It's our money!

In 2001 and 2002 Labour was given grants of £183,000 to help it understand the new rules on election funding. Given that they had written the law that was just been enacted, and their subsequent failure to understand what the hell was going on, the Electoral Commission should ask for their money back.

But let's skip the easy 'fish in a barrel' kind of kicking that Labour deserve over the continuing saga of party funding.

But the really unbelievable part of it is the overall picture.

The Electoral Commission gave grants totalling £700,000 to all parties to help them understand the new rules.

Let's get this right - the new legislation is enacted in 2000 by MP's who one would expect have read and understood the legislation and now they want grants to understand how to apply the Act. Section 54 is the key section, and it is quite easy to understand, even for someone like me who has never been involved in writing it, reviewing it, debating it and then enacting it in law.

Yet, the Electoral Commission dish out our money to help "install new systems" or "employ new staff". Just tell the greedy sods to raise the extra funds themselves. Get sponsors - David Abrahams to sponsor an identity checker, or Paul Green to fund an employee to check the donors names against the electoral roll.

Or better still, get the MP's to bother to find out who was actually giving them money, rather than allow them to sit around working out how to squander our funds.

Alternatively, and less charitably - but probably more accurately - the parties didn't have the faintest idea of the legislation they were discussing, far less how to implement it. Which would explain much of the bad law that comes our way.