It’s an odd thought that someone bought the then leader of His Majesty’s opposition some trousers. The last time someone chose trousers for me it was my mum, in the 70s!

It’s an utterly foolish scandal anyway. Starmer’s gifts are all there in the register, it’s not hidden or “misreported” as so many others have been. But it does raise the question of gifts and donations, of what they’re for and why on earth would someone buy you trousers?

With a moment’s thought, we all know that we might buy clothing as a gift for a spouse, a child, a really close friend, but mightn’t you also buy expensive clothing as a gift for someone with whom you’re trying to curry favour, who you’d like to influence? For this very reason, a great many companies absolutely forbid gifts above a given value between colleagues, customers and suppliers. Instead, for our elected representatives, we mandate the registering of all gifts; we don’t try to stop the buying of favour, instead our current system tries to render it transparent.

I’d contend that in this instance, the best practice commercial approach is better. Limiting gifts to a financially immaterial level offers stricter governance to that currently applied to Ministers and MPs. If the new government were serious about revising standards and structures they could do that tomorrow.

But when is a gift actually a donation, something that helps the campaign? Well I’d contend that we should just ban all political donations. Here’s why.

A great many political donations will be, certainly, an expression of support for the inherent philosophical values of that party, its leader or a given candidate. I’m sure that’s the case for me and – if you’ve ever put a few bob in a campaign bucket – for you too.

We must all, by now, be very aware that campaigns cost. Think how many political party leaflets you saw through your door in 2024, replicate that across the country, double it in target seats, triple it in marginals. That print and distribution alone is incredibly expensive. Now add in social media, “battle buses”, flights and rail tickets, hotel rooms and meals, not just for candidates but for their teams, for HQ support staff dashing about keeping all 650 individual campaigns aligned.

So our parties need skip-loads of money, but we do not want that money to buy influence. But we absolutely do want people to be able to influence policy. We want nurses to be involved in discussions about nursing and, believe it or not, we need petro-chemists to be involved in discussions around petrochemicals. That’s involved in discussions though, not running, or leading, or agenda-setting, and that’s where the legitimate concern about gifts & donations comes in.

To all intents & purposes if you want to move policy in a way that will benefit you to the detriment of others, gifts and donations could clearly be one way to do that. A pair of trousers might not swing it, but enough to fund a target seat for a year, say £100k, could.

Accepting then that parties & politicians need money to campaign, let’s try a thought experiment where you, and I, are people who want to affect UK policy against the collective public good, specifically to OUR benefit.

Firstly we’d want to seek out parties or candidates, broadly sharing our world-view and accepting our specific propositions, and “support” or “invest” in them. There are of course companies out there who’ll help for a decent fee. If we’re UK citizens with wealth from a provably legitimate source and we’re fearlessly unafraid of scrutiny and press interest that’s straightforward; we just donate to the party or candidate.

If that party or candidate would rather remain detached, not have our business, investment and wealth taint them by association – or vice-versa of course – then we’ll do it through an Unincorporated Association. It’s very easy, perfectly legal and stops scrutiny in its tracks and can funnel serious amounts of dark money into campaigns.

A company can do the same.  But sometimes firms might not want to be party-specific but get all MPs to understand their perspective. In this case why not send them all a valuable, but universally applicable gift; a really expensive hamper or something. There’s no explicit quid-pro-quo but they’d expect it to be substantially easier to chat to the MP immediately after the Fortnum’s wickerwork has shown up!

Let’s say you and I are oligarchs, with links to an authoritarian regime in “informal war” with democracy and without the requisite citizenship credentials to donate or gift. No worries. Just get our British spouse/hairdresser/chauffeur to do it for us and cover the cost. This can have another super bonus. If we publicly heavily imply, after the event, that it was really our money, supplied through a loophole, then we can not only support the anti-establishment or disruptive candidate or party of our choice, but also bring the whole political system, even the principles of democracy, into disrepute. It can encourage the whole “they’re all in it for themselves, they’re all corrupt” vibe when, very obviously, only “our” party or candidate is really tainted by our money.

Say we are international plutocrats, domiciled wherever the tax advantages take us. We’re making millions out of investments in fossil fuels and we really want to reduce enthusiasm for anything environmental, any of those pesky net-zero goals, right? Well we can’t donate legitimately in the UK, obviously, as we’re not electors here, but happily there are international “institutes” with offices in regimes with low levels of exclusion, who’ll be happy to take our cash & use a perfectly legitimate internal transfer (less a fee of course) to the domain of the party or candidate you want to support. Those transfers could be something as anodyne as rent support or a management fee or money in support of a report that’s already fully funded. All perfectly legit, perfectly justifiable, & once there, that same money can support “our candidate”, “our party”.  We’ll just make sure they’re quietly aware of where it’s from and what it’s for, right?

Time to be bold: ban ALL donations & gifts to parties, in money, in kind or in services and fund our parties from the public purse, split on vote-share. That would defend democracy from all influence, foreign or commercial. It would cost less than 1/1000th of the MoD budget. Now I don’t know what the MoD, the police and our Security Services currently spend trying to manage influence operations in a – frankly – poorly regulated regime, but at least that small amount would be saved to offset the cost.

All that, plus a limit on the value of gifts to any elected official.

Oh, and it would stop these entirely predictable foolish headlines too.

Authored by Stephen Gosling, Unlock Democracy Council member