DESPITE THE endlessly exzzzziting inveszzztigations into political party funding, a couple of questions remain unasked. For a start, why should Labour, the Conservatives and other terminally ill parties have a God-given right to life?

The all-party funding crisis reveals that these organisations are already the living dead. Their active membership and core constituencies have withered, leaving leaders less able to raise money and support. Yet they need ever more cash to fund the media PR stunts on which they now rely — another consequence of the demise of campaigning parties.

Their short-term solution was to get rich individuals to give secret injections of cash, quick shots of financial Botox and Viagra to keep up the appearance of youth and virility. Now the deathbed cry goes up for the State to act as a life-support machine, using public funding of political parties to maintain artificial signs of vitality.

But who needs nationalised political parties? Our politicians already sound and act like glorified bureaucrats instead of inspirational leaders. (Exhibit A: Gordon Brown’s Budget speech.) To make them more dependent on state patronage than public support would be to rubber-stamp their role as account-keeping civil servants rather than accountable servants of the people.

In any case, what on earth is wrong with political donations — even from those dreaded rich people? The message today from David Cameron downwards seems to be that parties should be more like charities, operating somehow above political interests. But democracy only means something real when political parties are, believe it or not, partisan, representing clear interests and constituencies with conflicting world-views.

The problem is not donations. It is that the asking for donations has become divorced from politics. Let the parties go out and convince people that they stand for something worth backing. If they cannot, they are bankrupt in more ways than one, and surely do not deserve to survive.

YES, the law lords were right to reject the claim of 17-year-old Shabina Begum that she had a human right to wear a jilbab — full-length Islamic dress — to school. But it was wrong for such a silly human rights case to get anywhere near the Lords.

Ms Begum’s case was not about a school oppressing Muslims; her Muslim head teacher had already agreed a uniform headscarf with Islamic scholars. It was about a teenager pushing her luck with authority. It might be unusual for stroppy schoolgirls to want longer hemlines rather than shorter ones, but the meaning of her adolescent outburst is much the same. It is no more a political or religious issue than it was in the 1970s, when we would-be lads tried (and failed) to get away with wearing white socks and half-mast trousers to school. And in the rush to blame radical Islamists for inciting Ms Begum’s case, let us not forget the old municipal Left, whose ban-the-blazer campaigns did so much to turn childish objections to school uniform into a politico-legal cause.

Only our society’s acute nervousness about appearing the slightest bit Islamophobic could have allowed such a case to progress right through the legal system. Religious freedom is an important principle — as is the freedom to ridicule religion. But it can only be demeaned by this sort of carry-on in the courts.

Mick.Hume@spiked-online.com

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