Stopping Billionaires from buying British politics

There is an interesting article on Byline Times in which Oliver Bullough, who has written a number of books about the way oligarchs and corrupt state players exploit the UK's financial system to launder and hide money, argues that we must act now to prevent a complete oligarch takeover of British politics.

Bullough says that when you step back and look at Nigel Farage’s £5 million gift from Christopher Harborne, even when you compare it to illegal donations, you can see that there has never been anything like it in British politics, and people are right therefore to be more than usually concerned about where it came from, why it was given, and how it was spent.

He says that all the parties’ spending in the last British general election added together comes to barely one-hundred-thousandth of the total for America’s presidential and congressional races that year.

Bullough suggests that some US billionaires might be looking across the Atlantic right now and wondering why they should bother chucking so much money at SuperPACs when they could, for the cost of a single senate seat in Texas, buy a whole G7 country, money that wouldn’t be going to the Greens, to Labour, or even to the Lib Dems:

I know there are lots of crises clamouring for your attention right now, but the threat posed by electoral funding should trump them all because without negating it, there is no way to solve the others. Without a fair political system, we cannot elect politicians who will represent everyone, rather than just their donors; without adequate enforcement of the laws, there is nothing to stop politicians from cheating their way to victory and, once they’ve won, retrospectively approving their own triumph.

If we don’t get big money out of democracy therefore, there will eventually be no democracy. Once a political system has started to accept the kind of money that flows into American elections, there is precious little you can do about it. If a democracy has become a plutocracy, it is well on its way to oligarchy, and oligarchs don’t give up their power without a fight.

The government has made some moves in this direction, but its efforts are inadequate and lack the urgency required. They must be strengthened, and then the rules must be robustly enforced by ambitious, independent and powerful investigative agencies.

The first threat is from money. Billionaires are accustomed to getting their way, and are highly skilled at obscuring their wealth behind shell companies, foundations, associations, and other structures, and spreading it among multiple jurisdictions, in order to do so. But these time-honoured ways of escaping detection are a clunky old video store compared to the streaming service smorgasbord that is provided by digital currencies that can be programmed to evade detection.

It is good that the government has announced a moratorium on any donations made in cryptocurrencies, and tightened restrictions on how money can flow via companies, but that’s not enough. Only people can vote in elections, so only people should be able to fund them; and those people need to be taxpayers in the UK, on the electoral register.

This radical but simple reform would sweep away every available loophole, and every trick, and force political donors to be open and transparent about who they are, what they’re doing, and where their money comes from.

Political donations should be made, in sterling, from a British bank account (with the sole exception, for obvious reasons, of Northern Ireland), to make sure their origins are checked as thoroughly as can be. And there should be restrictions on how much any one person can give: £100,000 seems like a good limit to me, but I don’t mind as long as it’s comfortably in the low six figures. In recent elections, British parties have become increasingly dependent on large donors to fund their operations, which is a trend we need to reverse, if we want a healthy democracy. These rules should apply not just to the period before an election, but all the time.

The second threat is from cheats. Too often in the UK, parliament has passed strict rules to protect us – against sewage in our rivers; against money laundering on our high streets; or against bias on our airwaves – but those rules have not been enforced. Regulatory bodies are underfunded, demoralised, and lack the political support they need to do the jobs they’ve been given. This legalisation by under-enforcement needs to stop.

In 2022, Boris Johnson’s Government stripped the Electoral Commission of its powers to prosecute wrong-doers and undermined its independence by forcing it to follow a government-imposed strategy, with many Conservatives at the time angry that the commission had fined Vote Leave for breaking funding limits during the Brexit referendum.

But the lesson to draw from that episode was that the commission had too few powers, not too many: what’s the point of fining a political party or campaign after it’s already won? The obvious lesson that politicians drew from such a futile punishment was to cheat. The body defending our democracy needs to be able to act quickly, decisively and robustly to keep corruption out of politics, and to make sure our politicians serve only the interests of their constituents.

Once more the government is guilty of not doing enough to protect our precious democracy. It is time to put that right.