A Magic Million from Hogwarts!

The dodgy geezer who gave £2m to the LibDems and is now on trial for fraud must be wishing he had New Labour's luck.

Impressed by the good intentions of Labour on child poverty, which haven't yet seen anything other than a worsening child poverty rate, the billionaire author of Harry Potter has donated a couple of days of her income to the Labour party, in the form of a £1m donation.

For the Labour Party, it's a shame she's not matched David Sainsbury and given a more sizeable share of her annual income.  10% of her income would have more than paid off New Labour's £18m debt!

Unions and big donors continue to prop up political spending "arms race"

A BBC report, doing a little bit more than just updating their report from 3 months earlier, indicates that the big money continues to come in from a small number of big donors for the big parties.

They add that David Sainsbury has (apparently, I can't be bothered to check if they're accurate yet) converted a £2m loan to a donation (they needed it to pay their staff bills).

Were the BBC actually doing a job as journalists, perhaps they would at least try to answer a simple question: "Why?"

Why is David Sainsbury continuing to prop them up? What's in it for him? Perhaps they threatened to give the Competition Commissions some teeth against the supermarkets monopoly.

They might even, just possibly ask another question: "Why has the government not acted on the (Sir Hayden) Philips Review?"

It's no wonder the government is so quiet on reform when the BBC doesn't actually bother to ask a single serious question, or even link to the Philips Review.

Good donations cost less (?) at Sainsbury's

Puzzle #1: Lord (David) Sainsbury (of Turville), as he's somehow (sometimes) come to be called, is known for having handed some loose change to the Labour Party. How much is it?

Answer: Let's go take a look at the Electoral Commission Register. A quick search for donors who have more than £250,000 in loose change gives us the following results (searching back to 2001):

Lord Sainsbury	13/01/02	£ 2,000,000
Lord Sainsbury of Turville	01/03/03	£ 2,500,000
Lord David Sainsbury of Turville	10/03/05	£ 2,000,000
Lord David Sainsbury	10/09/07	£ 2,000,000

And... why does he donate in so many variations of his 'title'? It's so bizarre, that you could be forgiven for being a little suspicious. Then again, £8.5m is quite a bit of loose change to be giving to anyone, don't you think?

And next, we might just have a look at the big donors elsewhere, but before that, shall we dwell on how your average Mr Sainsbury might just have a vested interest in this sort of donation?

Another bit of checking around, and we find that on 16th Nov 2007, Lord David of Turville held 6.3% of Sainsbury's shares. That's 6.3% of 1.7billion shares, with a 2007 dividend per share of 9.75pence. Yes, he owns over a hundred million shares that in 2007 paid him a dividend totalling £10.3m. Does he have a vested interest in the supermarkets continuing to make huge profits? You bet he does!

Iit doesn't matter if you're not Tesco, because they're all making a huge profit, so long as no one comes along and says "Hey, you're killing our communities, our local economies, and our environment, and we're going to put an end to it!"

Well if that is the case, I doubt if there's a Labour minister who's going to tell his party they just lost a donor who can be relied on for over a million pounds every year!