{"id":187872,"date":"2011-02-10T20:19:00","date_gmt":"2011-02-11T01:19:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2011\/02\/10\/unsurprising-news-of-the-day-3\/"},"modified":"2011-02-10T20:19:00","modified_gmt":"2011-02-11T01:19:00","slug":"unsurprising-news-of-the-day-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2011\/02\/10\/unsurprising-news-of-the-day-3\/","title":{"rendered":"Unsurprising News of the Day"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In the last election, the City banks, the London equivalent of Wall Street, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.guardian.co.uk\/politics\/2011\/feb\/08\/tory-funds-half-city-banks-financial-sector\">supplied half the campaign donations for the Tories<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote style=\"color: blue;\"><p>Financiers in the City of London provided more than 50% of the funding for the Tories last year, new research has revealed, prompting claims that the party is in thrall to the banks.<\/p>\n<p>A study by the Bureau for Investigative Journalism has found that the City accounted for \u00a311.4m of Tory funding \u2013 50.79% of its total haul \u2013 in 2010, a general election year. This compared with \u00a32.7m, or 25% of its funding, in 2005, when David Cameron became party leader.<\/p>\n<p>The research also shows that nearly 60 donors gave more than \u00a350,000 to the Tories last year, entitling each of them to a face-to-face meeting with leading members of the party up to and including Cameron.<\/p>\n<p>The study shows the impact that Michael Spencer has had on party funding. He was appointed by Cameron as Tory treasurer in an attempt to reduce the influence of Lord Ashcroft, the party&#8217;s former deputy chairman. Spencer was asked by Cameron to increase the number of relatively small donations of \u00a350,000 to curb the influence of large donors such as Ashcroft, and for these smaller donations the City was place to look.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Relatively small donations of <b>fifty thousand quid<\/b>?  That&#8217;s like <b>eighty thousand US Dollars<\/b>!<\/p>\n<p>This might explain why their proposals to reign in bankster pay are so toothless.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In the last election, the City banks, the London equivalent of Wall Street, supplied half the campaign donations for the Tories: Financiers in the City of London provided more than 50% of the funding for the Tories last year, new research has revealed, prompting claims that the party is in thrall to the banks. A &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1094,970,984,1004],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-187872","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-campaign-finance","category-corruption","category-europe","category-finance"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187872"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=187872"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187872\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=187872"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=187872"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=187872"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}