Talk:Political funding in the United Kingdom

A fact from Political funding in the United Kingdom appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 9 February 2009, and was viewed approximately 393 times (disclaimer) (check views). The text of the entry was as follows:

Did you know... that the United Kingdom political party the Liberal Democrats received £456,000 in state political funding in 2006?

A record of the entry may be seen at Wikipedia:Recent additions/2009/February.

Wikipedia

Politics of the United Kingdom Mid‑importance

	This article is within the scope of WikiProject Politics of the United Kingdom, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of Politics of the United Kingdom on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.Politics of the United KingdomWikipedia:WikiProject Politics of the United KingdomTemplate:WikiProject Politics of the United KingdomPolitics of the United Kingdom articles
Mid	This article has been rated as Mid-importance on the project's importance scale.

Finance & Investment Low‑importance

	This article is within the scope of WikiProject Finance & Investment, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of articles related to Finance and Investment on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.Finance & InvestmentWikipedia:WikiProject Finance & InvestmentTemplate:WikiProject Finance & InvestmentFinance & Investment articles
Low	This article has been rated as Low-importance on the project's importance scale.

Needs a lot of work

I have found and corrected two places in which this article was misleading. First of all, it said that historically parties relied mainly on membership subs for funding. The reference is to a short BBC article which does not actually say this, and I find it hard to believe. Secondly, it said that the labour party gets most of its money form trade unions, also a reference to the BBC article, which does not say this either (again, I doubt it is true). Clearly all the references need checking, as there may be other misleading statements that need changing. In general the article is not very informative. It gives no estimate of how much money is given to whom by whom. It would be good to have something of this type on the page to the extent that the information is available.

Given the number of members and the membership fee it would not be hard to figure out what contribution membership subs give in total per year. For the tories it is 7,250,000 if there are 290,000 members and the all pay 25 (although younger members pay only 5, making this tricky). Anyway, this is per year, showing that it is a lot less that the amount raised in donations per quarter. Such a simple calculation shouldn't count as novel research.

O'society (talk) 00:13, 16 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

The heading is still true! As far as I know "political funding" became an issue of statutory law in 1883 with the Corrupt and Illegal Practices (Prevention) Act. So why not start from there? Membership subs as a source of party funding is really disputable for the U.K.; does the author of this article mean "constituency quotas" and "trade union affiliation fees"?

Well folks, let's get started! Besides, there are three stubs on the matter which do not deserve separate article status (Cranborne Money, Short Money, Labour Leader's Office Fund). Why are "Political parties and Elections Act", "Policy Development Grant" missing? If someone from the U.K. politics group could come to some basic decisions I may get involved with this article. Khnassmacher (talk) 06:35, 15 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

If you want to add to the article, find sources and do it. As for Cranborne and Short money, they are not really what this article is or should be about. They make sense as separate articles because they are about parliamentary funds set aside for parties to use for parliamentary purposes. This article should be about election and basic organisational funding. -Rrius (talk) 11:48, 15 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

This may be the legal situation, however, as far as I know parties use such funds for their general operation and report them to the Electoral Commission as part of their general revenue. As for sources: The books that I added to the reading list are all on my shelf. Because of other commitments it's just the time to do the work that I miss for some time to come. So, if anybody else wants to go ahead, so be it. Khnassmacher (talk) 16:47, 15 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Aggregates over time

I added year-by-year aggregates over time. I think a chart would really help the reader here, so if a regular user would like to add this I'd appreciate it. I recommend a bar chart broken down by year. 82.36.117.55 (talk) 12:02, 15 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]