Andy Burnham’s government could thwart Reform’s unprecedented £72m donations with retrospective restrictions on political donors that will include tough new residency requirements, ministers have announced.
It’s all naked self-interest anyway. Woes, people like our enemies.
But retrospective is truly vile. How can you do anything at all if you cannot have certainty that the law today is what the law today says it is?
Government sources, however, said the plans to strengthen the representation of the people bill had been under way for weeks, after MPs pushed for further action on domestic donations in the House of Commons.
Under the proposals, which are expected to be tabled at the Lords committee stage of the legislation, individual donors will have to prove their ongoing physical presence in the UK, in line with the residence requirements applied to other areas of government policy, such as tax status.
They’re not even allowing the commons to vote on it…..
The donations had to be made before the rules changed, hence the unseemly rush.
Superbrain Ange let the cat out of the bag with the backdating notion.
There is a faction in Labour led by Diane Abbot and David Lammy called the Hippo-crits. They are the far sighted visionaries who come up with such genius ideas.
She thinks dating it back to the announcements makes it OK.
Apart from getting bogged down in the courts she’s just OK’d it for Reform to backdate their Union legislation to yesterday.
It’s a dangerous game for Labour.
The thing with the two main parties is that most of the people involved with them don’t give much of a toss, except that it creates jobs for them. Especially Labour. Labour used to get people who could earn more outside of politics. But they believed in something, wanted to make a difference.
There isn’t a grass roots movement of ordinary people joining up, helping out. Canvassing is just councillors and would-be councillors.
Reform and the Greens are grassroots movements. You get people canvassing for them who just believe in the cause. They want a Reform government and don’t care if there isn’t a job in it for them. They can hit Reform very hard, and it could still win. Where I think Labour would fall apart without union money.
Labour used to get people who could earn more outside of politics.
Did they? I thought they were mostly thick as mince trade unionists or PPE twerps who never did a day’s work in their lives.
We’re talking on a scale of a hundred years ago.
Reform and the Greens are grassroots movements.
The Greens have been taken over by the hard left, no surprise there, and will soon start losing the middle class environmentalists who characterised it as a grass roots movement.
They’ve been lefty for quite some time. It’s the Islamic vote that’s taking over. And that is also grassroots.
(I’m not saying grassroots is good, just that it can run on volunteers more than Labour can).
It’s not grass roots environmentalism though, which is where the Greens started.
That’s true.
Yeah, the Lady Bountiful Fabian types; they were different to the current lot, but I’m not sure they were any better.
Oh, I’m not talking about “better” or I wouldn’t include the Greens.
I’m talking about whether people will make some small sacrifices for a cause or not. Will someone fix up a website for a party, answer a phone for an evening, or do they expect to get paid, or the promise of a job out of it?
You have got the name wrong: the *Conservatives* used to get people who were earning more money outside of politics and chose to surrender a chunk (sometimes a very substantial chunk) of that income to go into politics. I have personally met quite a few despite having given up active involvement in politics since I came south.
I liked how Nige came straight out of the gates and told them that if they do it to Reform then Reform will gut their union finding if it gets in.
No Tory-style quiescence. No beating about the bush, ummaing and ahhing. No mithering about principles and staying above the fray to show people what nice chaps they are.
Just a nice, clean threat.
More please.
And if it’s applied retrospectively to Reform, then a Reform government should make the last 100 years of union funding retrospectively illegal.
I think that’s the Lowe influence. Farage feels the pressure from the Right of Reform so has to be much more aggressive – and Lowe’s blunt statements have shifted the window of acceptable rhetoric and behavior in much the same way Trump has over here.
Lots of people in the West starting to drop the facade and get the knives out.
Much to agree with, as that twat Murphy would say.
Retrospective criminal legislation is directly against Article 11(2) of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Labour scumbags usually bleat about observing international ‘law’….
Labour scumbags
usuallybleat about observing international ‘law’…. when it suits them.FTFY
Surely against the Equalities act as well – legislation that disproportionately affects a single group.
Righties don’t have protected characteristic status…
Unlike you lot, we were bright enough to put it in our constitution 240 years ago.
That’s the constitution that has its own penumbra, right?
Only in that one little area. Somehow the penumbras don’t work to expand, say, 2A rights.
What a relief. Otherwise you might get judges making stuff up for partisan purposes.
Google’s AI: “The U.S. Constitution strictly bans retroactive criminal laws that increase punishment or criminalize past conduct, while allowing retroactive civil laws”
As usual, trust no American’s account of the Constitution.
This isn’t criminal. Retrospective tax law has been done so there’s precedent.
Other laws have been done retrospectively too. The Agricultural (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act of 1976 retrospectively changed all agricultural tenancies entered into prior to that date into a completely different type of tenancy that (among other things) allowed for 2 subsequent generations of the current tenant to inherit the tenancy, thus depriving the landlord of pretty much ever getting the freehold of his property back. And devaluing his asset by about a third.
And of course the current changes to domestic tenancies are retrospective – all landlords who granted an AST are unilaterally moved to an new contract, to their detriment.
It is electoral, not tax, law. Violating the rules on foreign donations is already a criminal matter under existing UK law, and the new legislation passing through Parliament expands those boundaries.
I’m sure that Amnesty and the whole ‘uman rights industry will be up in arms about this Governmental lawfare against an opposition party right?…Right?
My sides!
Clearly, they will also extend the citizenship requirements to the franchise as well….
That kind of foreign interference is fine…
Ironic to think that, if our Supremes don’t overturn the backdating, this could end up in Strasbourg.
Another Labour PM proves incompetent at law, and this one isn’t a lawyer!
Here’s what to do. The gazillionaires declare that the funds that would otherwise have been donated to Reform will instead be spent on private investigators who will look into the tax affairs of Labour bigwigs.
I suspect that change of incentives might change government policy.
So presumably, Labour will now pay back the £4 million donation received from a hedge fund organisation, linked to arms manufacturing, based in the Cayman Islands, or is that different?
I suspect that if Labour received 36m from an overseas-based UK citizen crypto billionaire, that would indeed be different. I almost wish it would happen so I could hear the ferret reversing.
I almost wish it would happen so I could hear the ferret reversing.
No point. They’d grin, put on their poker faces and, with the aid of the MSM, ride it out and in two weeks’ time it’d all be forgotten. And they’d still think they’re better than us.
No point in hoping truth or honour will come to our aid at this point. It’s a simple knife fight to the death in an alleyway. Gentlemen’s rules were jettisoned decades ago.
They have to protect ‘our precious democracy’ Tim!
I don’t believe your final line is correct. If a bill is amended in the Lords, it has to come back to the Commons. Both Houses have to agree before it can go forward to Royal Assent.
That doesn’t stop Burnham whipping it through when the time comes.
Oh, and it’s not Andy Burnham’s government. It’s his ministry, and the king’s government.
The king may be (is) a twat, but these niceties matter.