UK dodgy-political-donor watch database canned

A New Labour database designed to ferret out corrupt contributions to political parties has been canned. The Co-ordinated Online Record of Electors (CORE) was meant to make it easier for parties to spot contributions from non-resident donors as well as to run the database and deal with queries. The Coalition government claims …

[mark 63]

pricey!

11m to establish?

2m pa to run?

maybe i'm being a bit niave but my home dvd database didnt cost anyhing like that, and even if i upgraded it with ten ProLiant DL900s it still wouldnt scratch the surface of those figures

[Chad H.]

Does

Your home DVD database spot dodgy political donations?

[Anonymous Coward]

to spot dodgy political donations...

SELECT * FROM Donations

[Anonymous Coward]

it's pretty easy to filter it out...

A donation is a donation, it is the transfer of one item (in this case money) in return for nothing other than a thank you letter....

A payment is when items are given in return for foods or services...

If a party has to do something in order to receive the money it is a payment and is dodgy, and shouldn't be accepted...

Can I have my £11.4mil now please?

[Anonymous Coward]

And i bet labour had

Lord Prescott ready to run it.... poor bloke has been reduced to doing cheap deal adverts

[Anonymous Coward]

title goes here

And this has nothing to do with making it easier for DONATIONS to reach a party. Say donations from a certain media empire to say a certain party whoes colour is blue ?

[Daniel Buckley]

well...

I am shocked that it's the Tories that have scrapped it, I mean who would have thought?...

[Anonymous Coward]

or

Red, if we talk about Blair era.

[Captain Underpants]

No no no, you're all getting it wrong

This isn't about allowing (or turning a blind eye toward) dodgy donations, it's about leveraging private market forces in the area of political donations by removing such obstacles as dedicated and adequately-resourced oversight and the ability of the electorate/tabloids to uncover individual instances of underhanded dealings.

I look forward to the final phase of this project when the Conservative Party will announce its IPO.

[BristolBachelor]

Alternative solution

All donations have to be made to a new quango. All the donations will be recorded for auditing.

Said quango then dishes out the money as credits, with a fixed amount per prospective MP. MPs are not allowed to spend their own money on their campaign, only quango provided credits. Political parties only get money by accepting credits from their MPs and converting them to money. No donations.

Normally quangos are bad; but this would decouple the giving of money to politicos and politicos doing things (possibly in return for said money).

Still have the problem with politicos doing things in office, and then leaving and going to work for the corporation who did well out of what the politicos did in office.

Oh and possibly a new punishment being caught cheating the public; loss of a hand (a la arabic thieves)

[LPF]

@Daniel Buckley

Remind me, who was in power when all these hacking, financial , expense scandals were happening ?

Yeah when you read up and work it out, have a big can of STFU there's a good boy ;)

[Anonymous Coward]

re STFU

So what, did you sleep through the 80's and better part of the 90's, or are you really that tediously selective?

[Anonymous Coward]

Seperate donor from donation

All political donations should be paid into "blind" funds that are then passed on to the respective parties as a lump sum with no records passed on of the size of the individual donations. In addition, it should be made a criminal offence to reveal the size (or perhaps even the fact?) of a donation you have made to a party. Even of someone does say they have made a donation of X, whether they did or not becomes a matter of trust, and there's not too much of that floats around the political arena.

If it's not about favours, influence and corruption, no one needs the details, do they? Business types are always going on about how keen they are to support democracy. So let them.

[Anonymous Coward]

Aren't this Goverment trying to legalise corruption again? ...

... after the last lot legisilated (a bit) against it.

[RISC OS]

I'm sure

an already paid-for secretary could update the database spending maybe at most half an hour a week doing it. I mean just how many donations do they receive each week? 2+ million for updating the database? I want that job.

[skoop]

Is a bit more than a corruption database

Took a look on wikipedia (can I call myself a journalist now?)

In the United Kingdom, the Co-ordinated On-line Record of Electors (CORE), previously the Co-ordinated On-line Register of Electors, is a central database which Government have proposed will enable authorised users a single access point to existing information stored on local electoral registers. CORE will not replace local registers, but will mirror exactly the information contained at the local level for easy access.

The legislative framework for CORE is contained in the Electoral Administration Act 2006, passed by Parliament on 11 July 2006.

11 million does seem a bit steep though, but then we can just invent figures now because we'll never know ;)

[Robert Carnegie]

Belize

Rhymes with "sleaze".

Funny, that.

Well, I haven't heard their National Anthem. Not much of a joke on my part if they come right out and say it, and is there anything else -to- say about Belize, anthem-stylee?

It rhymes. I'm just pointing that out. Doesn't mean anything...

[skoop]

More research needed..

Did some research ie read second item from google after wikipedia entry and found out a few facts which illustrate the complexity of the proposed system. Unbelievably we have no national system to monitor registration to vote so looks pretty necessary to me, if you think you can do it for less then maybe you should contact hmg, cost is estimated at 7-22 million! The figures aren't break down how much of this is hardware, training etc.

http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/+/http://www.dca.gov.uk/consult/core/core_cp2905.pdf