The 2020 Sunday Times Rich List on donations to political parties in 2019
2019 was of course a General Election year in the UK and the 2020 Sunday Times Rich List looked at political donations made by the UK’s richest people.
The results were interesting.
£40.6m was donated in 2019 with £35.5m of that from the 50 richest people. Those 50 people managed to donate £24.9m to the Tories and £5,000 to Labour. The biggest donation however was from Lord Sainsbury (a former Minister in the Blair Government) to the Liberal Democrats. He gave them £8m.
It might be argued on that basis that donations didn’t equal votes or seats but it has to be taken into account that the LibDems own assessment of their campaign (May 2020) was that it was a high speed car-crash.
The Brexit Party also got £1.276m and thankfully no seats though it may have helped Nigel Farage’s bar bills a bit.
By contrast Labour raised £5m in trade union donations. The Sunday Times found that 160 people on the Rich List of a 1,000 people donated £96.750 in total to Labour.
When Labour last won an Election in 2005 with Blair as leader donations from the Top 50 ST Rich Listers then totalled £16.5m. In case anyone is tempted to think that this was specifically a Corbyn problem the donations from the same group to Labour covering the 2015 Election when Ed Miliband was leader were just £1.1m
Its about donating money to what is seen as the likely winning party, hence buying in some undefined way possible political influence.
Given that Corbyn was not so far from winning in 2017 there is a wider story here though. Perhaps the view was the donations would not buy influence in this case and perhaps conversely that big money to the Tories could not guarantee an Election win given the travails of Theresa May. A good deal of research is required to sort all that out I suspect.
Overall though it all looks like what William Cobbett used to call Old Corruption in the pre-1832 unreformed Parliamentary system.
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