To what extent is the business community burdened with financing the big political parties, and are things about to get worse? This question is not usually part of the debate about how parties are financed, the rights and wrongs of it, which has been going on for years.
The Nationalist and the Labour parties have their own revenue base. It starts with membership fees, but these only support the needs of the parties to a limited extent. Those needs have grown over the years.
No longer are the parties hugely dependent on volunteers. They still play a part in political organisation, especially to help individual election candidates to prepare their home visits and to man their political surgeries. But the two parties nowadays have a paid base. They do not give full details of its cost to them. It is financed, in addition to receipts from membership fees, with donations from the party faithful. Throughout the year they are targeted with fund-raising campaigns.
Malta has an old law against beggars which is still in force. It was recently invoked against a woman who lost her husband in a tragedy on the sea and resorted to begging. The law might more appropriately be applied to the political parties. They dress up their appeal for funds in all manners of nice words, all based on the need for all good men and women to come to the needs of the party, which of course exists for the needs of all good men and women. Stripped of the fine talk what the parties do is to beg on a large scale.
Individual candidates do it differently. They organise dinner dances against payment, trying to ensure there is always a bit left over to go towards their campaign fund. It is not uncommon for that bit to come partly from the assistance tapped from business concerns located in the candidate’s constituency.
That is not the only way the business community is approached to give assistance to the political class. It is the least of it. The parties pull out all the stops when a general election approaches. Elections have become costly things. That is one reason why the parties have also gone into business themselves, publishing newspapers, running television and radio stations, organising travel abroad.
These businesses do not yield much, even when they are profitable. Certainly, they do not yield enough to finance modern general election campaigns. These have become very costly affairs. Gone are the days when the cost of an election started and practically ended with public meetings addressed from atop lent or hired trucks and a basic public speaking system, throwing in the cost of refreshments for volunteers who man election stations and monitor the counting of votes.
Nowadays general elections are slick affairs that cost the earth. Political parties do not possess the earth, though they try to shape it. So they turn to businesses for donations. They do this without publicity or transparency. They work on the wink-wink, nudge-nudge principle, otherwise known as scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.
They deny it, of course, but at the heart of the seeking of donations by the political parties is the understanding that, if the party makes it to office it will be a shoulder for the donors to cry on. Sometimes that is stated openly by the donor – what do I get in return? Mostly it is, as I put it, an understanding.
It is a dangerous understanding for politicians to make their government, to an extent, beholden to business people. Some of the latter open their cheque books because they really support a particular political party and would like to see it elected without commitment to them. That is rare. Most of the time business people agree to donate firstly not to get on the wrong side of the party, secondly to try to buy insurance for the future when it comes to public contracts and permits.
It may be that business donors hope for more than they can get, although there seem to be a lucky few among them. What is certain is that business donations do not represent splendid altruism or the milk of human kindness.
It is probably the case that the number of business donors is not large. Operators within political parties, so defined in a game to keep the beloved party out of it, would make a list of potential donors and approach them discreetly but with a blunt request for a given substantial amount. Some businessmen give it, not unusually in context of the telling wink and nudge. Some don’t. A few send the party beggars packing, though they do not report them to the police like the poor widow beggar was apparently reported.
The system stinks. The political parties have finally realised it cannot go on for much longer. Honest people want to know how much the parties get in donations, and from whom. The parties do not want to tell it. Except for Alternattiva Demokratika, they want to keep donations up to a certain amount confidential. But they realise they cannot keep all of it confidential for much longer. For years I have called for party leaders to declare they will not accept business donations. None ever did. Nevertheless, things are moving. A law on political donations is being drafted. One early question – will it provide for the state to finance political parties?
That would be ironic. It would not only mean that all taxpaying business people and supporters will have to finance the parties. But that every individual taxpayer too. That’s where the frying pan and the fire come into all this.