{"id":961,"date":"2010-04-08T17:50:43","date_gmt":"2010-04-08T17:50:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/really.zonky.org\/?p=961"},"modified":"2010-04-08T17:50:43","modified_gmt":"2010-04-08T17:50:43","slug":"beholden-to-the-unions-or-to-the-fat-cats","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/?p=961","title":{"rendered":"Beholden To The Unions Or To The Fat Cats ?"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Tories have been slowly trotting out a procession of business leaders who think a Tory government would be a good idea. This is supposed to be news ? We know<\/em> that the Tories are bankrolled by big business, which gives those business leaders a considerable say in what the Tories do – not explicitly, but in terms of influence.<\/p>\n

Labour of course is similarly indebted to the unions, which gives the union leaders considerable influence over Labour’s policies.<\/p>\n

Given that I am not a fat cat but one of the workers, I am likely to be less unhappy with the union’s unfair advantage with Labour in charge than with the fat cats hotline to a Tory government.<\/p>\n

But I’m not happy about either Tories or Labour being beholden to any select group. It doesn’t seem to me to be a healthy situation if some group has an unfair access to the corridors of power because they helped fund the political party who managed to win an election.<\/p>\n

There is of course the Liberals who are not funded in the same way, but realistically they are unlikely to win a majority. The best chance for Liberal involvement in the next government is with a “hung parliament” with no overall control – at least until a pact is established.<\/p>\n

The real answer is to make party funding independent of private interest groups.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Tories have been slowly trotting out a procession of business leaders who think a Tory government would be a good idea. This is supposed to be news ? We know that the Tories are bankrolled by big business, which gives those business leaders a considerable say in what the Tories do – not explicitly, […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[3],"tags":[114,206,176,251],"class_list":["post-961","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-labour","tag-liberal","tag-tory","tag-uk-election","category-3-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1f2KI-fv","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/961","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=961"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/961\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":963,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/961\/revisions\/963"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=961"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=961"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=961"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}