Labour's financial situation

Peter Oborne writes in the Mail today about the current state of the party's finances

I've summerised the article's main pointed below for Labour Outlook

In terms of the current political situation, the final bullet point is perhaps the most shocking. 

 

Current situation

  • Since the sale of its Old Queen Street headquarters in central London for some £6 million two years ago, the party has no substantial assets.
  • Labour's debts total more than £20 million
  • There is a serious possibility that the party's accountants, Horwath Clark Whitehill, may refuse to formally approve the party's accounts, due to be completed later this month.

Current strategy failing

  • Labour's total running costs stand at around £25million a year, half of which is accounted for by a wage bill of more than £10 million and interest payments in excess of £2 million.
  • In the first three months of this year the party raised barely £5 million.
  • Jon Mendelsohn, appointed as fundraiser nine months ago by Gordon Brown, has had little success
  • A senior Labour party figure told Oborne that Sir Ronald Cohen, who had been expected to play the role of private banker to Gordon Brown 'has not been on the premises in the way that we hoped'.

Senior party figures will be liable for the party's debt

  • City solicitors Slaughter and May advise David Pitt-Watson, the erstwhile next party General Secretary, that he, along with other senior Labour Party figures, would be obliged to bear personal responsibility for the party's debts in the event of bankruptcy.
  • This threat of personal liability was taken so seriously that the GMB trade union discussed at its last executive council meeting whether its two representatives on the Labour NEC should be indemnified against financial loss in the event Labour goes bankrupt.
  • Every member of the NEC now faces the prospect of personal bankruptcy if Labour goes to the wall. These include the Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Labour Deputy Leader Harriet Harman, Employment Minister Pat McFadden and Treasury Minister Angela Eagle.

Where next?

  • The party needs to repay, or roll over, some £7million of loans by July as well as a further £6million more by the end of the year.
  • Lenders include some caught up in last year's cash for peerages investigation and, as a result, are either angry, disillusioned or both.
  • Lenders include Richard Caring who now appears on the list of constituency donors to the Conservative education spokesman, Michael Gove
  • One senior party figure told Oborne that 'the financial crisis is very severe indeed, and the worst thing is that there is no obvious way out. Bankruptcy has to be one of the options that is on the table.'
  • Brown is being forced to devote hours of his time to saving Labour from bankruptcy
  • There are hints that some donors are sending a message that they are happy to bail out Labour so long as the party finds another leader.


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Re: Labour's financial situation (#1)

Serious question - what happens if the party goes bankrupt? What would it mean for members, activists and councillors up and down the country?
 Would it be feasible to form another party for everyone left 'homeless'?

Re: Labour's financial situation (#2)

I suppose in theory they become independants. However, any such liquidation would need a general election called ASAP. Any such state-funding to bail out the Labour Party would be monsterous and I sincerly doubt even the absolute die hards would find the scorn from every tax payer in the land very hard to cope with come election time.

Re: Labour's financial situation (#3)

It is not clear to me if CLPs are seperate unincorporated associations from the national party, so would be outside of legal actions against the national party and thier officers.

But as CLPs have thier own constitution (pro-forma in chapter 7 of rulebook) and bank accounts, I suspect they are seperate and would survive the national party running into trouble, so could form another national organisation.  Possibly a similar situation for the Scottish and Welsh parties, and branches. Hard to put Labour down!

Re: Labour's financial situation (#4)

Light at the end of the dark, dark tunnel. Create a new national organisation which the current leadership has not tainted. It's like Ramsay McDonald all over again with these incompetent goons isn't it?

Re: Labour's financial situation (#5)

As a continuation of that, I've always thought that f Labour suffers a catastrophic defeat at the next election, a new party with a new name might be the way to go.

Re: Labour's financial situation (#6)

In an unincorporated organisation it is all the members, not just the committee, who are responsible for the organisation's debts.  Is the Party different?

Re: Labour's financial situation (#8)

That's what I thought originally, but it appears not to be the case.

As I understand it in my amateur way, as an unincorporated organisation like the Labour Party has a very limited legal personality (e.g. it is not a body corporate), it cannot enter into significant contracts as an organisation. So any significant contract is personally entered into by officer(s) of the party, on behalf of all the members. But it is a personal contract with officer(s) and she/he/they would be sued if it came to the courts - expecting the party to indemnify them if they lost. (I'm not clear if this is different to being a trustee.) But if the party does not have the resources to indemnify them ...

I'm also unclear if contracts entered into by officers on behalf of the party have to be explicitly assigned in writing to new officers when they retire. I assume Matt Carter signed the millionaire loan agreements; does he need to explicitly assign those loans to his replacement officer when he resigned? Could Matt Carter or Peter Watt personally still be the a party to those contracts as no new GenSec has taken up the post yet?

It would be helpful if any lawyer reading this could throw a little more light on the situation. However this may be on the leading edge of legal precedent - I doubt many unincorporated organisations have borrowed millions. Maybe no-one can be confident of the exact legal position - if so it may fortunately make people reluctant to sue the party to recover thier loans, as it might be very expensive to get to the bottom of this mess. e.g. it is possible that the loans were taken up ultra vires by party officers.

It is terrible that members, who might to some degree be individually involved in these contracts, have to rely on Tribune and the newspapers to give us important information on this and the debt situation, rather than members.labour.org.uk.

Re: Labour's financial situation (#7)

Now I would have thought that the party would have come out and clarified the situation if it was not as bad as is being suggested.

 I believe the current legal advice is that Labour party members MAY be liable for the debts if they are members when a decision is made not to sign off the accounts and effectively starting bankruptcy proceedings.

 Can anyone give a second opinion of this.

 I believe this is similar to the Lib Dem party membership structure.

Re: Labour's financial situation (#9)

Sorry to ask a very silly question, but I guess its out of the questions since the election is in 2010, for the party to effectively shut down and just exist on the web for most of 2009?