Musk shows how British democracy is wide open to abuse
Including interview with Peter Geoghagan
Our democracy is remarkably easy to manipulate. In the past week, Elon Musk and the UK property magnate Nick Candy have promised untold millions to Nigel Farage. Musk then dropped Farage because he would not endorse Stephen Yaxley Lennon, aka Tommy Robinson, a genuinely extreme figure with multiple convictions.
As I said in my last post, Musk too is a genuinely extreme figure, and no one has the right to be surprised by his admiration for jailbirds and anti-Muslim thugs.
Nor can we believe that the political influence Musk’s money brings is over now that the connection with Farage is severed. Like a weedy kid begging for favours from the school bully, Farage is now whining that “of course, I want his support”.
And if Farage won’t deliver, Musk’s money is available to other wannabee rabble rousers on the British right.
Musk still owns Twitter (X) and his engineers have rigged the algorithm so that his crank views hit us every time we log on
It works. There is no clearer illustration of the power of money than the way Musk shaped coverage of the child abuse scandal in the UK.
He made it seem as if horrible cases of the sexual exploitation of children from the early years of the century had been ignored because the perpetrators were Muslim.
He didn’t know and did not want to know either about the multiple local inquires and the one national inquiry.
The media followed Musk. As did the Conservative party, which looks as if it is now trying in its cynicism and desperation to outflank Farage on the right.
The Mirror journalist Hugh Cudlipp said of the overheated obsessions of Lord Beaverbrook, the 20th century Anglo-Canadian press baron:
“He merited no more attention than a bearded nut in Trafalgar Square carrying a placard that ‘Judgement is Nigh’.”
But because he owned newspapers the world was forced to listen. Musk commands an audience of a size the press magnates of the past could only dream about. His propaganda is more deadly and relentless.
The power of the plutocracy is the subject of the latest Lowdown with Peter Geoghagan, the author of the essential Democracy for Sale newsletter .
You can listen here on Apple
On Spotify
And on all other apps via this link.
Two warnings against complacency are worth bearing in mind.
The usual layers of duplicity cover the role of money here in Perfidious Albion. Like a Victorian family keeping up appearances we behave with the utmost propriety during election campaigns when there are strict limits on funding.
Outside of elections, however, anything goes.
Writing on Democracy for Sale David Howarth, Professor of Law at Cambridge University, went through the gory details.
He pointed out that British politics is increasingly funded by a handful of rich men (and they are mainly men.) Last year, two-thirds of donations came from just 19 donors, who gave more than £1 million, according to recent research by Transparency International.
The Tories stripped powers away from the Electoral Commission, the body that was meant to regulate politics. Because it cannot enforce limits on donations, parties are positively encouraged to flatter the superrich in the hope of gaining a jackpot payout.
Labour, with its union backing, wants to leave the status quo unchallenged. Perhaps Musk’s interventions will change that.
The US is meant to be our ally, after all. Yet here is Musk, a confidant of Trump, and a member of the incoming administration, spreading lies and inciting violence.
To date Labour has hoped for the best and just assumed that Trump will not be such a bad president. Wishful thinking is more comforting than the awful choices brought by the realisation that Trump and Musk will appease Putin and other leaders of dictatorships while whipping up far-right movements in democracies.
It seems to me that the time for wishful thinking has been and gone and all that is left to do is face our bleak future honestly.
The archives are for paying subscribers. For £1.15 a week ($1.40) you have access to eveeything I do. You also allow me to carry on writing without fear or favour.
Previously on this site I put a long read on the obsessive knowledge Trump and Musk have of the British far right. I cannot think of any previous US president or tech mogul who would know about the existence of a low level limey lout like Tommy Robinson.
More widely there is a piece on why the Trump movement prefers Putin’s dicatorship to Western democracy.
Yes, like the Tories, Labour try to game the system to gain narrow party advantage. It's very similar to their attitude to voting reform.
We need reform of the way parties are funded (with big individual donations banned) and we need electoral reform. We also need the electoral commission to be independent of government, and run by judges. The electoral commission should have legal powers like the health and safety executive.
I initially read "a jackpot payout" as "a crackpot payout". But it's understandable. There is no guarantee that the billionaires whose funds politicians crave are reasonable balanced individuals, and, if Musk is anything to go by, they can be the worst sort of crackpots.