Labour’s lost millions?

But this is unfortunate timing … As the FT reports on the Tories foreign funding, FT reports on the Tories billionaire foreign funding (£), and the Guardian reports on Labour’s righteous attack where Annaliese Dodds is put up to make this point on the day that the Times, runs the story (£) , another unfortunate leak, for which we will have no leak enquiry, that Labour is doing the same.

This is a multi-million pound problem, rich donors cannot solve this problem, even if was desirable. Labour needs £2.7m per month to cover its running costs. Sorry about the paywalled articles. …

Labour’s money, where’s it gone?

Labour’s money, where’s it gone?

The Labour Party has launched a redundancy programme which may or may not be linked with plans to consolidate English based staff into three English hubs. It’s doing this because it’s short of money reportedly down to one month’s reserves. In Dec 2019, it had reserves of £16 million. How did it move from the richest party in the country to this? The short answer is that it’s lost a lot of members and lost a lot of “Short” money. The rest of this blog article looks at why it's now short of money.

Mushroom Therapy

I have just bookmarked Crispin Flintoff’s video made for Stand up for Labour, as part of his campaign to get the Party to spend more on the CLPs by means of remission of a higher proportion of the membership subs.

From 29:30 Dave from Milton Keynes, kicks off a discussion about the management and reporting of the Party’s finances. Two NEC members, Gurinder Singh and Jon Lansman comment on the exclusion of the NEC from the management of money. It’s really quite shocking. …

On Labour’s Money

On Labour’s Money

I was looking through the LP’s finance report presented to#Lab19, which has the 2018 7 2017 figures in it. I had previously discovered that at the end of 2018, the Labour Party had £20.8m “cash in hand” and so it had become a surprise to me that we had only spent £8m on the General Election, when we had spent £11m in 2017.

But this time round I found some other things that piqued my interest

  1. The Labour Party made a surplus of £1.4m in 2017, the year of a General Election that we lost by 2,500 votes. Why is this?
  2. Income from Affiliations is the third largest source of income, after membership fees, and the front bench “short money” grant.
  3. On the expenditure front, they spent £3m (6%) on “Grants and payments to CLPs”.

For context, total income in 2018 was £46.3m and membership fell by 8.1% (45,914) from 564,433 to 518,519.

There’s a chart of the sources of income oveleaf/below … …

Fair shares

Fair shares

Crispin Flintoff has started a campaign to ensure that CLPs are properly funded. This is an issue that I looked at during the democracy review but CLPs get something like 5% of the membership fees and its paid as a capitation fee. From this, and by observing the effort that goes into fund rasing, I concluded that the CLPs should get more of the membership fees and am happy to help Crispin.

CLPs spend their money on administration, campaigning and conference. Administration varies from basic member communication, inc. printing via room rentals to in some cases wages and property costs. There are usually three conferences per annum, with annual conference being a significant cost often beyond a CLP, many of whom fail to send delegates. Elections vary but some need to be funded by the CLP, some require a tax to be payed to the district or regional party. Some have to fund an election every year, some only three out of every five years. Some get financial help from the Labour Group, if there is one, and others from Party HQ, but the biggest and safest and the weakest CLPs get little help.

We could describe the current capitation as 5% of the membership fees. In my article “Brass“,  I proposed raising it to 50%, I have changed my mind and today

  1. I propose doubling it (to 10%) and revising the rules around a floor so that small parties get what they need.
  2. and I would transfer the costs of Annual Conference to HQ

When thinking about the minimum grant, maybe there should be an investment fund where CLPs bid for the money to support projects aimed at growing the membership, building infrastructure (at the lower end, web sites/services, at the higher end, property maintenance) or growing internal fundraising efforts.

If so, I need to check out Crispin’s proposed motion and offer amendments.

There are some de-facto footnotes below/overleaf. …