Public money used to bank-roll the Labour party to win the next election? Surely not!

The Labour party and the Government are just about to get caught up in a good old fashioned sleaze story. The Times has broken the story that the massively in debt Labour party has been using government grants for its policy-making process. The Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) has received nearly £1 million in government grants. They are the people behind popular ideas such as road pricing, rubbish taxes, ID cards and justifying hospital closures. In effect, the tax payer has been funding the Labour party to come up with policy - something that the Tories and Lib Dems are, not surprisingly, unhappy about. The full detail of the grants demonstrates how unhappy they and the tax payers should be.

The biggest grant was for £100,000 for policy development with the Social Exclusion Unit and the National Community Forum and given by the Department for Communities and Local Government. Typical that old two jags or (two jabs as he was latterly known) Prescott was behind this one! The Foreign Office made ten payments to the IPPR ranging from £9.49 to £40,000 for "goods and services". Incredibly, public money has even been used to sponsor events at the Labour Party conference. And as if to add a bit of irony to the proceedings, the Department of Constitutional Affairs made a payment of £29,417 to the IPPR to be an adviser on a project to provide "better value for money for the taxpayer". You could not make it up! All this means that the Government is handing out our money to justify Labour policy that most of us don't want anyway - such as bin taxes, ID cards and the like.

Of course the Tories were very quick to point out that this isn't the first whiff of a scandal surrounding public money funding the Labour party. Oliver Heald, the Shadow Cabinet Office Secretary, said "-Combined with the links between the Smith Institute and Gordon Brown, there is now growing evidence of backdoor state funding of the Labour movement. Think-tanks have a valuable role to play in promoting vigorous debate, but they should not be arms of the State.-" He is also very specific in saying that "-It appears that the Labour Government has systematically bankrolled the IPPR to out-source the Labour Party's policy-making process, and help fund the re-election of the Labour Government-." Public money used to bank-roll the Labour party to win the next election? This story is likely to run a little further yet...