With membership blossoming the party is far less reliant on big donors than the Tories

Labour is Britain's richest party – and it's not down to the unions

If Jeremy Corbyn were looking for a single example of his impact on British politics, then his party’s finances might be the best place to start. The party’s large membership, swollen since the 2015 leadership contest, has helped ensure that Labour is easily the richest political party in Britain.

In the general election year of 2017 the Labour party raised £55.8m – £10m more than the Conservatives.

Labour members, who number about 550,000, generated £16.1m in subs for their party in 2017. A further £18.2m came via donations, partly from online campaigns. As the party’s annual report highlights, on one day alone, during last year’s general election campaign, Labour was able to raise £500,000.

The party’s traditional paymasters, the trade unions, have fallen in financial importance. Fees from affiliations amounted to a relatively modest £6.2m, although the union Unite, led by key Corbyn supporter Len McCluskey, remains the party’s biggest single donor and unions continue to contribute millions in donations.

The contrast with the New Labour era could not be more stark. Under Tony Blair the party sought to compete with the Tories by raising millions from wealthy individuals, such as the author JK Rowling.

In some instances those donations got the party in trouble. When he was prime minister Blair had to apologise after it appeared that one donor, Bernie Ecclestone, had appeared to win favourable treatment for cigarette advertising in Formula 1. A few years later Downing Street was enveloped by the cash-for-peerages saga, which took up years of police time even if it did not lead to any charges.

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As for the Conservatives, some argued that the dead generated more income than the living because subscriptions from the party’s 124,000 members produced a paltry £835,000 for the party’s national accounts, which was half the £1.7m the party received from legacies and wills.

So concerned were the Conservatives about the idea that the party was literally dying off that the party deputy chairman, James Cleverly, tweeted on Wednesday night that local associations retained the bulk of membership subscriptions, amounting to a total of £4m a year.

In any event, the claim is only true if the party’s living donors, such as the JCB owner, Anthony Bamford, and Lord Ashcroft, were excluded from consideration. Donors raised £34.3m between them, three-quarters of the Tories’ total annual income.

It also helps explain why the Tories have to spend so much time publicly fundraising. At this year’s fundraising Black and White ball, one person paid £55,000 to spend a day shadowing Theresa May; another paid £12,500 to have home-cooked dinner with the environment secretary, Michael Gove, and his wife, Sarah Vine.

Labour politicians can boast they are relatively free of such constraints. The party, meanwhile, hopes to use its newfound cash to increase its ranks of community organisers and boost its in-house digital capability, helping it produce more social media messaging and, perhaps ironically, more appeals for funds.

• This article was amended on 23 August 2018. An earlier version said that most of the £18.2m donations the Labour party received were from online campaigns. That is true for some of the donations, not most. In addition, an earlier version discussed affiliate fees from trade unions, but omitted to say that unions donated millions to the party.