Orders of the Day — Political Parties (Accounts)

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons am 12:00 am ar 15 Rhagfyr 1949.

Danfonwch hysbysiad imi am ddadleuon fel hyn

Photo of Mr Quintin Hogg Mr Quintin Hogg , Oxford 12:00, 15 Rhagfyr 1949

I turn now to the Co-operative Movement and its relation to the Labour Party. The Co-operative Movement also has political funds of a very considerable order, but very few of these appear in the political accounts of the Labour Party or even in the political* accounts of the Co-operative Party. As I see it, affiliation fees amount to about £18,630, but they represent only a very small proportion of the political expenditure in favour of the Labour Party by the Co-operative Movement.

No proportion whatever of the affiliation fee to the Co-operative Union of £100,000 is revealed as a separate political item, and yet we know that these things are not unpolitical, impartial or unbiased in the sense which the hon. Member for Hornchurch would have liked the Aims of Industry to be. The education movement on which the Co-operative Movement spends £358,000 a year is very largely directly political and tendentious; yet no reference is contained in the accounts to this political item.

All these are not matters of complaint. I am not asking for further information on these subjects at all. I should not get it, and I do not propose to waste my breath. What I am showing is that it is wholly impossible and impracticable for a political movement to publish significant accounts and that, in fact, the Labour Movement does not do so. How do the services of paid members of the trade union movement—whole-time secretaries and the like—some very considerable part of whose time is spent in tendentious or political activities, become shown in the account? Yet if it was an honest account on the ordinary basis of accountancy, those items would have to be shown. They are, of course, quite unshowable, but that only goes to show that the whole demand for accurate or full accounts is an impossible demand.

I now turn to the question of associated movements with which the hon. Member for Hornchurch specifically invited me to deal and with which he dealt at some considerable length.