Labour’s shocking links to philanthropists

By Natan Doron / @natandoron

Paul Staines aka Guido Fawkes has this week written in the Guardian of how Ed Miliband has “cynically exploited cancer patients for political advantage”. What he is referring to is how Ed Miliband raised the issue of recovering cancer patients losing out financially under the welfare reform bill. The main charge seems to be that Macmillan had a press release about the issue ready too quickly on Wednesday afternoon. The second charge is that their spokesperson on the news once stood as a Labour candidate. In the broad spectrum of political scandals, this is fairly low level stuff.

If Ed Miliband did take advantage of having contacts in the third sector (something strongly denied by the head of Macmillan Cancer) then really, so what? The fact is that the issue raised is still a worthy one and the kind of areas that Labour should be challenging the coalition on. If vulnerable people are to suffer disproportionately and unnecessarily from government policies, then Ed Miliband should feel more than empowered to go for them. I would even go a bit further here. If the third sector is populated by people sympathetic to the Labour cause, then surely this says something quite profound about the respective values of the Labour and Conservative parties?

ConservativeHome complained before the last election that support for Labour was too strong in the third sector. Those on the Labour side may wish to complain that the major newspapers in the UK display a similar bias towards the Conservative Party. The media clearly has more of an effect on the outcome of elections than the third sector. This signals to me that Ed Miliband is justified in using every resource he’s got.

Fundamentally though, politics should be about values and this is how elections should be fought. If the broader aims of the third sector are to campaign for worthy causes with a hope to draw attention to and alleviate the amount of pain and suffering in the world, then Labour could do much worse than to be seen as being too close to charities such as the Macmillan Cancer Support.

But as mentioned, all of this is pretty low level on the scandal spectrum, about the same level as using the issue of cancer drugs as a political argument platform before the election. The main point is, a Labour MP could never say anything like ‘disabled people should work for less than the minimum wage‘ and we should be proud of that.