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The Oxford-educated daughter of one of Pakistan’s most popular post-independence leaders, she was not a particularly successful leader of the country either in 1988-90 or in 1993-96, but she still has a following. Reliable opinion polls are few in Pakistan, but some commentators think she would win a fair fight with the General.Hence the other legal device deployed yesterday, by which election officials rejected her nomination papers in her home city of Larkana, meaning that she would not even be able to stand for election as an ordinary member of the National Assembly.The officials were implementing another law passed by President Musharraf which bans anyone who has failed to answer criminal charges from being a candidate. Ms Bhutto, who lives in self-imposed exile in London and Dubai, was last month tried in her absence on corruption charges and found guilty by a Pakistani court.President Musharraf has been an effective leader of his country, abandoning its support for the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, taking some action against extremist Muslim terrorists based in Pakistan, and remaining calm in the face of provocation by the Indian Prime Minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee.However, he will not secure lasting stability for his country or the region unless he oversees a transition to a securely based and genuine democracy And he cannot do that unless he lets Ms Bhutto run.. The laws on trade union funding of the Labour Party were among the least successful of the barrage of anti-union legislation passed by the Conservatives. The requirement in the 1984 Trade Union Act that unions should ballot their members every 10 years on political donations ensured a secure funding base for the Labour Party for two decades.

The next round of ballots, however, is due around the time of the next election, and cannot be taken for granted.The response of the Government is as predictable as it is partisan – ministers are considering simply repealing the provisions of the 1984 Act. Their arguments can easily be imagined: the ballots are expensive and unnecessary; besides, the original law was biased.It is certainly true that the intention behind the law was to tilt the balance against the Labour Party at a time when there was no constraint on corporate donations to the Conservatives. Since then, however, Labour has levelled the see-saw by forcing companies to ballot shareholders on political donations. Scrapping the similar requirement on unions would be to respond to the unfairness of the Tory years with an equal and opposite injustice. It would be the tawdry act of a financially and morally bankrupt party.Labour’s cash crisis and the imminent trade union ballots ought to be, instead, the opportunity for a total overhaul of party funding.The truth is that the 1984 law was a fudge. Margaret Thatcher somewhat surprisingly recoiled from requiring trade union members to “opt in” to paying a levy to the Labour Party as part of their subscriptions.

She was persuaded to accept that members would have the right to “opt out”, provided they were balloted every 10 years on whether their union should act as collectors for Labour Party funds at all.That leaves Labour as the beneficiary of that sharp commercial practice known as inertia selling, whereby trade unionists forget they are chipping in a few pence a week into Labour’s coffers. Although the fiction is maintained that the unions are merely convenient conduits for millions of individual donations, the baronial instincts of union leaders mean that million-pound cheques are still wielded like the old block vote in pursuit of sectional interests. Threats to withhold large sums of money from the party are routinely made by union bosses without any suggestion that members ought to be balloted first.Nor is the position of company donations satisfactory, either. Although shareholders now have to be consulted, donations do not meaningfully come from individuals – they are instruments of executive vanity paid for out of corporate funds.Let us return to first principles.