variety of City interests at a time when the Conservative-led government is attempting to kick banking reform into the long grass."

Hain said: "The Conservative party has long since been over reliant on donor income from people at the top of the income scale.

"No wonder David Cameron and George Osborne are straining at the leash to cut tax for people earning at least £150,000 a year while asking everyone else to pay the bill for a financial crisis caused by the banks," he said.

The Liberal Democrat peer Lord Oakeshott said: "Big financiers are still the Tories' big backers with hedge fund gamblers and private equity asset strippers leading the way. Labour is being bankrolled by the union bosses. The coalition must act now to clean up party funding."

City's influence over Conservatives laid bare by research into donations | Politics | The Guardian

And how many votes did this win them?

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That probably depends on how much credit you give to Saatchi & Saatchi.

But, it also misses the point.

And not forgetting:

Quote:

It's hard not to admire George Monbiot for publishing all his earnings. As he says, journalists often have a giving-it-out-but-not-taking-it problem. I know a columnist, for example, who often writes that Britain needs to export more weapons, but who has never, to my knowledge, divulged that he goes shooting at the expense of a prominent arms dealer. This doesn't stop him dismissing MPs as uniquely venal and corrupt. What has prompted Monbiot's transparency? He explains it like this: The question of who pays for public advocacy has become an obsession of mine. I’ve seen how groups purporting to be spontaneous gatherings of grassroots activists, fighting the regulation of tobacco or demanding that governments should take no action on climate change, have in fact been created and paid for by corporations: a practice known as astroturfing. He's on to something, though it doesn't follow that these groups are wrong to oppose regulation. As Delingpole points out, this is the 'Motive Fallacy'. You might have a personal interest in saying something, yet it might none the less be true. Still, it is surely better for everything to be out in the open. Oddly, though, Monbiot says nothing about the money and influence on the other side. Yes, the oil, tobacco and (above all) pharma lobbies are active in politics – every day I spend as an MEP teaches me quite how active. Even more frenetic, however, are the poverty lobbyists and green NGOs: Oxfam, Friends of the Earth, War on Want, the WWF, Greenpeace and, not least, Christian Aid. The global corporations and the global NGOs are mirror images of each other. Both distrust the democratic process, preferring to reach understandings with key opinion formers. Both, accordingly, love the EU, immediately intuiting that it was designed to be immune to public opinion. Yet, for some reason, most of those who complain about the anti-democratic tendencies of the multi-nationals have a blind spot when it comes to the eco-lobbies and anti-free-trade campaigns. Incidentally, just to anticipate some of your comments, all Conservative MEPs record and publish every meeting they hold with lobbyists. I took the decision some years ago not to hold any. When a lobbyist requests a meeting, I reply that I should be happy to talk any of his clients who are my constituents, and that they should get in touch with me directly. I am, I realise, being very unfair to the overwhelming majority of lobbyists, who have regulations of their own to ensure ethical behaviour. But, like Monbiot, I've become obsessed with the way in which the democratic process is circumvented. Transparency won't solve the problem; but it's a start.

The lobbying strength of big business is puny compared to that of the global NGOs – Telegraph Blogs

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