The Guardian / BBC / Labour nexus and angles of attack on the Conservatives

The Guardian  has a big lead story about Conservative party funding claiming that:

'the amount coming from the City has more than doubled in percentage terms, and now accounts for more than half the Tories' funding. It rose from 24.7% of donations in 2005 to 50.8% in 2010.'

The BBC  report this story under the banner headline 'More than half of Conservative donors 'from the City' and start the report thus:

'More than half of donations to the Conservative Party last year came from the City of London, according to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism.

Firms and individuals donated £11.4m in 2010, the bureau said, bringing the total from the City since David Cameron became leader to more than £42m.'

'the Bureau of Investigative Journalism.', sounds impressive. However Guido explains why the journalism may be a little suspect:

'Yuba Bessaoud is one of the hacks behind the piece, Guido can vouch that he is a great guy for a night out, but he isn’t a financial journalist, he is a Labour Party loyalist, who by his own admission doesn’t know the difference between inflation and interest rates.'

and that the story is not true:

'According to the BIJ “The biggest individual City backer of the Tories is David Rowland, who has contributed £4.013m in just two years.” Anyone who has read even only the business pages of the Guardian will tell you that David Rowland is a property developer, not a City financier.

...

Subtract Rowland from the BIJ’s own dubious numbers and all of sudden the reality behind the headline “City Bankrolled Tory Election Campaign“ becomes less exciting, with their own self-selected top ten of remaining City donors giving the Tories a mere 9% of their funds. Even then it is the case that the individuals gave their money out of their own pockets'

Of course this Guardian/BBC story has legs as Twitterers such as David Schneider repeat the claim. I have pointed out the truth to David Schneider and await his climb-down.

In the meantime it is odd that the BBC are so concerned to report that the Conservative party is allegedly financed by bankers but never points out that the Trade Unionists being interviewed on its programmes are the largest funders of the Labour party; the UNITE union alone provides a larger proportion of the Labour party's funds than bankers do to the Conservative party.