If we really want to reform party funding, we need politicians or trade unions to be brave.

Transparency has failed. That is the lesson from the last decade of political party funding reform.

Encapsulated by the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act of 2000, the emphasis – with general cross-party support – has been on making it clear where funding for parties comes from. There has been some tinkering with who is allowed to give money and with how much parties can spend. However, the curbs on foreign donations has not ended the succession of questionable and controversial politician donors, and the generous expenditure limits means how much cash and lines of credit you have is still the main limiting factor.

As for transparency – it too has had little effect. The belief was that making the main sources of political funding public would fix significant problems with our political system. It has not.

In part, this is due to the ingenuity of some in always seeking to side-step the rules. Loans were but one example. Less controversial and less talked about, but arguably even more important, has been the switch of some donors from funding parties (obliged to declare) to funding think tanks (nothing to declare). Think tanks influence the political process and can support political parties, so funding them achieves much the same as funding parties – save for it being unregulated.

In part, transparency has also failed because it has turned out to be (perhaps not surprisingly) not simply where the money comes from that causes concerns. It is also how much money there is and whether it can be used to buy elections. Yet attempts to extend election expense limits have been deeply flawed, even counter-productive.

As a result, when the coalition agreement was drawn up in 2010, it was back to attempting to reform political party funding. Despite an independent, respected committee carrying out the review – the Committee on Standards in Public Life – its proposals died almost as soon as they were published this month. This is because the package of restricting large donations and putting trade union donations on the same footing as other donations required a balancing item: making up for the cuts in funding those would produce with increased state funding for parties. None of the main parties are willing to publicly speak up for such funding at the moment, so killing the package.

There are two faint possibilities of resurrection. The sums involved (c.£100m) are significant but not unthinkable put against the overall level of government spending. Introducing the committee’s plans would cost about the equivalent of introducing directly elected police commissioners, for example. It is the sort of money that can be found if there is a political will, and if something of a similar size – which is not popular with the public – can be found to be cut, just possibly the proposals can be resurrected from within the coalition.

The other possible source of resurrection lies in an unlikely quarter: the trade unions. The strong historical links between trade unions and the Labour Party means that any proposals which would curb the amount unions can give to Labour are fiercely opposed.

But Labour is not the permanent party of government.

Requiring union members to opt in explicitly to make donations and choose which party they wish their funds to go to would certainly hurt Labour relative to other parties. However, becoming the conduit of mass funding to all the main political parties (remember just how many trade unionists vote for parties other than Labour) would make other parties pay more attention to the concerns of trade union members. It may weaken support for Labour and reduce the role of trade union bosses, but it would strengthen the political influence of trade union members. Were it not for the weight of history, this move would make sense. As it is, it is very unlikely.

This is a great shame. The Committee on Standards in Public Life has done its job and done it well, independently and promptly coming up with a well thought out package of reforms to deliver what politicians have said they want. What it needs now is for politicians or trade unionists to be brave.

Here’s the background: there are well-established rules for the imprint that has to appear on printed literature during election campaigns. There are some disputes over details of how the law operates, in particular over whether Post Office box numbers are legal and how imprint law interacts with the Newspapers, Printers, and Reading Rooms Repeal Act 1869. (This Act is one of my favourite pieces of legislation, partly because of the confusion I caused a few years ago by quoting it to civil servants who had failed to notice that it was still on the statute book.)

But the general principles of election imprints on printed items are clear and widely followed, which is why you frequently see leaflets with wording such as “Printed, published and promoted by Mark Pack on behalf of William Woodings (Liberal Democrats), both at 17 Lever Arch View, London, N1 3AH”.

However, it’s far from clear how these rules should be applied to the online world. The question of emails and websites is moderately straightforward, in that they have space for a full imprint and you can interpret the “printer” required on leaflets to mean the computer firm that hosts the website or provided the email server used to send messages.

It becomes less straightforward for social networking services, where it is often either hard to find somewhere to put suitable information (e.g. is putting an “imprint” on the non-default tab on a Facebook page acceptable?) or where there are problems over the length of messages involved (e.g. you can’t really expect a full imprint in each tweet).

Similar questions apply to other technology. How do you fit an imprint on a text message? Where should an imprint go on a YouTube film: in the film or on the YouTube page or both? Does an imprint buried at the end of a 45 minute DVD suffice or should it also be on the box? And so on.

With a matter of common sense, good will and a bit of ingenious reapplication of laws from other contexts, it is possible to come up with a decent answer in most cases. But there is a risk involved. How would the law get interpreted in a test case? It may seem obvious that if you make it easy to get the imprint information it does not have to be on the face of electronic material – but that logic wouldn’t work if applied to printed material. You couldn’t say “We have a phone number on the leaflet and would have given the imprint to anyone who rang us”.

Therefore in a piece of far-sighted legislation (yes, really) in 2000 Parliament included in the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act Section 143(6), which gives the Secretary of State the power, subject to a Parliamentary veto and following consultation with the Electoral Commission, to draw up rules on how the imprint law should apply in all these sorts of circumstances.

Those powers have though never been used. In 2003 the Electoral Commission recommended they should be. Whilst the Government’s response to this in 2004 acknowledged the importance of the issue, it decided that due to the fast-moving nature of the area it would … do nothing in the five years since.

It’s true that there has been no major problem in the interim, but that is due as much to luck as judgement. It should also be remembered just how many new technologies will be in play at the next general election. Twitter is new. Facebook is no longer a niche. Text messaging is even more widespread. The general election is also likely to be far more competitive than the previous three, putting extra temptation in the way of anyone tempted to indulge in silly or immoral campaigning tactics.

And if something comes to court? The judges will have to rule on the law as it is written, not as we might wish it to be – with the risk there’ll be a repeat of the current imbroglio in the United States, where the Florida Election Commission has banned the use of Google Ads because they necessarily do not include the Florida equivalent of an election imprint – as there isn’t enough room. That ruling is being contested, and may yet trigger a change in the law but it shows the risk of doing nothing and hoping all will come out okay.

It doesn’t always, and in this case there is already the legal power to head off problems. As a bonus, coming up with official guidance would reduce the administrative burden on candidates and parties as it would save people having to work out their own answers. But it would require the Government to do more than sit on a recommendation for six years without acting on it.