Polly Toynbee laments the decline in funding of various (mostly centre-left) thinktanks because the Aberdeen Group terminated its Financial Fairness Trust (This thinktank exposed fat cats and obscenely high pay. Guess what has happened to it?, 10 July). I suggest that the financial vulnerability of thinktanks being dependent on the largesse of profit-driven financial businesses like the Aberdeen Group is a weakness of their funding model. A point which is obvious without even considering the morals of Alistair Darling founding such a trust based on a demutualisation, which just underlines the tokenism at the heart of such a model of funding.
In contrast, in Germany, the state funding of political parties is accompanied by state funding for party political foundations – each party has its own foundation funded on the basis of the size of its vote share.
The UK has a problem with corrupt political funding, and now is maybe the time for the Labour party to address the issue by moving to a state-funded model. Maybe Labour should have done this when it was last in power, but in yet another example of short-termism, New Labour and Darling preferred to have thinktanks dependant on financial capital than set up a state-funded model.
Hylton Guthrie
North Shields, Tyne and Wear
• I was shocked to read of the closure of the High Pay Centre in Polly Toynbee’s article. Is there an opportunity here for Andy Burnham to take it over as a government regulatory body, and give it some fiscal teeth? There must be some excellent staff in the job market.
Andy McWilliam
Handforth, Cheshire
