Part of the debate – in the House of Commons am 12:00 am ar 15 Rhagfyr 1949.
No, Sir, I would not be in favour of either so unfair or so ridiculous a proposal. I think I may now deal with the question of practicability, and it may be that on that ground I shall have a little more to say about the suggestion made by the hon. Member for Nelson and Colne (Mr. S. Silverman).
It is said that the Labour Party publishes its accounts. That is part of the "Holier than thou" campaign which the Pharisees and the hypocrites of the modern world try to put about. The Labour Party publishes accounts, and the accounts are cooked, as I shall proceed to show. Nothing can prevent their being cooked. I do not complain of their being cooked, but they are at least as remote from the truth as the prospectus for which the late Lord Kylsant was sent to prison. They serve no useful function except the purely internal one of keeping the various confederated forces inside the Labour Party, sufficiently informed for their own purposes of what their potential rivals and colleagues are doing. From the point of view of the public the accounts are cooked. They bear no relation to the facts. They bear no relation to those facts either as to the expenditure from the fund, or as to the way in which the fund was obtained, or as to the way in which it is expended. They are cooked accounts. I do not complain of then-being cooked because they never could have been anything else.
The position is that the accounts show, or purport to show, the income of the Labour Party as something in the neighbourhood of £250,000. I think the actual figure shown is £236,000. The real figure is something like £750,000. That is the figure which ought to be shown on a rational account, but it could not be shown, for the reasons which I shall indicate. The figure shown in the account is £250,000 or thereabouts, as income. How much is that a genuine figure? The answer, so far as I can see, is "Hardly at all." Take, for instance, the political funds of the trade unions. How much of that is shown in the Labour Party's accounts? The answer is—and again I hope I shall not be tied to an exact figure, but I think I am substantially right—about £113,000. The actual size of that fund, as is known on this occasion, though most of the other figures can only be calculated, is about £400,000. The result is— Mr. Attewell (Harborough) rose —