Lessons from the United Kingdom

On Monday, Britain’s Prime Minister Gordon Brown promised a reform of the country’s party funding laws, after his government was embroiled in a scandal involving undeclared donations from the business community.
Following hard on the heels of the “cash for honours” scandal which had engulfed Brown’s predecessor Tony Blair, the latest malaise to grip the Labour Party also originated from candid leaks to the press by individual donors: in this case, David Abrahams, who admitted in a media interview to making “hidden donations” via third parties to Labour.
The dynamics of the current political debacle in Britain appear to mirror that of the local scenario, where party funding has also been in the glare of the media spotlight recently, and under fairly similar circumstances.
Once the subject of the Gonzi Commission in 1995 – which fizzled into nothing after the three parties concerned, PN, MLP and AD, failed to agree on a maximum threshold for declared donations – the issue was forcefully resuscitated last summer by none other than PN secretary general Joe Saliba, who let slip in an interview with The Times that his party regularly receives hidden donations from building contractors.
This revelation – which came in the wake of Saliba’s controversial holiday cruise on board the yacht of a well-known building contractor (and former PN councillor) – served to rekindle an issue which had lain dormant since the Gonzi Commission’s disintegration over a decade earlier.
But despite the clear resemblance between the British and Maltese party funding experiences, there is also a significant difference.
In the UK, both the cash-for-honours scandal and the Abrahams affair were met with disapproval, if not downright disgust, by the public at large. This much can be gleaned from the Labour Party’s own handbook on party funding, excerpts of which were published this week in The Guardian:
“Certain donation-reporting failures can be criminal offences. Donation reports are closely followed by the media and minor mistakes can lead to major damage to the party’s reputation... party officers should make potential donors aware of the disclosure requirements of Ppera [the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000], and that in cases of doubt we will always favour disclosure.”
The emphasis above is on “major damage to the party’s reputation”, suggesting that the British electorate takes these issues very seriously – enough to punish political parties at the polls, if they perceive them to be guilty of such misdemeanours.
In Malta, by way of contrast, it is debatable whether the word “scandal” can even be used to describe a situation which has manifestly lost its power to shock.
In the wake of Saliba’s revelations, MaltaToday Midweek asked a number of leading contractors if they had ever made donations to political parties. Several of Malta’s construction magnates openly replied in the affirmative. In some cases – like that of Anglu Xuereb – the donations were modest, and made against receipts. In others, the “donations” were actually barter arrangements, whereby expensive construction work was offered to political parties for free.
These and other revelations automatically raise questions which – at least in other European countries – could conceivably weaken, if not altogether topple an incumbent government. It is an old maxim that “you don’t get something for nothing”; what did these contractors expect, or indeed receive, in return for their generosity?
Faced with this disclosure, Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi – like Brown several months later – also called for multi-party talks on the subject of a new party-funding law. Among his initial suggestions was a system whereby political parties would be funded by the State. Admittedly this is indeed the preferred system in a number of EU member states; but perhaps unsurprisingly in a country where political parties have a consistent habit of rewarding themselves through public funds, a MaltaToday survey held in October found that a massive 70 per cent disapproved of the idea.
In the same week, the government presented a motion in Parliament to set up a Parliamentary Commission tasked with drawing up a system that regulates party funding and makes it more transparent. A repeat performance of the Gonzi Commission? Perhaps, but this time there appeared to be genuine consensus that many of the obstacles to agreement in 1995 had since been overcome.
Needless to add this hope proved premature. It is now December, and the motion has not yet even been debated; and with an election now expected early next year, no one will be surprised to discover that the issue of party funding has once again slipped firmly out of the national agenda.
Once again, it seems also that the Maltese electorate is willing to forgive its political class for yet another broken promise of a law on party funding. All things told, then, we are unlikely to learn anything from the latest lessons to come out of the UK.