O financiamento dos partidos

Tema não-quente, eu sei – ou, como se costuma dizer, fora da «agenda». Mas não posso deixar de transcrever uma pequena nota sobre o assunto, da autoria de Charles Moore (última Spectator):

“When you think about it, the suggestion that the cure for corruption over payments to political parties is state funding is the most amazing cheek. The argument essentially is that they, the parties, are so incapable of behaving properly about this that we, the people, should take away their freedom to raise money privately and give them lots of ours instead. It is precisely because party funding is so endemically, habitually corrupt that it should never be taken on to the state payroll. If it were, that corruption would be transferred and institutionalised, not abolished. Turning into a cartel against the public interest, parties would conspire with one another to get more money for themselves and divide the spoils. This process has crept forward for many years now, in the form of ever bigger allowances to MPs, secure and large pensions, more cars for ministers and so on. If our parties were state-funded, they would, in effect, be state-owned. It is a much better system when people, rich and poor, feel some moral obligation to help the party they support to get elected. And when the corruption enters in, as it so often does, the fact that private money is involved makes it easier to detect.”