Ignorance should be no excuse

Another week, another scandal.

The Labour Party have been caught breaking a 2000 law they themselves introduced by taking money from David Abrahams when he was known to be avoiding public disclosure by channelling his donations through his employees.

According to the 2000 Act, anyone who did anything which could have made it easier for the secret donations to be made, has committed an offence. The relevant section is below.

Offences concerned with evasion of restrictions on donations

(1) A person commits an offence if he—

(a) knowingly enters into, or

(b) knowingly does any act in furtherance of,

any arrangement which facilitates or is likely to facilitate, whether by means of any concealment or disguise or otherwise, the making of donations to a registered party by any person or body other than a permissible donor.

This is why all the key players are making ignorance the central plank of their defence. Because if they were in anyway knowingly involved in the arrangements, they would have committed an offence.

In Brown's case, he claims:

"I had no knowledge until Saturday night, either of the donations or of the practice which had grown up where they were improperly declared to the Electoral Commission... The money was not lawfully declared."

Woody says: If that's true you should be ashamed, because you had no oversight over the fundraising practices of your own party. And if it's false you should be even more ashamed because you have brazenly lied and cooperated in breaking the law.

In Harman's case, that she did not know that the money came from Abrahams rather than from Kidd.

Woody says: I refer the right dishonourable lady to the answer I gave above.

In the case of Abrahams himself he claims:

"Until the weekend I didn't know it was illegal for a person who hadn't personally donated to have to declare his hand to the Electoral Commission."

Woody says: And I didn't know I couldn't w**k on the bus. You broke the law, and you should face the consequences.

And in any case, the law is totally flawed - ignorance should be no defence at all.

If ignorance is a permissible defence then all Brown and Harman would have to do (and in practice exactly what they seem to have done) is to say to their funding teams "Just get the money in, I don't care how you do it, I just don't want to be told about it or involved in any way."

And then the team would have carte blanche to break the law, with Brown / Harman knowing full well that in the unlikely event that it comes to light they would be able to claim ignorance.

Such a law simply encourages politicians to deliberately lose sight of fundraising, when in fact they should be held responsible for it.

The whole thing stinks to high heaven.

Are we heading for a constitutional crisis at the next election?

Current Prediction: Labour short 13 of majority

Party	2005 Votes	2005 Seats	Pred Votes	Pred Seats
CON	33.24%	209	40.01%	284
LAB	36.21%	346	36.10%	313
LIB	22.65%	66	13.80%	20

Prediction based on opinion polls from 22 Oct 07 to 10 Nov 07, sampling 6,624 people.

The above table shows Baxter's current prediction of the likely result of the next election. It predicts that Labour will still be the largest party, but lack an overall majority. The most likely outcome would therefore be a Lab-Lib coalition of some sort.

Baxter's system takes a weighted average of recent survey results and converts them into a likely distribution of seats according to new constituency boundaries.

So if this happened Labour would still be forming a government even though the Tories had polled over 40% of the vote.

Would this really be politically acceptable?

While disparities between voting shares and seat shares are always going to be a feature of the first past the post system the fact is that nothing remotely like this has ever happened in the past. There has only been one election since the war when the party with the most seats did not also have the largest proportion of votes. That was in 1951 when the Tories won the election with 48% of the vote, although Labour actually polled higher, with 48.8% of the vote.

That didn't really bother anyone because the margin was so small, and in any case the Tories had nearly 50% of the vote.

But will people really accept a Labour-led government when they polled a full 4% less than the Tories?

This issue will be made all the more acute by the fact that Labour are already struggling to defend their reliance on Scottish and Welsh MPs to pass laws that primarily affect English constituencies (the so-called West Lothian question).

Could this be the trigger for a change in the electoral system and/or the representation of Welsh and Scottish MPs at Westminster?