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  # 66........Hot air....
  
  The mess with Labour and the unions makes this the perfect time to let the state fund political parties
  
  It's easy to state the case against state funding. But if the lack of respect for MPs is what prevents
  
  taxpayers stumping up, this lack owes a lot to the present system
  
  Not for the first time, a still, small voice of sanity from John Prescott. Scarcely noticed amid the
  
  echoing roars of recrimination during the weekend, over Ed Miliband's collision with Unite's
  
  leader Len McCluskey, the Labour peer renewed his call for state funding of political parties
  
  on the grounds that "whether it is a rich union or a rich businessman, in parties they should not
  
  be dictating what they think is the position".
  
  Prescott understands better than most one of the paradoxes of the years he lived through as
  
  Deputy Prime Minister. No Labour leader before or since took less account of the view of union
  
  leaders than Tony Blair - probably rather less than Prescott himself would have liked.
  
  But at the same time, remarkably little was done during the Blair years to reform the unions'
  
  institutional leverage in the party.
  
  It's hardly Blair's doing that Ed Miliband didn't see earlier that exactly because of the role played
  
  by the unions in his own election as leader, he would be under mounting pressure to put in train
  
  some of the reforms he is expected to foreshadow in his big speech today. Or that Labour has not
  
  found the additional funding - including from business - that it was so adept at attracting
  
  during the Blair years.

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