Polly Toynbee, The Guardian:
With the US threatening to support ‘patriotic’ parties here, we need better defences, starting with tough new rules about political donations
The new threat is so dizzyingly bizarre that Europe, and especially Britain, is slow to believe it. The US declares itself our enemy. Europe emerges as its main adversary in the US national security strategy. Russia is its friend, not us. Everything that looked solid since the second world war is turned upside down; the land of the free becomes the destroyer of democratic values. Appeasement fails.
He may ramble, but Donald Trump speaks plainly. He means what he says, and he hates everything European. Except its emerging “patriotic” parties, which he wants to support. His strategy warns of “civilizational erasure”, claiming Europe will soon “become majority non-European” and parroting the racist conspiracy known as the great replacement theory. Describing Europeans as “weak”, “decaying” and “destroying their countries”, with “real stupid” leaders, Trump responded to the question of whether they would still be allies, in a Politico interview, with a hint of threat: “It depends.”
Note this: the official US strategy says that “the growing influence of patriotic European parties indeed gives cause for great optimism”. He is what he is, in plain sight. No more pretending his fickle ways can be reversed. He appears to back the EU’s nativists, which his strategy suggests are “political allies”. Why wouldn’t he? British politics is already under threat from Russian and Chinese hacking and interference, as in the case of Reform’s former Welsh leader – who has been jailed for taking Russian bribes. Expect electoral threats from the US from now on. Trump regards Europe’s vain struggle to protect itself – via its Digital Services Act – from the worst excesses of US tech giants as an act of treachery.
Britain looks singularly vulnerable to danger from this US friend turned enemy. But at least here’s one simple political defence that needs immediate action. Next month, the government is expected to publish its elections bill, but so far it has only weak suggestions for protecting our democracy from gross interference by hostile actors. Unlike many countries, we have no cap on political donations. Elon Musk was reportedly going to back Reform with £100m, a sum that buys a party – although he denied that specific figure. Though foreign, he can do it legally by paying out of his companies’ UK profits. He fell out with Farage, but might swerve back, and other plutocrats may support the hard right wherever the door is left open to their malign influence.
This week, the government published its anti-corruption strategy, drawn up by Margaret Hodge, its anti-corruption champion, together with David Lammy, and designed to arrest a steep decline: this year the UK fell from 11th to 20th in Transparency International’s corruption perceptions index.
This new strategy on tax evasion, money laundering and the professional enablers of corruption – lawyers, accountants, PR companies – was welcomed by campaigners. More than £100bn is laundered a year in Britain, according to the National Crime Agency, not just through the seedy world of fake barber, vape and sweet shops but reaching to the very top. Kleptocrats launder their reputations as well as their money using philanthropy, cultural institutions, private schools, universities and football teams, all over-eager for funds with too few questions asked.
But one section of the strategy concerns political influence: Home Office polling shows 73% of people are concerned about corrupt actors in the political system, and they are right to be. Today the FT revealed that a German private bank gave £300,000 to the Tories before the last election: as it came from an illegal foreign source, it was given back. But it shows how many interests want to sway our elections. A £75,000 donation to Robert Jenrick was revealed to arrive from a UK-based company that took significant loans from a business registered in the British Virgin Islands. Jenrick said the donation was “perfectly legal and valid”, which is what’s wrong with the law.
This month, the Electoral Commission has reported that a £9m donation to Reform UK is the single largest ever from a living person. Of all donations to Reform, 75% have come from just three wealthy men. That £9m from one of them, a crypto investor, was not in cryptocurrency, but future donations could be. The government is weighing up whether to ban crypto donations, a shady sector that should be kept well away from political donations.
On lobbying rules and on restoring the independence of the Electoral Commission, as called for by campaigners, we wait to see if the bill will be tougher than suggested so far. (For another day is the lack of proportional representation, which Labour will regret eternally.) As it stands, cleaning up political donations is a clear win for a distrusted party. Hodge has managed to drag them as far as at least reviewing it. Now they need to do it. As Full Fact, the Electoral Commission and a coalition of democracy and anti-corruption organisations propose, multiple reforms are needed: an annual cap on spending on election campaigns, instead of just restricting it in the pre-election period, would stop vast sums spent on preparing data and social media ahead of time. They want a £15,000 maximum single-person donation, but any cap would be a start.
It will take unflinching action to restore public trust, but Labour could wash away public suspicion after
the cabinet’s minor but painful moral embarrassment in taking gifts and tickets. Cash for honours is illegal, but a Conservative benefactor donating more than £3m to the party can find a seat in the Lords. Stop donations from companies and unions when these eyewatering sums swashing about in our politics disgust the public. Brave public wrath by explaining that public subsidy to politics is a lesser evil than private corruption.
The Labour manifesto says: “We will protect democracy by strengthening the rules around donations to political parties.” Will it, really? The democratic threat is terrifying. The time for timidity is over, for appeasing the US, for pretending Brexit can ever work – and for allowing big money into politics. For a government so low in the polls, boldness is the only way up.
