Wendywatch: Taxpayers funding a glorified version of MS Access

Today's Sunday Times reports on a new row that may or may not engulf Wendy Alexander.

It transpires that she is one of 13 Labour MSPs (as well as 260 Labour MPs and 16 Labour Welsh Assembly Members) who are using parliamentary allowances to pay Computing for Labour - owned by a certain Labour Party - for IT services that Holyrood offers for free.

CfL helps Labour campaign during elections, but in this case, provide what is essentially a database to follow constituency casework. This would be fine, except it's basically MS Access. I know this because I used to be in Labour (but I grew out of it), used to volunteer in an MP's office, and used CfL.

So software that MSPs could probably get from Holyrood anyway, they're using Parliamentary allowances - taxpayers' money - to get the Labour Party to do it for them. Your tax money is therefore assisting Labour's campaign strategy. As it is basically just a database - and if the MSPs need help with that, they should hire an assistant who can use MS Office - the argument that it is an invaluable support tool to help them deal with constituents' problems is just a red herring. In any case, are these 13 MSPs the only effective constituency caseworkers?

Wendy Alexander - and the others - have broken no rules. But there is no need for this particular software as it's already available, and there is no need to pay CfL for it - other than to channel extra cash to Labour. There is certainly no need to use Parliamentary allowances for it. Perhaps, while Nicol Stephen is in the mood to propose inquiries by the Corporate Body, this is something else they could look at?

PS Thanks to SLG at Our Scotland for flagging up the story.

Wendywatch: 9th December

It had to happen, really, didn't it?

Anyway... in today's papers:

It turns out that Wendy's list of fundraisers was sent from her Holyrood office - a party political campaign being run on Parliamentary facilities is a no-no, and with Wendy not declaring donations on her Register of Interests, the Standards Commissioner is wading in.

Key Labour donor Willie Haughey is now refusing to give any more money to the Party until the mess is cleared, and as well as losing an important fundraiser - which won't go down well - Wendy has lost another spin doctor, this time Kerron Cross, who was to be Number 2 to Gavin Yates.

Oh, and a local ally in her political backyard is in the soup, with Renfrewshire Councillor Tommy Williams suspended from the Labour group and sacked from his post with Glasgow City Council for financial irregularities, after allegedly falsifying his time-sheets. One wonders if her election agent will be the next one under the spotlight of shame.

I think my response is predictable: she's lost a donor, she's losing employees, her allies are crooked, she's broken the Alastair Campbell "two weeks in the Sunday papers and your position is untenable" rule, she's facing the same drip-drip of allegations that did for both Henry McLeish and David McLetchie, everybody that can investigate something now appears to be doing so, and Charlie Gordon has opted not to go quietly into the political night. Labour need someone, anyone, else at the helm.

The Expenditure Column

Having spent a good long while looking at the Income column of party accounts, news comes of the Expense column, thanks to the release of the parties' spending during the May campaign.

In terms of overall outgoings, the SNP come first, with £1,382,730. Labour spent £1,102,866. The Tories spent £601,982 and the LibDems £303,740. The Greens spent £108,162 while Margo MacDonald's re-election campaign cost £22,105.29.

In terms of how much every seat cost, the Green seats were the most expensive at £54,081 spent per seat won. The 17 Tory seats - Alex Fergusson was a Tory until becoming PO, remember - cost £35,410.71 each. The SNP shelled out £29,419.79 for each of their 47, compared with Labour's £23,975.35 per seat (though, of course, the election cost them power, so it wasn't great value). The LibDem seats were a comparative bargain (until you factor in loss of power) £18,983.75, which makes their MSPs cheaper to elect than Margo MacDonald.

In terms of the cost of each vote on the two ballots, a Green vote was the most expensive, at £1.26. Margo spent £1.15 per vote, and the SNP spent £1.07 per vote. The Tories spent 97p for each vote, while Labour spent 89p. LibDem votes were good value, at just 55p per X.

So the fact that the SNP outspent and outpolled Labour may be telling, but remember that at the last Westminster election, the Tories were second in terms of Scottish campaign spending, but fourth in terms of Scottish votes and seats. Again, this time, the Tories nationally spent almost double what the LibDems coughed up, and got only 61,845 votes over the two ballots, and one more seat, to show for it. So simply to say there's a correlation between spending and polling doesn't tell the whole story. This time - unlike the 2005 Election - the parties who did get into Parliament do find that their expense ranking corresponds with their ranking in terms of public support and Parliamentary strength, and the high cost of Green votes may be explained by the fact that in 72 of the 73 Constituencies, there was only one opportunity to vote Green rather than two. The same applies to Margo MacDonald, who was only on the Regional Vote in Lothian, and did not seek any constituency.

However, leaving them out of the equation for a moment, an SNP vote cost almost double the price of a LibDem vote. Food for thought.

One last thing: a number of people commenting on the online versions of the papers have sniffed that the press have dug this story up to bail Labour out. In fairness, I should point out that the Electoral Commission will have released their figures this week, and it's a broadly similar timescale to the publication of the 2005 Westminster campaign figures. So anyone looking for an accusation that this story is a part of a Unionist media conspiracy will have to look elsewhere. Surprising as it may seem, co-incidences do actually happen from time to time.

And so, we wait

Despite this blogger's predictions - and hopes - Wendy Alexander is still Leader of Scottish Labour. She is waiting for what the Electoral Commission say, and in fairness to her, there is a logic to that. If Charlie Gordon - or, as Navraj Ghaleigh would have it, David Whitton - were to be the fall guy who takes the blame, then a Wendy Alexander resignation would serve nothing and she would live to fight another day. She would be wounded, there's no question about that, but she could survive.

More interestingly, and from Wendy's perspective more dangerously, Charlie Gordon has confounded everyone by announcing that he's staying and fighting. He too is waiting for the Electoral Commission to report and has tided himself over by attacking practically everyone, mostly on his own side, and particularly former colleagues in Glasgow City Council's Labour Group.

Firstly, this decision does not square with his original decision to resign as Shadow Transport Minister. Is he now going to un-resign? Would Wendy let him? Why was it that the facts made his position on the frontbench untenable, but we have to await confirmation from the Electoral Commission before his position on any bench becomes untenable?

Secondly, Wendy now has a threat. Gordon has been hung out to dry. If they both survive, Wendy has an enemy on the backbenches, who could wreak havoc, Gordon did more than many to undermine Jack McConnell - the two were not exactly bosom pals and Gordon threatened to act as a stalking horse if McConnell's leadership had continued. Charlie Gordon now provides a destabilising influence - as if it were needed - on the Labour benches. Will his colleagues rally round to him? After his combattive statement, it's doubtful, but Wendy has a threat, a potential critic, with an axe to grind. One public critic has a habit of generating a second, even if the two have different grounds for their position, different criticisms to make, and can't stand each other. None of that matters: once one egg is thrown, a second can follow. Then a third, and so on.

Thirdly, should Gordon be damned by the Electoral Commission and has to resign, it doesn't matter whether or not Wendy is in trouble as well, she's still toast. And the reason is simple: by not going with dignity right at the start,Gordon has chosen to fight on and prove his innocence. But if there is no innocence to prove, what then? Gordon has committed the same false indignation that did for the likes of Jonathan Aitken. And what happened to his party? Anyway, Gordon's reputation would be in the mud, Labour would be bounced into a By-Election they didn't want, and with Gordon having attacked everyone, key figures in the local - and national - party would be at each other's throats. This would all but hand the seat to the SNP and that would kill off Wendy Alexander's leadership. Weak performances at FMQs are one thing. A scandal is another - we do not yet know if Wendy has what footballers call 'bouncebackability' so she may survive this. But an electoral defeat to the SNP, in combination with those other factors, may prove to be the final straw, and the Labour MPs who have been supporting her to keep Brown safe may start looking nervously to their own seats, their own majorities, and gently suggest that out of the 44 other people who would be available, one of them might have a better shot of getting Labour back on the success vector than Wendy Alexander.

In any case, Wendy Alexander and Charlie Gordon have both publicly tied their futures to the Electoral Commission, so those hoping for a quick beheading will be disappointed. Wait we must, and wait we will.

Or must we? This story has been driven primarily by the Sunday papers, most notably the Sunday Herald. Who will get what coverage this week?

Perhaps we need only wait a couple of hours to see what will happen: if the story dies down, then the Commission will have the final say. If not, the vultures will be circling. Perhaps they may even be preparing to swoop.

So the fate of the Scottish Parliament's main opposition party rests in Paul Hutcheon's hands. We await his next move.

On 'Experts'

In every political debate, the parties are keen to trot out 'experts' who claim to offer total proof that their ideas are right. Then the other parties find other 'experts' who claim to offer total proof that the first expert should be given psychiatric care.

Experts argue. Experts challenge one another. Experts have journals, where one puts forward an idea, and others spend the next six issues debunking it. Why is this? Well, put simply, experts are people too. The only reason they are considered experts is that they have spent a long time absorbing what previous experts said when they were knocking seven bells out of each other, and - this is the important bit - forming their own conclusions. And just like the laiety, experts can use their own in-built approaches - which is why I always had trouble with recent developments in Binary Syntax as it involved giving determiners like 'the' or 'a' an enhanced status which I didn't think they merited, so as far as I'm concerned, the determiner will always be in Spec-NP, and NEVER at the head of a Determiner Phrase.

Anyway, one such expert who has been cited is Navraj Ghaleigh. Ghaleigh notes that the illegal donation by Paul Green to Wendy Alexander's campaign was made out to just that: the "W.A. Campaign", and not to Wendy Alexander. Therefore, Ghaleigh asserts, Alexander herself is not responsible for the donation, but her campaign treasurer, David Whitton is.

Ghaleigh is, of course, the same Navraj Ghaleigh who stood as the Labour candidate in Edinburgh West. And it overlooks various points: for example, why did Brian Ashcroft's computer (Ashcroft being Wendy's husband) keep a record of donations, including questions at to their permissability, when this was David Whitton's job? Further, a cheque to Wendy Alexander herself rather than the WA Campaign would enter the legal answer to the Bermuda Triangle. This would no longer be a campaign donation, it would be a timely gift to her, to spend as she wished. But there would surely be issues with the Members' Interests register at Holyrood. And if Ghaleigh is correct, then why does ultimate responsibility for a campaign not lie with its leader?

A saga rumbling on, a leader trundling off?

As things stand, Charlie Gordon is in even more trouble: it transpires he received warnings about donations from Paul Green two years ago, it seems that the Daily Record - Labour's voice on Earth - has turned on him, possibly because he yelled at their reporter, and he is making a statement on his future later in the week. As he appears not to have one, the general conclusion - which I subscribe to - is that he is to resign his seat, presenting Glasgow Cathcart's voters with their second By-Election since September 2005. What else could he announce?

Wendy Alexander, meanwhile, has received criticism from Sir Alastair Graham - a former public standards supremo - and the donor in question, who has described events as "bad management". However, this is counterbalanced by news that the meeting of the Labour Group of MSPs gave Wendy "unanimous backing". But this is in turn contradicted by claims that a couple of MSPs have spoken anonymously to the press, calling for her to go. Now, one or two MSPs muttering to the Herald is not the same as a full-scale revolt, but if it's true, it still damages claims of unanimity. Therefore, we can deduce one of the following: either Duncan McNeil, the Convener of the Labour Group at Holyrood, was stretching the truth, or The Herald was. Neither is impossible. But a stronger possibility is that both tales are correct, that a handful of Labour MSPs have spoken to the press in less than flattering terms about their current leader but are too chickenshit to come into the open. The current theory is that Wendy is waiting until after PMQs to resign - so that there is no scalp with which to taunt Gordon Brown then - but before FMQs on Thursday - so that she doesn't take pelters then.

It's a credible theory, primarily because, as with most of Labour's response to the concurrent scandals, it appears to be backfiring. The Labour Party lost its General Secretary to the scandal, but the press dug further into the story and turned up Harriet Harman's name. Harman tried to attach herself to Brown over this and that has only dragged him down rather than kept her safe. Alexander was supposed to saty to avoid the resignation bug spreading to Westminster. Instead, it has led Wendy Alexander to claims that she is being programmed by Brown, incapable of making decisions for herself and for the benefit of the Labour MSPs who she leads (remember that she only leads the MSPs, of course), and it has given the Scottish scandal more publicity in England, allowing more eggs to be thrown at the PM. This approach would stil give David Cameron and Vince Cable (as well any SNP MPs that the Speaker happens to call, but don't hold your breath for that) extra ammo on Wednesday, and give Alex Salmond the perfect opportunity to rip Labour on Thursday. It is the worst of all worlds, and given Labour's headless-chicken-esque response to events, it is probably their plan.

Should she go? In my mind, she most certainly should: she has broken electoral law and therefore her campaign for Leader was flawed, even though she had no challengers (can you imagine the mess if she had?). Is it partisan to say this? Not really. Let's try and sketch out the next few weeks depending on whether or not she goes.

If she goes, other parties will claim the scalp and celebrate for a little while, citing a Labour Party in disarray. But this story will die down, Labour will find its next Leader over the following weeks and regroup, ready for the challenges ahead, most notably the Budget process. And should there be a By-Election in Glasgow Cathcart, Labour people nervous about a leaderless party trying to defend the seat might want to speak to Liberal Democrats in Dunfermline & West Fife, where the Party won a By-Election despite being in the middle of a leadership contest following Charles Kennedy's clumsy departure.

If she stays, other parties - to say nothing of the press, which now appears to have it in for her - will harass and harangue her. Every policy announcement will be ignored: the questions will be all about sleaze, and the role of her closest colleagues in this affair. Muck will be raked, and Wendy Alexander will continue to be the story, until she goes. And this would even colour Cathcart: this would be the By-Election caused by corruption, and Labour would be painted as the party of sleaze, and with Wendy still in charge, Gordon would be presented as a scapegoat. The claim would be that any Labour candidate would be supporting a corrupt Leadership, and unless the SNP select the weakest candidate in Scottish electoral history, the likely outcome would be for Labour to end up one MSP down, which would all but force Wendy out. The Labour group would, as a result, attempt to lock the stable door despite the fact that the horse hadn't so much bolted as run halfway across the country before its absence was noticed.

So the partisan approach would be for me to want Wendy to stay and drag Labour down ever further. But Wendy Alexander is colouring, even poisoning, politics, a subject that got me excited enoguh to start blogging about it, so you can tell how much value I place on politics. Today, she has dismissed resignation as the easy way out. It is, but it gives Labour a chance at a clean break. So for her to talk about it being wrong - surely it's a bit late to start talking about right and wrong? - is to miss the point: her actions determine not just her future, but the future of forty six MSPs (herself included), to say nothing of Labour's Scottish MPs, MEPs and Councillors. That in turn has a knock on effect for every individual community in which the Labour plays (or could play) some role; it affects Scotland and its people; it could, potentially, affect the future of the entire UK, particualrly in the event of a close election, where every vote, every seat, may count.

And, at least ostensibly, Wendy has reduced all of that to a matter of her pride. The right thing is to go, and give us all a chance to start again.

Wendy: the woman who has destroyed Labour?

She's not going. She said she regretted any damage done to the Labour Party but that she didn't mean to do wrong.

Unfortunately for her, she has still broken the law. She was supposed to check the donations were legal. They weren't. She knew that they weren't. If she had simply dropped the ball and been unaware of what was going on, she could just muddle through. But she knew, the letter to Paul Green, and her admission that she was responsible for it and addressed it to him, proves it. So she broke the law, by accepting the donation, by not checking that it was legal, and by knowing that the donor was not a UK registered voter. Therefore, she has done wrong, and she knew she was doing wrong. Either she doesn't know the campaign laws brought in by her own Party, or she has just told a whopper.

And now she faces a drip-drip of allegations, with leak following revelation, and likely investigations by the Electoral Commission and Strathclyde Police, constantly dragging her and her Party through the mud. She's damaging Labour by continuing to lead it. And yet still she continues.

If she does really regret any damage to the Party, she doesn't regret it enough. If she did, Cathy Jamieson would be Acting Leader now.

The odds are that the order has come from Brown: stay on, or everyone has to go.

But the voters will see that they all go soon enough.

It's getting worse for Wendy

Barring the fact that Charlie Gordon put Paul Green's name forward for an honour of some description - have they learned nothing from Cash for Honours? - things have got worse for Wendy Alexander. We learn that Moir Lockhead, Chief Executive of First Group, was approached for a £995 donation, but declined to provide it. We also learn that it was to be channelled through John Lyons, the former MP for Strathkelvin & Bearsden, falling foul of the law barring donations through a third party. And to make matters worse, the man behind this donation was one David Whitton, MSP for Strathkelvin & Bearsden, now Wendy Alexander's PPS.

Meanwhile, "Tom" (McCabe, undoubtedly, now Labour's member of the Corporate Body, and Wendy's campaign manager) got Neil Davidson and Willie Haughey on side. "Jackie" (Baillie, Shadow Parliament Minister) arranged donations, as did "Pauline" (McNeill, now Shadow Education Secretary). Another donor was approached by "Jim": the Sunday Herald does not join any dots here, but this could well be Jim Sheridan, MP for Paisley & Renfrewshire North. One wonders how many others helped secure donations, and whether or not this explains why Alexander's Shadow Cabinet is so large.

Anyway, the bell would seem to be tolling for the Leader of the Opposition, but one figure supports her: Gordon Brown wants her to stay on according to the Sunday Mail, but his motives are less than pure. If Wendy goes, Harriet Harman has to go. And she has attached herself to him, so if she goes down, Brown goes down with her.

Scottish Labour is now languishing, tearing itself apart with a weak leader at Holyrood, now unable to land a blow on the SNP Government. And Brown is willing to let his party wither on the vine so that he can stay in Downing Street a little while longer. To paraphrase Jeremy Thorpe, greater love hath no man, that he should lay down his party for his office.

Wendy in Trouble

While we now know that Wendy Alexander managed to spend about £15 grand on a campaign that wasn't needed, and that SNP Leadership Candidates fund their own campaigns even when they have challengers, the revelation has come that Wendy wrote a personal thank you note to Paul Green. She did not write it to the company, who were the official donors, so she wrote to a man based in Jersey thanking him for a donation. That would, I'm sure, be acceptable evidence in any court that wished to prosecute her.

Further, Labour have put out their own statement, separate of anything said or done by Wendy Alexander, saying that they refused money from Green precisely because he was not a permissable donor. Therefore, Wendy does not have Harriet Harman's excuse that the Party took the money, and if the cash is good enough for the Party, it's good enough for her.

So, you have Wendy writing a personal thank you note to someone who by law, she should not have had any reason to thank, and Labour now issuing its own statements, separate of its Leader. The word that springs to mind is 'doomed'.

By the way, the man behind the donations that have got UK Labour in trouble has dismissed it as "cock-up, not conspiracy".

This sounds eerily like "a muddle not a fiddle".

And we know what happened to the man who uttered that phrase.

£$€!!!!!!!!!!!! - a tale of two similar scandals

We now have two Labour party funding scandals running concurrently: the UK Labour party receiving donations from a property developer via intermediataries. This has claimed the Party's General Secretary, mand it transpires, of course, that Harriet Harman received some similarly conveyed money from the same source to fund her successful bid for the Deputy Leadership. Further, the Electoral Commission have called in the police. If the police to follow this up with the vigour of the 'Cash for Honours' investigation, what will the CPS say? And will Labour dismiss the Electoral Commission's complaint as a political stunt? And given that Harriet Harman got into her position with the help of dirty money - that cash could have made the difference between her winning and Alan Johnson winning - how long can she stay in?

But tonight, news from Scottish Labour is that Wendy Alexander's Leadership campaign broke the law in an attempt to secure funding from a businessman based in Jersey, but with a UK registered company. Party Finance law states that only UK registered electors can donate to UK registered political parties, and all £1000+ donations have to be disclosed. Jersey does not count as a member of the United Kingdom, so for Paul Green to donate the money as himself is against the law. But for him to give it to Labour through his company, Combined Property Services, is perfectly legal, and to give £950 means he is within the donation limit and can aoid detection.

The problem is, Green's name was on the cheque, and therefore, he gave money to Wendy Alexander's campaign. Charlie Gordon, MSP for Glasgow Cathcart has already carried the can for this and quit as Labour's Transport Spokesman. Gordon specifically got in touch with Combined Property Services with the express intention of soliciting a donation, and it is believed to be one of many donations to Alexander in the £900-£1000 bracket. Regardless of the breakdown of individual donations, Alexander pocketed £17,000 for a leadership campaign in which she was the only candidate. In her bid to become Labour's Leader of the Opposition in Scotland, and their candidate for First Minister in 2011, Alexander's campaign attempted to side-step two clear rules and failed to make it around one of them. It is Gordon who pays the price, but there are other questions, regarding the donation, the campaign, and Gordon:

1. How many other donations were there in the £900-£1000 bracket?

2. Where did they come from?

3. Why did a leadership campaign in which there was only one candidate need £17,000?

4. How long after it became clear that Wendy would be returned unopposed did fundraising end?

5. With £950 returned to Green, what happened to the rest of the money? How was that spent in a campaign that wasn't needed?

6. Who instructed and/or permitted Gordon to seek out Combined Property Services?

7. What did Wendy Alexander know of the fundraising that was carried out on her behalf?

8. What did her campaign manager, Tom McCabe, know?

9. What connection is there, if any, with this scandal and the resignation of Lesley Quinn, Scottish Labour's General Secretary? Her UK equivalent resigned after he was implicated in the UK Labour scandal, but she went suddenly after decades of service to the party, before any of this happened. Did she know what was coming?

10. Seeing as Charlie Gordon was all for challenging Jack McConnell's leadership on the grounds that Labour members deserved a choice on who led Labour at Holyrood, what the Hell was he doing raising money for Wendy Alexander?

And an eleventh, far more damning question can be found at ASwaS.

The Party Line

...or rather, rail-line. Richard Thomson has been looking through the Electoral Commission's records of donations to Scottish Labour, and has two donations from Network Rail, totalling £11,000. What's interesting is that on the Network Rail website it says, "Network Rail is a 'not for dividend' company and all our profits go straight back into improving the railway"

Exactly how is donating £11,000 putting profits straight back into improving the railway?

Brother, can you spare £27,000?

As well as reporting on the possible defection of a Labour MP, the Sunday Herald also has an article on a £27,000 loan to the SSP by the Party's former deputy Treasurer, Gordon Morgan. Morgan wants the money back in full, and is taking the Party to court to get it.

Morgan apparently started the action when he discovered that the SSP had sold their HQ again to keep themselves afloat. Oh, and did I mention that he has defected to Solidarity?

This is the latest (and perhaps most destructive) skirmish between the parties: Solidarity leaders Tommy Sheridan and Rosemary Byrne withdrew from an agreement to pool the cost of hiring researchers; a Solidarity activist has called on the SSP to disband; the SSP have called on the Standards Commissioner to investigate whether or not Sheridan should have declared a stay in a hotel paid for by a tabloid newspaper. This one, however, is the big one, and could damage the SSP heavily, leaving them with little or no resources to fight the campaign. The SSP simply say that they are 'prepared', claiming that, 'Solidarity think they can ruin us but it won't happen'.

I would say that Solidarity are about to win the battle for the Scottish Left, but I suspect that with the vitriol that's going into this row, there will be no winners, only a lot of disenchanted voters who threw their lot in with the SSP in 2003, but either won't bother voting or will support someone else entirely this time around. And they will be the biggest losers in this affair.

A few continuing stories (Updated)

A quick glance through the weekend's papers (and a look at the TV programmes) tells me that this is a week to look at stories that I've already covered, and how they're progressing.

Firstly, on stock transfer: Malcolm Chisholm has been interviewed today, informing viewers that he has personally visited all of the Council areas where the Council Tenants have been balloted on having their housing transferred over to an association. Obviously, Edinburgh (his home patch) was the first of these. The tenants voted No. He's visited Stirling. They voted No. He visited Renfrewshire. They voted No, which could possibly gift two marginal constituencies to the SNP next May. He's also campaigning in Inverclyde and Highland, no doubt to the abject terror of local Labour parties in those areas. Having admitted that he is now the Zelig of stock transfer debacles, he's effectively cursed any future plans while he's Communities Minister and now seems to have "Sack Me" written on his face.

On party funding there are two interesting stories worth considering: the first is the RMT's decision to end its affiliation to the SSP, as discussed here. They haven't as yet announced their support for Solidarity, but I suspect that this will be a matter of 'when' rather than 'if'. Meanwhile, the £2.4 million donated to the LibDems by convicted perjurer Michael Brown is causing consternation: reports abound that the party will have to return the cash, and the Scottish LibDems have opted against disclosing how much of that money went their way, but seeing as their 2005 Election expenses were more than double their 2001 figures, I'd guess that it was quite a bit. But if there is a forced repayment, it'll leave the LibDems' 2007 campaign in tatters.

Finally, The Greens will be discussing Coalition options (a subject I like to come back to occasionally) at their Conference next week, with Patrick Harvie taking the initiative by circulating a paper on what part the party could play in propping up any potential Executive next year. Although he's tight-lipped on what policies will have to be part of any deal (though he has re-stated the party's opposition to nuclear power), he did mention his preferred option for how the deal would work. He's seeking the activists' backing for the 'Confidence and Supply' model, where the Greens would take no ministerial seats and would not be expected to support the Executive on most matters, but they would support another party's candidate for First Minister, back the Executive in confidence motions and vote for the Executive's Budget in exchange for concessions on policy over the four-year term.

Harvie says this will allow a more exciting form of politics, where an Executive will have to win an argument before it wins the vote. I think it'll lead to more U.S. Congress-style 'pork barrel' politics, with Executive whips having to negotiate with other parties, and individual members of all political hues (including their own), in order to get votes passed, where the only question Ministers will have to answer from MSPs will be, "What's in it for us?" Or perhaps I'm getting cynical.

UPDATE: According to Kenny Sheerin's blog, the Scottish Republican Socialist Movement has also disaffiliated from the SSP, apparently citing concerns that the party isn't giving enough weight to the Independence argument. However, a number of SRSM members will stay in the party as individuals, so I don't think they're switching to Solidarity.

Money Talks

The financial state of the parties is worth discussing today, particularly in light of the news that Sir Tom Farmer has pledged £100,000 to the SNP. This is undoubtedly good news for the Party in one sense, as it has always been short of wealthy backers, with the obvious exception of Sir Sean Connery, who is still wealthy and is still a backer of the Party, but not in the financial sense. However, you could argue one of the SNP's big selling points has been its lack of wealthy backers as they have hitherto gone to great pains to point this out, and in any case, the Party was trying to raise £1million, and before Sir Tom's intervention, they were only a quarter of the way there with less than six months to go before the formal dissolution of the Scottish Parliament and the start of the official campaign (the unofficial campaign having started last September at the latest). This means that the Party has to up its profile and its fundraising game, or find at least six more wealthy backers now.

However, they should count their blessings that they aren't the Labour Party's financiers, who have had to pull the plug the formal conference in Glasgow next Spring, replacing it with a more 'informal' (i.e. cheap) arrangement, but also deprives Labour of its showpiece rally before the Election. This lack of money in the pot couldn't have come at a worse time for Scottish Labour, who will need to fight a hard (and expensive) campaign. I also suspect that the people at Labour HQ in London hasn't quite realised that Scottish Labour is in a perilous position... Scotland is probably number three on their list of priorities: first place will go to the English local government elections in an attempt to prevent yet more votes ebbing away from Labour in the key marginals in England; number two will be the Welsh Assembly, where Labour lost its majority last year, failed to win it back at the Blaenau Gwent By-Election, and faces a set of opposition parties who are more predisposed to banding together to give Labour a good kicking than in Scotland.

Then there's the SSP, whose troubles of all sorts have been well-documented, particularly where cash is concerned. At Conference yesterday, the RMT representatives hinted at the possibility that the union end its affiliation to the Party over the handling of the Tommy Sheridan saga. Given Sheridan's attempt to appeal to trade unionists (that is when he's not fighting the evil alliance that he claims exists Rupert Murdoch, MI5 and Colin Fox), there's probably a good bet to be had on the RMT switching to Solidarity before the year is out.

SSP finances

The SSP doesn't quite know how to handle money. First, Tommy Sheridan and Rosemary Byrne have to take out personal loans to keep the party afloat, then they submit their accounts late (how long does it take to tell the Electoral Commission 'We have no money'?), and now this:

There is a £16,966 hole in their accounts. The 2004 accounts have been signed off five months late by their accountants (Trots with accountants! What is the world coming to?), who could not conduct a full audit as the party didn't have all the paperwork necessary. The money was, it seems, paid to a former party official who went into hiding after a rift with his ex-colleagues. Problem is, there's no paperwork. No invoices, no receipts.

The upshot of this is that the Electoral Commission are going to be monitoring the SSP's finances for a year to keep an eye on them.

Number crunching

Seems I'm now involved in a dance with the BBC: they carry a story on the Electoral Commission publishing the parties' expenses; I visit the Commission website, get the expenditure details for Scotland, and publish the figures on here along with the cost of each vote. Now on my next visit to the BBC website, I find a more detailed story... including the cost of each vote.

So do I have the BBC rattled or am I giving myself too much credit? Answers on a postcard please, but it's worth looking at the figures - according to Auntie Beeb a Labour vote in the UK as a whole cost £1.90 (13 pence more expensive than in Scotland alone), a LibDem vote was 10p cheaper at 72p, while a Tory vote was a whapping £1.54 cheaper at £2.03!

Party Expenses

The Electoral Commission have published the expenses from each party in the Westminster election. Labour's campaign was the most expensive at £1,636,450, or £1.77 per vote; the LibDems spent £435,406 (82p per vote); the Greens spent £22,831.08 (89p per vote); while the SSP spent £21,494.95 (49p per vote). The best value campaign was the SNP's, who spent £193,987, making each vote they won a bargain at just 47p. As for the Tories, they spent £1,317,192.73, making them the second highest spending party (I thought they were after lower spending?). Seeing as they came a distant fourth with 369,388 votes, a vote for the Tories cost the party £3.57, more than double the price of a Labour vote, and more than seven and a half times the price of a vote for the SNP.