Westminster operates on a shoestring. Being cheap comes at a high cost
Save time by listening to our audio articles as you multitaskBritish politics does have a problem with money: there is not enough of it. Total political donations per year add up to roughly the cost of a competitive Senate race in America. A benevolent millionaire could fund almost all of Britain’s biggest political think-tanks and have change left from £20m. Salaries for those working in government and Parliament are skimpy. British politics operates on a shoestring.
Away from the government front bench, things are even worse. Although opposition parties are handed “short money” from the state to fund their day-to-day parliamentary business, the amounts are stingy. Labour, which is odds-on to form the next government, recently searched for a new head of economic policy. The salary on offer was about £50,000, for a key role shaping the direction of a £2trn economy.
This matters. Good government requires a healthy stream of good ideas. Milton Friedman, a free-market economist, was right when he argued that in a crisis “the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around”. But good ideas are harder to generate when the pay is poor. Germany solves this problem with generous state funding. America solves it by having plutocrats from across the political spectrum pump cash into think-tanks.
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