Washed-up Tory grandee Kenneth Clarke should not be allowed to whitewash his party’s dependence on tax-dodging donors.

Clarke dismisses popular anger at the dodgy money that props up his party of the millionaires as “artificial and bogus.”

It is neither. The fact that the Conservatives may go into battle with a war chest three times the size of Labour’s, courtesy of hedge-fund managers, City spivs and business tycoons, is a scandal.

As always when confronted with the rotten sources of Conservative cash the right has tried to embarrass Labour about its links to the organised working class.

“When people donate to the Conservative Party, they don’t pick the candidates, they don’t choose the policies,” David Cameron blustered in the Commons last week.

The Prime Minister has presumably forgotten that 71 of the coalition MPs who voted for the Health and Social Care Act had links to private health firms — with both then health secretary Andrew Lansley and his successor Jeremy Hunt receiving donations from people with a direct stake in health privatisation.

The party’s refusal to rebalance the economy towards manufacturing and away from reckless City of London speculators is also surely linked to the vast sums it receives from the masters of the universe.

As for the allegation that Labour dances to the trade union tune, we can only sigh: “If only.”

There is nothing objectionable whatsoever in working people donating to the Labour Party through their organisations and expecting the party in return to stand up for them.

Sadly it shows little sign of doing so. If it did, Labour would be presenting us with a progressive programme involving nationalisation of the railways and utilities, curbing the parasites in the City and investing in manufacturing, green technology and growth. It would also have the coming election in the bag.

Clarke tried again yesterday to assert a false equivalence between the Tories’ funds from the super-rich and what is rightly termed the “cleanest money in politics” — funds transferred from millions of working people to Labour in an open and democratic manner.

His solution, state funding for political parties, is not novel, nor is it popular. Even Clarke admits the move would cause a public outcry.

The distaste for the political elite engendered by their all-too-obvious corruption would hardly be tackled by handing public money to these shysters.

Many of us would scream blue murder at the thought of our taxes being handed to the likes of the Tories or Ukip.

Despite this, there has been periodic support for taxpayer-funded political parties from some on the left who believe it would take dirty money out of politics.

This dilemma is evidence that the political system itself is flagging. Both Labour and the Tories are, membership-wise, pale shadows of their former selves, counting fewer than 200,000 members each where once both reckoned in the millions.

Rewarding their failure by propping them up at our expense is hardly the solution.

Nor do the champions of state funding recognise that behind the smoke and mirrors of parliamentary politics lies the key issue of class struggle.

Each party is the main electoral vehicle for one of the two principal antagonistic classes in this country, the working class and the capitalist class. That’s why representatives of those classes fund them.

Whether Labour can indefinitely retain the support of a class it refuses to fight for is unclear. But others on the left who believe state funding will even up the playing field are on to a loser. Rewriting the financial rules of the game is no substitute for building the democratic anti-monopoly alliance that will bring real change to these islands.