The billionaires funding your anger and Reform UK’s Autumn of Content

Part one of ‘The billionaires funding your anger and reform UK’s Autumn of Content can be read here.

Britain has already seen the bill

Britain does not need to imagine what happens when private fortunes help transform political grievance into national policy through funding political parties. We have already run the experiment, and we are still paying for it. (

In the Spring of 2016 Arron Banks made £8.4mn available to Leave.EU and associated organisations around the Brexit campaign, at the time the largest reported individual political donation in British history. Questions surrounding the source of that money were investigated and the National Crime Agency ultimately found no evidence of criminal offences. That matters. But once again, illegality is not the argument. The democratic question is how much political power one private fortune should be permitted to purchase in the first place.

Brexit was sold as ordinary people taking back control from distant and unaccountable elites. Yet the economic risk attached to that promise was never distributed equally between those financing the campaign and those persuaded by it.

The Office for Budget Responsibility estimates that post-Brexit UK trade is around 15% lower in the long run than it would otherwise have been and productivity is around 4% lower than had Britain remained in the EU.

Those percentages sound bloodless until they’re translated into what they actually mean. Lower productivity means a smaller economy than we might otherwise have had: less investment, weaker wage growth and a smaller tax base from which governments must finance hospitals, schools, councils, infrastructure and everything else voters are subsequently told the country can no longer afford.

The precise cash cost cannot be read mechanically from the OBR’s 4% productivity assumption, and estimates vary according to the counterfactual used. But the scale is not abstract: a persistently smaller and less productive economy means less income, investment and taxable activity than Britain would otherwise have generated. Independent modelling has likewise found substantial losses in GDP per head since Brexit.

A wealthy donor can spend millions helping to create the political conditions for a vast national economic experiment without personally carrying anything resembling the economic risk it will impose upon the people persuaded to vote for it.

That is the bill. The donor purchases influence. The public inherits the risk and the costs, if the experiment fails (reader, it did).

The capture of political possibility

This buying of influence by the mega rich is larger than Reform. Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page examined 1,779 US policy outcomes and found that economic elites and organised business interests had substantial independent effects upon policy, while average citizens had little or no independent influence once elite preferences were taken into account. Their methodology has been debated and America is not Britain. The democratic question survives every qualification: whose preferences are governments structurally equipped to hear?

Big money does not merely secure meetings. It helps determine the boundaries of political possibility.

A wealth tax must prove itself against every imaginable behavioural response. A tax cut for asset owners is treated as an incentive. Public investment must survive warnings about bond markets. Privatisation is modernisation; public ownership is ideology. Weakening unions is flexibility; workers acting together is disruption. Decade after decade, the preferences of concentrated wealth are laundered through the language of competence until they reappear as common sense.

This is the ecosystem of constraint. Nobody needs to issue an order. Donors fund parties and think tanks. Lobbyists supply policy ideas. Media owners decide which arguments receive oxygen. Markets reward some choices and punish others. Politicians learn which ambitions attract money and which attract ridicule. Eventually the limits imposed by wealth no longer look imposed at all. They simply look reasonable.

Then we congratulate ourselves because everybody still receives one vote.

Political equality cannot survive indefinitely as a ceremonial moment at the ballot box surrounded by extreme inequality everywhere else. Democracy is not only the right to mark a cross. It is the ability to form judgements within a public sphere that no small class can dominate, and to make collective choices that wealth cannot quietly veto.

The people who vote pay the bill

Can you afford your rent? Can you heat your home? Can your children find secure work? Can you see a doctor or dentist? Can your council still provide the services that make communal life possible? These are questions that are very material to large numbers of voters.

A politics that answers these questions by suggesting closing the borders, deportations, flags on lampposts and attacks upon minorities is not one confronting the economic settlement. It is protecting that settlement by placing the blame on minorities.

That is why billionaire-backed populism may not feel like a contradiction. It can turn justified anger at insecurity into support for a political project that leaves much of the distribution of property and power intact.

This damages more than election campaigns. It degrades the common life upon which everyone depends. Public debate becomes angrier and less truthful. Minorities become political raw material. Trust collapses. Collective institutions weaken. Governments become more responsive to those who can finance them and less capable of asking those same people to contribute more. Society is taught to fight horizontally – citizen against migrant, worker against claimant, town against city – while wealth continues travelling vertically.

The government’s response to the Rycroft Review accepts measures including a £100,000 annual cap on donations from overseas electors and a moratorium on political donations made via cryptoassets.

Donation caps would not abolish elite influence. Wealth would still own newspapers, fund institutes, employ lobbyists and move capital across borders. But refusing even to limit direct donations tells the public something bleak: democracy recognises the danger, yet remains unwilling to restrain those with the power to exploit it.

Follow the anger then follow the money

The danger lies precisely where the death of centrism and the rise of billionaire-funded populism meet.

As I argued in ‘Is the political centre dead?’, the collapse of the old political settlement does not mean that voters have suddenly become socialist. It means that millions have stopped believing the settlement works for them. That distinction matters enormously, because anger without an explanation of power is politically available to whoever can provide the most compelling target.

The centre has lost much of its historic authority to define what counts as reasonable because it defended increasingly unreasonable outcomes for too long. But anti-settlement politics is not inherently progressive. The vacuum left behind can be filled from either direction. If the democratic left does not connect insecurity, stagnation and declining public services to the distribution of wealth and economic power, the billionaire right will happily connect them to migrants, minorities and the powerless instead.

And now Reform has £72mn with which to make that explanation heard

We have seen a similar thing in the past. There is a historical warning here. In 1933, the Nazis destroyed Germany’s independent trade unions and absorbed workers into a state-controlled organisation. That history illustrates an extreme version of a recurring truth: movements that speak constantly in the name of ‘the people’ can strip actual working people of the institutions through which they exercise power.

Of course, Britain is not Weimar Germany, and melodrama weakens the argument against populism, which should be defeated by not sacrificing good socialist policies on the altar of appeasement and centrism. The immediate democratic danger is visible without it: a party manifesting itself as anti-elite now possesses a huge electoral war chest supplied, in a single weekend, by two members of an economic elite.

Brexit also demonstrated how money, data and technology could combine to change the scale of political persuasion. Investigations into Cambridge Analytica, Leave.EU and Vote Leave’s work with AggregateIQ exposed a political infrastructure in which voter data could be analysed, segmented and targeted at extraordinary scale. Political money no longer bought only posters, leaflets and airtime. It could buy data, behavioural insight and the ability to deliver different messages to different voters.

That history matters when considering what £72mn can purchase now.

£72mn does not guarantee Reform victory. Money cannot manufacture consent out of thin air. But it can industrialise resentment. It can test which fear works, identify who is susceptible to it and place variations of the same message in front of them again and again. It can overwhelm rebuttal through sheer scale. It can help turn prejudice into organisation, grievance into data and two private fortunes into a national political presence.

The technology has changed since Brexit, the democratic asymmetry has not

Ben Delo and Christopher Harborne are entitled to their political opinions. They are not entitled to a healthier democracy merely because their donations comply with the law. Legality answers whether the rules were followed. It does not answer whether the rules protect political equality.

The final question is therefore not whether billionaires should be allowed to vote, speak or donate, of course they should. It is whether democracy should permit wealth to amplify their voices millions of times beyond those of the people who will live with the result.

Because when political anger is financed from above and directed downwards, the pattern is brutally consistent.

The billionaires buy influence.

The powerless become the target.

And the public pays the bill.