Member-only story
The Labour Party posted ( mirror ) its 2021 accounts to the Electoral Commission site earlier this week.
The papers, the Independent and the Guardian rapidly picked this up. They and Labour List focused on the first deficit in years and the loss of 91,000 members. I look at the numbers and and add the observation that individual donations are very weak, and donations as a whole remain dominated by Trade Union donations. For more in detail, please read on, I conclude with questions to be asked at Conference.
They were followed a day later by the Forensic Socialist who published (or my mirror) a presentation on twitter. Esther looks at the decline in membership and membership income.
She also looked at the reduction in net assets, i.e. the best measure of liquidity, the increase in running costs, including a strange and unexplained £6m item & the operational deficit, which was only transformed into a balance sheet surplus by a pension fund re-evaluation. She estimates that if Labour continues to spend like this it’ll be bankrupt (or need bank loans again in 18 months).
