Home page The party is over When a loan is a donation. In essence the distinction between a donation on the one hand and a loan on the other can boil down to semantics. A loan is paid back. A loan which is never paid back is a gift. A loan paying a commercial rate of interest can still be a donation. If the interest payments are made from the original "loan" the money is not being paid back but rather the donation is suffering a discount. The discount paid is the opportunity cost of spreading this activity over the number of accounting periods necessary to remain with the appearance of a loan. So a loan of £2 million at a comercial interest rate of 7% for a "duping period" of say 2 years in reality means a donation of £1.72 million with the recipient having received back £280,000 of his own money back as "interest". Although this is never something to bother political parties, loans cause the party to remain always endebted to a donor. This results in a debt of compromise of one sort or another. The best and cheapest way to settle the debt of compromise is to pay the donor off using non-party, tax payer's money by providing them with a rest-of life job in government. The Labour party has been calling donations, loans, to get round their own regulation on donation transparency and thereby hoodwink the public. The inability of the opposition to make much of these tactics is because all political parties have been doing this; they are all corrupt, without exception. Indeed, it is because of the private party machines and the politician's allegience to them that they are not in a position to be able to fight this corruption directly in Parliament because this will only invite revelations of their own corruption. Unfortunately, this is not a matter of political parties having become corrupt, they always have been corrupt. This nation needs to understand that political parties, as tiny private organizations with a total membership of less than 1% of the British population, trade off electoral legitimacy for cash. Political parties are an anachronism and have served out their purpose, if indeed, they ever had one. They have failed to defend individual freedoms of the people of England, leaving the state of this nation's democracy and, indeeed, that of the United Kingdom in a very sorry state. Debt swapping The most evil aspect of the behaviour of political parties is that as private organizations they take on debt and create for themselves a debt of compromise. They do not have the income to repay large loans, so how could can these ever have been considered to be loans? Normally there is no intention to repay. The unethical aspect of this is that poltical parties swap their own private debt with a repayment based upon a life-long job in government as a peer (so-called). So the debt swapping actually consists of substituting what is private debt with a repayment paid for by tax payer's money. This secures for an unelected individual political influence in government for the rest of his or her life. It buys an illegitimate opportunity to meddle in the decisions which affect free men and women and at the same time prevents these same free men and women from defending themselve from such an interference in their affairs. This is yet another example of the brazen abuse of authority exercise by political parties. Save the party Because the public has become more generally aware that all political parties are guilty of this grubby self-interested bid for power driven by the self-interest of so-called donors, they are all seeking to deflect attention from the main culprit, the political party. The government is boldly declaring that it will introduce legislation to make loans declarable. Essential yes, but just at the moment, seen not as a step towards transparency but more a clumsy slight of hand to try and show what decent people they are, now that they have been found out. On the other hand the politicians are all singing from the same hymn sheet with a chorus that it is necessary to fund political parties. After all, how can political party activists even think without cash? They are saying in unison that more consideration should be given to increase the funding to political parties paid for from public funds. They are unashamedly bent on justifying the money raising for what are private organizations. Conflict of interests Political parties are essentially private nongovernmental organizations and have absolutely no basic right to any public money at all. Indeed governments should not even contemplate paying political parties any money since this would, and does, represent a fundamental conflict of interest. It is amazing that politicians see it as a right to feather the nests of their own parties. There is not even any legitimacy to this with less than 1% of the electorate being members of these parties. But since this has a cross-party advantage, no politician questions this corruption. England and the United Kingdom in general has a vibrant voluntary movement which has more people committed to more and different useful activities than all of the British poltiical parties put together, and which do not rely on rich donors and grubby trade-offs to get things done or to gain support. It is clear that for the sake of England the party is over.