Boris Johnson has recently been attacking Ken Livingstone for being under the thumb of unions who fund his campaign. But the Evening Standard’s Pippa Crerar has discovered that Boris is as much in hock to big business.
Stanley Fink, CEO of hedge fund ISAM, has given £33,000 to Johnson’s campaign, while Sir John Beckwith, chair of fund management group, Pacific Investments, has given £25,000 – with, crucially, another £25,000 to be delivered if the multi-millionaire likes Boris’s manifesto.
Livingstone has received £25,000 from transport union TSSA and another payment from Aslef, who contributed £20,000 to his campaign to be selected as Labour’s candidate.
The two sets of figures are on a par, yet Boris feels no qualms about implying Ken wouldn’t be in a position to take on the tube unions, or calling him a union glove puppet. Are we to assume that Boris would be similarly beholden to big business?
The US political system is (rightly) mocked for interests like Big Oil being able to buy influence and idiocies like SuperPACs, so should we be paying more attention to who funds our candidates – all of them? On which note, we’re off to investigate whether Big Biomass is skewing Jenny Jones’s policies.
Photo by Stuart-Lee from the Londonist Flickr pool
