More in the corporate destruction of British democracy. As Open Britain and other pro-democracy groups have made it abundantly clear, British democracy is under severe attack from dark money and the parties taking their cues and orders from the mega-rich corporate donors, rather than Mr and Mrs severely normal British public. They’re following Reagan’s America in this. Sometime in the 1980s the American Supreme Court or some other judicial body ruled that corporate donations constitute free speeches. Thereafter, the parties have eagerly gone after the rich donors giving to their parties and sponsoring individual politicians.
It’s undermined American politics to the point that a Harvard report declared that the Land of the Free was no longer a proper democracy. It was a quasi-oligarchy, because of the way the wishes and needs of ordinary American voters were ignored by the parties in favour of the big donors. And the voting American public know it. They found that while Americans overwhelmingly vote at elections, they very much are aware that it’s all ‘election promises’ as Mike Yarwood called political lies, and that the moment their man or woman gets in, they’d all be dumped in favour of what the money men and women want.
And even Republicans are disgusted with it. Over a decade ago a Republican businessman in California campaigned for politicians to be forced to wear sponsorship badges on their clothing like sportsmen and women.
Well good. Then we’d know who owned them. Perhaps it should be like the rings Roman slaves have to wear around their necks, giving the slave’s owner and directions for returning them. Among the slaves that worked in the fields and waited on their masters and mistresses, there were also public slaves serving as navvies, but also performing clerical work on cities’ public finances. Our politicos were fit in with the latter. Wouldn’t that be great! Starmer and Badenoch standing there at question times, thrall rings for the energy, water companies, private healthcare companies and big oil glinting in the lights.
Of course, where America leads, Britain has to follow. Tony Blair took it up with a vengeance, and the results were that British taxpayers were paying over the odds for much needed public works, as well as the construction of supermarkets that communities up and down the country didn’t need, and which would ruin the small business people at the heart of them.
Now Kemical, sorry, Kemi Badenoch has gone further and set up a ‘top table’ giving the biggest Tory donors increased access and influence with the party.
Tory Party PLC meeting its shareholders, perhaps.
Ordinary Tories don’t want it. From the ’90s onwards the Tory party, once easily the largest British party with something like a quarter of a million members, was shedding their grassroots membership. They resented the way they were being ignored in favour of the corporate donors.
Tump and Farage owe some of their success in having persuaded the American and British electorates that they stand outside this network of soft corruption. In fact, they epitomise it. Trump is corrupt, corporate America personified. One American official tasked with creating democracy in Afghanistan has written a book describing how she came back from that thankless, impossible task to find all the monumental corruption she’d had to fight there back in America in Trump’s White House.
Farage is Trump’s lickspittle and British counterpart. Whatever he says, Reform isn’t a political party. It’s a private company, though he’s no longer majority shareholder. As a plethora of internet commenters, including our own Mike at Vox Political, his bold plans for the economy actually won’t benefit it and the British public in the slightest. But it will benefit his corporate paymasters. So he’s another candidate for wearing sponsorship logos and a thrall ring.
More power to cross party groups like the All-Party Groups campaigning for PR and electoral reform, and down with the corrupt servants of corporate power.
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