Showing posts with label donor. Show all posts
Showing posts with label donor. Show all posts
Tuesday 21 February 2023
Wednesday 30 November 2016
Frightened by Donald Trump? You don’t know the half of it
George Monbiot in The Guardian
Yes, Donald Trump’s politics are incoherent. But those who surround him know just what they want, and his lack of clarity enhances their power. To understand what is coming, we need to understand who they are. I know all too well, because I have spent the past 15 years fighting them.
Over this time, I have watched as tobacco, coal, oil, chemicals and biotech companies have poured billions of dollars into an international misinformation machine composed of thinktanks, bloggers and fake citizens’ groups. Its purpose is to portray the interests of billionaires as the interests of the common people, to wage war against trade unions and beat down attempts to regulate business and tax the very rich. Now the people who helped run this machine are shaping the government.
I first encountered the machine when writing about climate change. The fury and loathing directed at climate scientists and campaigners seemed incomprehensible until I realised they were fake: the hatred had been paid for. The bloggers and institutes whipping up this anger were funded by oil and coal companies.
Among those I clashed with was Myron Ebell of the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI). The CEI calls itself a thinktank, but looks to me like a corporate lobbying group. It is not transparent about its funding, but we now know it has received $2m from ExxonMobil, more than $4m from a group called the Donors Trust (which represents various corporations and billionaires), $800,000 from groups set up by the tycoons Charles and David Koch, and substantial sums from coal, tobacco and pharmaceutical companies.
For years, Ebell and the CEI have attacked efforts to limit climate change, through lobbying, lawsuits and campaigns. An advertisement released by the institute had the punchline “Carbon dioxide: they call it pollution. We call it life.”
Former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, like other members of Trump’s team, came from a group called Americans for Prosperity. Photograph: UPI/Barcroft Images
It has sought to eliminate funding for environmental education, lobbied against the Endangered Species Act, harried climate scientists and campaigned in favour of mountaintop removal by coal companies. In 2004, Ebell sent a memo to one of George W Bush’s staffers calling for the head of the Environmental Protection Agency to be sacked. Where is Ebell now? Oh – leading Trump’s transition team for the Environmental Protection Agency.
Charles and David Koch – who for years have funded extreme pro-corporate politics – might not have been enthusiasts for Trump’s candidacy, but their people were all over his campaign. Until June, Trump’s campaign manager was Corey Lewandowski, who like other members of Trump’s team came from a group called Americans for Prosperity (AFP).
This purports to be a grassroots campaign, but it was founded and funded by the Koch brothers. It set up the first Tea Party Facebook page and organised the first Tea Party events. With a budget of hundreds of millions of dollars, AFP has campaigned ferociously on issues that coincide with the Koch brothers’ commercial interests in oil, gas, minerals, timber and chemicals.
In Michigan, it helped force through the “right to work bill”, in pursuit of what AFP’s local director called “taking the unions out at the knees”. It has campaigned nationwide against action on climate change. It has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into unseating the politicians who won’t do its bidding and replacing them with those who will.
I could fill this newspaper with the names of Trump staffers who have emerged from such groups: people such as Doug Domenech, from the Texas Public Policy Foundation, funded among others by the Koch brothers, Exxon and the Donors Trust; Barry Bennett, whose Alliance for America’s Future (now called One Nation) refused to disclose its donors when challenged; and Thomas Pyle, president of the American Energy Alliance, funded by Exxon and others. This is to say nothing of Trump’s own crashing conflicts of interest. Trump promised to “drain the swamp” of the lobbyists and corporate stooges working in Washington. But it looks as if the only swamps he’ll drain will be real ones, as his team launches its war on the natural world.
Understandably, there has been plenty of coverage of the racists and white supremacists empowered by Trump’s victory. But, gruesome as they are, they’re peripheral to the policies his team will develop. It’s almost comforting, though, to focus on them, for at least we know who they are and what they stand for. By contrast, to penetrate the corporate misinformation machine is to enter a world of mirrors. Spend too long trying to understand it, and the hyporeality vortex will inflict serious damage on your state of mind.
Don’t imagine that other parts of the world are immune. Corporate-funded thinktanks and fake grassroots groups are now everywhere. The fake news we should be worried about is not stories invented by Macedonian teenagers about Hillary Clinton selling arms to Islamic State, but the constant feed of confected scares about unions, tax and regulation drummed up by groups that won’t reveal their interests.
The less transparent they are, the more airtime they receive. The organisation Transparify runs an annual survey of thinktanks. This year’s survey reveals that in the UK only four thinktanks – the Adam Smith Institute, Centre for Policy Studies, Institute of Economic Affairs and Policy Exchange – “still consider it acceptable to take money from hidden hands behind closed doors”. And these are the ones that are all over the media.
When the Institute of Economic Affairs, as it so often does, appears on the BBC to argue against regulating tobacco, shouldn’t we be told that it has been funded by tobacco companies since 1963? There’s a similar pattern in the US: the most vocal groups tend to be the most opaque.
As usual, the left and centre (myself included) are beating ourselves up about where we went wrong. There are plenty of answers, but one of them is that we have simply been outspent. Not by a little, but by orders of magnitude. A few billion dollars spent on persuasion buys you all the politics you want. Genuine campaigners, working in their free time, simply cannot match a professional network staffed by thousands of well-paid, unscrupulous people.
You cannot confront a power until you know what it is. Our first task in this struggle is to understand what we face. Only then can we work out what to do,
Yes, Donald Trump’s politics are incoherent. But those who surround him know just what they want, and his lack of clarity enhances their power. To understand what is coming, we need to understand who they are. I know all too well, because I have spent the past 15 years fighting them.
Over this time, I have watched as tobacco, coal, oil, chemicals and biotech companies have poured billions of dollars into an international misinformation machine composed of thinktanks, bloggers and fake citizens’ groups. Its purpose is to portray the interests of billionaires as the interests of the common people, to wage war against trade unions and beat down attempts to regulate business and tax the very rich. Now the people who helped run this machine are shaping the government.
I first encountered the machine when writing about climate change. The fury and loathing directed at climate scientists and campaigners seemed incomprehensible until I realised they were fake: the hatred had been paid for. The bloggers and institutes whipping up this anger were funded by oil and coal companies.
Among those I clashed with was Myron Ebell of the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI). The CEI calls itself a thinktank, but looks to me like a corporate lobbying group. It is not transparent about its funding, but we now know it has received $2m from ExxonMobil, more than $4m from a group called the Donors Trust (which represents various corporations and billionaires), $800,000 from groups set up by the tycoons Charles and David Koch, and substantial sums from coal, tobacco and pharmaceutical companies.
For years, Ebell and the CEI have attacked efforts to limit climate change, through lobbying, lawsuits and campaigns. An advertisement released by the institute had the punchline “Carbon dioxide: they call it pollution. We call it life.”
Former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, like other members of Trump’s team, came from a group called Americans for Prosperity. Photograph: UPI/Barcroft Images
It has sought to eliminate funding for environmental education, lobbied against the Endangered Species Act, harried climate scientists and campaigned in favour of mountaintop removal by coal companies. In 2004, Ebell sent a memo to one of George W Bush’s staffers calling for the head of the Environmental Protection Agency to be sacked. Where is Ebell now? Oh – leading Trump’s transition team for the Environmental Protection Agency.
Charles and David Koch – who for years have funded extreme pro-corporate politics – might not have been enthusiasts for Trump’s candidacy, but their people were all over his campaign. Until June, Trump’s campaign manager was Corey Lewandowski, who like other members of Trump’s team came from a group called Americans for Prosperity (AFP).
This purports to be a grassroots campaign, but it was founded and funded by the Koch brothers. It set up the first Tea Party Facebook page and organised the first Tea Party events. With a budget of hundreds of millions of dollars, AFP has campaigned ferociously on issues that coincide with the Koch brothers’ commercial interests in oil, gas, minerals, timber and chemicals.
In Michigan, it helped force through the “right to work bill”, in pursuit of what AFP’s local director called “taking the unions out at the knees”. It has campaigned nationwide against action on climate change. It has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into unseating the politicians who won’t do its bidding and replacing them with those who will.
I could fill this newspaper with the names of Trump staffers who have emerged from such groups: people such as Doug Domenech, from the Texas Public Policy Foundation, funded among others by the Koch brothers, Exxon and the Donors Trust; Barry Bennett, whose Alliance for America’s Future (now called One Nation) refused to disclose its donors when challenged; and Thomas Pyle, president of the American Energy Alliance, funded by Exxon and others. This is to say nothing of Trump’s own crashing conflicts of interest. Trump promised to “drain the swamp” of the lobbyists and corporate stooges working in Washington. But it looks as if the only swamps he’ll drain will be real ones, as his team launches its war on the natural world.
Understandably, there has been plenty of coverage of the racists and white supremacists empowered by Trump’s victory. But, gruesome as they are, they’re peripheral to the policies his team will develop. It’s almost comforting, though, to focus on them, for at least we know who they are and what they stand for. By contrast, to penetrate the corporate misinformation machine is to enter a world of mirrors. Spend too long trying to understand it, and the hyporeality vortex will inflict serious damage on your state of mind.
Don’t imagine that other parts of the world are immune. Corporate-funded thinktanks and fake grassroots groups are now everywhere. The fake news we should be worried about is not stories invented by Macedonian teenagers about Hillary Clinton selling arms to Islamic State, but the constant feed of confected scares about unions, tax and regulation drummed up by groups that won’t reveal their interests.
The less transparent they are, the more airtime they receive. The organisation Transparify runs an annual survey of thinktanks. This year’s survey reveals that in the UK only four thinktanks – the Adam Smith Institute, Centre for Policy Studies, Institute of Economic Affairs and Policy Exchange – “still consider it acceptable to take money from hidden hands behind closed doors”. And these are the ones that are all over the media.
When the Institute of Economic Affairs, as it so often does, appears on the BBC to argue against regulating tobacco, shouldn’t we be told that it has been funded by tobacco companies since 1963? There’s a similar pattern in the US: the most vocal groups tend to be the most opaque.
As usual, the left and centre (myself included) are beating ourselves up about where we went wrong. There are plenty of answers, but one of them is that we have simply been outspent. Not by a little, but by orders of magnitude. A few billion dollars spent on persuasion buys you all the politics you want. Genuine campaigners, working in their free time, simply cannot match a professional network staffed by thousands of well-paid, unscrupulous people.
You cannot confront a power until you know what it is. Our first task in this struggle is to understand what we face. Only then can we work out what to do,
Thursday 24 September 2015
It’s the British establishment that has a problem with democracy
The elite has little time for elections that deliver the wrong results. And Jeremy Corbyn’s was one of them
Seumas Milne in The Guardian
If there were any doubts that the British establishment has a problem with democracy, the last few days should have put them to rest. First there was the drama of the spurned Tory donor and piggate. Unsurprisingly, Michael Ashcroft’s revelation that the prime minister simulated oral sex with a dead pig as part of a student initiation ceremony has been the centre of attention.
The question of whether David Cameron lied about when he knew of the former Conservative treasurer and donor’s continuing non-dom tax status – meaning Ashcroft paid no tax in Britain on his overseas earnings – was dutifully raised by Labour and SNP MPs. Both Ashcroft and the Tories had promised he would take up permanent UK residence when he was given a peerage in 2000.
Revealed: the link between life peerages and party donations
But the real scandal is that Ashcroft, like so many party donors before him, simply paid up and pocketed his unelected seat in parliament in return. His later argument with Cameron was apparently only about whether a “significant” government job was also included in the package for his £8m of donations. And the evidence suggests Cameron only dropped it because of embarrassment over the “non-dom” deceit.
But it’s not as if Ashcroft’s expectations were at all unreasonable, based on experience. Rewarding major donors with seats in parliament and jobs in government is a long-established British tradition. Statistical analysis has disposed of any vestigial doubt that this exchange is what is still going on. Among many others, John Nash, the venture capitalist with education and health interests, was given a peerage and a job as schools minister in 2013. David Sainsbury was made science minister in Tony Blair’s government after donating millions of pounds to the New Labour. Outrageously, but to no great surprise, government jobs and seats in the legislature are very much tradeable commodities in the mother of parliaments.
The second shaft of light thrown on the contempt for democracy among the British elite appeared at the weekend, when a “senior serving general” in the British army told the Sunday Times that the armed forces would take “direct action” and “mutiny” if Jeremy Corbyn were to become prime minister. “Fair means or foul”, the general reportedly declared, would be used to protect the country’s “security”.
At face value that is a threat of a coup against a future elected government and an attack on national security. Of course, the bluster of one unnamed general against the newly elected Labour leader is a long way from the reality of tanks on the streets, or even military insubordination against elected leaders. And the British military has in any case a long record of suppressing democracy around the world.
But the lack of official and media response to the kind of openly anti-democratic top-brass talk that’s not been heard in Britain since the 1970s – and would be denounced as treasonable anywhere else – is remarkable. The comments by the general were unacceptable and “not helpful”, was the most the Ministry of Defence could manage. Self-evidently, the general should be disciplined. But the government ruled out even an inquiry on the grounds that it would be “almost impossible” to identify the culprit among 100 serving generals.
It’s only necessary to imagine what would happen if a Muslim had threatened “direct action” against elected leaders to grasp the absurdity of the response. Add in the fact that the intelligence services have also said they will “restrict” information to Corbyn “or any of his cabinet” because of the opposition leader’s “detestation of Britain’s security services” – and it’s clear the problem unelected officials have with elected politicians who disagree with them goes far beyond the odd bilious general.
But political corruption and the implacable opposition of the spooks and military to progressive change are the traditional forms of anti-democratic politics, in Britain, as elsewhere. For the past generation it has been the corporate embrace, the revolving doors, the privatised contracts, the “free trade” treaties, European Union directives, and the removal of economics from democratic control under the neoliberal rules of the game that have set the boundaries of acceptable politics.
Since the 2008 crash the rejection of that broken economic model and the hollowed-out politics that reflects it has spread across the western world, now including Britain. Which helps explain why Cameron’s Conservatives have turned to the most retrograde measures to bring opposition to heel.
The most extreme of those is the trade union bill now going through parliament, which will not only effectively outlaw most strikes but will slash trade union funding of the Labour party by erecting an individualised postal hurdle, a form of which was last imposed in the aftermath of the General Strike of 1926. No such obligations will apply, needless to say, to the entirely undemocratic corporate funding of the Tory party.
But establishment resistance to a democratic mandate is also running at a high pitch inside the Labour party itself. The reaction of a string of Labour grandees to Corbyn’s landslide election – including of several of those brought into the new leader’s big-tent shadow cabinet – has been to denounce most of the platform he was elected on.
More than anything else, the established international and security policies of the state, from renewal of the Trident nuclear weapons system to support for any and every US military campaign across the Arab and Muslim world, are being treated as red lines out of bounds of democratic debate.
That doesn’t reflect public opinion, let alone the views of Labour’s hugely expanded membership. The only way to bridge the gap between the bulk of Labour MPs, most of whom were selected under a tightly controlled New Labour regime, and the mandate of a leader elected by a runaway majority outside parliament is to give full rein to the party’s own democracy.
That process will start at next week’s Labour conference. But it could be bolstered, and Corbyn’s political authority strengthened, with a referendum of members and affiliated supporters on the main policies he campaigned on, from abolition of tuition fees to public ownership. It’s only by unleashing democracy, inside and outside the Labour party, that the anti-democratic backlash will be overcome.
Seumas Milne in The Guardian
If there were any doubts that the British establishment has a problem with democracy, the last few days should have put them to rest. First there was the drama of the spurned Tory donor and piggate. Unsurprisingly, Michael Ashcroft’s revelation that the prime minister simulated oral sex with a dead pig as part of a student initiation ceremony has been the centre of attention.
The question of whether David Cameron lied about when he knew of the former Conservative treasurer and donor’s continuing non-dom tax status – meaning Ashcroft paid no tax in Britain on his overseas earnings – was dutifully raised by Labour and SNP MPs. Both Ashcroft and the Tories had promised he would take up permanent UK residence when he was given a peerage in 2000.
Revealed: the link between life peerages and party donations
But the real scandal is that Ashcroft, like so many party donors before him, simply paid up and pocketed his unelected seat in parliament in return. His later argument with Cameron was apparently only about whether a “significant” government job was also included in the package for his £8m of donations. And the evidence suggests Cameron only dropped it because of embarrassment over the “non-dom” deceit.
But it’s not as if Ashcroft’s expectations were at all unreasonable, based on experience. Rewarding major donors with seats in parliament and jobs in government is a long-established British tradition. Statistical analysis has disposed of any vestigial doubt that this exchange is what is still going on. Among many others, John Nash, the venture capitalist with education and health interests, was given a peerage and a job as schools minister in 2013. David Sainsbury was made science minister in Tony Blair’s government after donating millions of pounds to the New Labour. Outrageously, but to no great surprise, government jobs and seats in the legislature are very much tradeable commodities in the mother of parliaments.
The second shaft of light thrown on the contempt for democracy among the British elite appeared at the weekend, when a “senior serving general” in the British army told the Sunday Times that the armed forces would take “direct action” and “mutiny” if Jeremy Corbyn were to become prime minister. “Fair means or foul”, the general reportedly declared, would be used to protect the country’s “security”.
At face value that is a threat of a coup against a future elected government and an attack on national security. Of course, the bluster of one unnamed general against the newly elected Labour leader is a long way from the reality of tanks on the streets, or even military insubordination against elected leaders. And the British military has in any case a long record of suppressing democracy around the world.
But the lack of official and media response to the kind of openly anti-democratic top-brass talk that’s not been heard in Britain since the 1970s – and would be denounced as treasonable anywhere else – is remarkable. The comments by the general were unacceptable and “not helpful”, was the most the Ministry of Defence could manage. Self-evidently, the general should be disciplined. But the government ruled out even an inquiry on the grounds that it would be “almost impossible” to identify the culprit among 100 serving generals.
It’s only necessary to imagine what would happen if a Muslim had threatened “direct action” against elected leaders to grasp the absurdity of the response. Add in the fact that the intelligence services have also said they will “restrict” information to Corbyn “or any of his cabinet” because of the opposition leader’s “detestation of Britain’s security services” – and it’s clear the problem unelected officials have with elected politicians who disagree with them goes far beyond the odd bilious general.
But political corruption and the implacable opposition of the spooks and military to progressive change are the traditional forms of anti-democratic politics, in Britain, as elsewhere. For the past generation it has been the corporate embrace, the revolving doors, the privatised contracts, the “free trade” treaties, European Union directives, and the removal of economics from democratic control under the neoliberal rules of the game that have set the boundaries of acceptable politics.
Since the 2008 crash the rejection of that broken economic model and the hollowed-out politics that reflects it has spread across the western world, now including Britain. Which helps explain why Cameron’s Conservatives have turned to the most retrograde measures to bring opposition to heel.
The most extreme of those is the trade union bill now going through parliament, which will not only effectively outlaw most strikes but will slash trade union funding of the Labour party by erecting an individualised postal hurdle, a form of which was last imposed in the aftermath of the General Strike of 1926. No such obligations will apply, needless to say, to the entirely undemocratic corporate funding of the Tory party.
But establishment resistance to a democratic mandate is also running at a high pitch inside the Labour party itself. The reaction of a string of Labour grandees to Corbyn’s landslide election – including of several of those brought into the new leader’s big-tent shadow cabinet – has been to denounce most of the platform he was elected on.
More than anything else, the established international and security policies of the state, from renewal of the Trident nuclear weapons system to support for any and every US military campaign across the Arab and Muslim world, are being treated as red lines out of bounds of democratic debate.
That doesn’t reflect public opinion, let alone the views of Labour’s hugely expanded membership. The only way to bridge the gap between the bulk of Labour MPs, most of whom were selected under a tightly controlled New Labour regime, and the mandate of a leader elected by a runaway majority outside parliament is to give full rein to the party’s own democracy.
That process will start at next week’s Labour conference. But it could be bolstered, and Corbyn’s political authority strengthened, with a referendum of members and affiliated supporters on the main policies he campaigned on, from abolition of tuition fees to public ownership. It’s only by unleashing democracy, inside and outside the Labour party, that the anti-democratic backlash will be overcome.
Friday 2 August 2013
Party Donors nominated to House of Lords
from The Independent
The naming of business chiefs who have donated millions of pounds to the major political parties as new members of the House of Lords has provoked accusations that money is “polluting” Parliament.
The donors are included on a list of 30 new peers who will take the total membership of the Second Chamber to nearly 850 – the biggest number since it was reformed 14 years ago.
The 14 Conservative nominations include Sir Anthony Bamford, the chairman of JCB, whose family and firm has handed £5m to the party in recent years. His elevation comes three years after a previous attempt by David Cameron to award him a peerage was dropped.
JCB has close links with the Conservative Party. It employed the Foreign Secretary William Hague as an adviser after he stepped down as party leader in 2001 and Mr Cameron last year opened a company factory in Brazil.
A Tory source praised Sir Anthony as an “incredibly significantly industrialist” whose business employs thousands of people and pointed out he was invited on a foreign delegation organised by the last Labour government.
The Conservative list also includes Howard Leigh, a Tory treasurer and fundraiser, who has donated more than £200,000 personally and through his company.
Two prominent Liberal Democrat donors are among the 10 party supporters nominated to the Upper House by Nick Clegg. They are the entrepreneur Rumi Verjee, who brought Domino’s Pizza to Britain and has given the Liberal Democrats more than £800,000 and the nightclub developer James Palumbo, whose Ministry of Sound company has donated almost £700,000.
One of Labour’s five new peers is the businessman Sir William Haughey, a former director of Celtic football club, who has given the party more than £1.3m since 2003.
The campaign group Unlock Democracy said the nominees were the “usual list of party donors and cronies” and accused Downing Street of producing the names in Parliament’s summer recess to minimise adverse publicity.
Lord Oakeshott of Seagrove Bay, a Liberal Democrat member of the committee of MPs and peers which drew up a blueprint for Lords reform blocked by Mr Cameron, said: “Cash for peerages pollutes Parliament and political parties. We are all in it. It is now more urgent than ever to elect the Lords and get the big money out of British politics for good.”
The swathe of appointments brings the number of people entitled to sit in the Lords to 838 (although 53 are currently absent), the largest figure since most hereditary peers were removed in 1999.
The new peers could cost the taxpayer about £1.2m, plus travel and other expenses, leaving Mr Cameron with awkward questions over his promise to cut the cost of politics.
New peers
1. Sir Anthony Bamford (Con) Veteran industrialist whose family is a long-standing, generous Tory supporter.
2. Danny Finkelstein (Con) Times columnist, below left, and old friend of George Osborne. A youthful supporter of the SDP.
3. John Horam (Con) Britain’s most travelled politician sat in the Commons for Labour, the SDP and finally the Tories.
4. Howard Leigh (Con) Chairman of the Leaders Group, a network for supporters requiring members to donate at least £50,000 a year.
5. Olly Grender (Lib Dem) First worked for the party in the 1980s and was Paddy Ashdown’s chief spin doctor. Has just stood down from a Downing Street stint.
6. Brian Paddick (Lib Dem) Former senior officer in the Metropolitan Police, above right, has twice been a candidate for London Mayor.
7. James Palumbo (Lib Dem) Friend of Nick Clegg and has lent his nightclub, free of charge, to the Lib Dems.
8. Sir William Haughey (Lab) Glaswegian businessman above right, who built a fortune in the refrigeration business. Has given more than £5m to charity.
9. Jon Mendelsohn (Lab) Chief fund-raiser for Labour who set up his own lobbying company with two party colleagues.
10. Jenny Jones (Green) One of their most prominent figures on the London Assembly for 13 years.
Tuesday 9 July 2013
Looking for a party funding scandal? Try David Cameron's Conservatives
We know how much Unite gives Labour, but finding out who writes the cheques for Conservative Central Office is more difficult
Len McCluskey, general secretary of Unite. Photograph: Sarah Lee for the Guardian
I've just been reading about a political party in hock to shadowy donors who enjoy easy access to its leadership and untold influence over its policies. It's scandalous stuff. That's right: I've just been reading about David Cameron's Conservative party.
Few activities are more congenial to the British commentariat than an afternoon's fox-hunting that can be moralised away as "grownup" debate. So it is with Ed Miliband and Len McCluskey. Even as they fire upon Ed for not being his brother, the pundits insist their real subject is party funding and who runs British politics. Yet mentions of the Tories' paymasters are inevitably brief and come with the gloss of "they're all as bad as each other".
Actually, they're not. Yes, some of the allegations about Falkirk are shaming. And it goes without saying that all three main parties are damagingly dependent on big donors; no Obama-style flood of 20s and 50s on this side of the water. But when it comes to concentration of funding, the opacity over where the cash comes from and the overlap between policy and donor interests, the Conservatives look far more corrupted.
We know how much Unite gives Labour because it's out in the open: all fully checkable on the Electoral Commission's website. Finding out who writes the cheques for Conservative Central Office is far harder. Cameron's funders seem to prefer channeling their money through conduits, or splitting the cash between multiple donors.
Through their forensic investigation into Tory funding, published just after the last general election, Stephen Crone and Stuart Wilks-Heeg discovered that some of the largest contributors would give a few hundred thousand: big, but not big enough to raise eyebrows. But then a funny thing could be spotted in the accounts: their wives and other family members would chip in, as well as their business ventures.
Take the JCB billionaire Sir Anthony Bamford, one of Cameron's favourite businessmen and a regular guest on the PM's trade missions abroad. Between 2001 and summer 2010, Wilks-Heeg and Crone found donations from Anthony Bamford, Mark Bamford, George Bamford, JCB Bamford Excavators, JCB Research, and JCB World Brands. Tot that up and you get a contribution to the Conservative party from the Bamford family of £3,898,900. But you'd need to be an expert sleuth with plenty of time and resources to tot it up.
One family: nearly £4m. Wilks-Heeg and Crone found that 15 of these families or "donor groups" account for almost a third of all Tory funding. They enjoy trips to Chequers, dinners in Downing Street and a friendly prime ministerial ear. Lord Irvine Laidlaw stuffed over £6m into Conservative pockets over a decade and, one of his former staffers told the Mail, liked to boast about his influence over party leaders: "William's [Hague] in my pocket".
Perhaps you're wondering why the Tories talked so tough on banking reform before election but have done so little since. That may have something to do with the money the City gives to them. According to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, in 2010 donations from financial services accounted for over half of all Tory funding.
Three years ago, spread-betting boss Stuart Wheeler brazenly told MPs that "a party is going to take more notice of somebody who might give them lots of money than somebody who won't". He should know; he once gave the Conservatives a single donation of £5m. And certainly, the City has plenty to show for its investment. Across Europe, Angela Merkel, François Hollande and others are pushing ahead with plans for a Tobin tax or a small levy on financial transactions to start next year. Britain, on the other hand, is part of a small band of refuseniks, along with such other giants of financial regulation as Malta and Luxembourg.
One of the mysteries of this government is why George Osborne made a priority of cutting the 50p tax for the super-rich, thus handing the opposition a stick to beat him with. One possible answer to that is suggested by an FT report from November 2011 on hedge-fund donations to Osborne's party. "There probably aren't many votes in cutting the 50p top rate of tax," one major hedge fund donor told the paper, "but among those that give significant amounts to the party, it's a big issue, and that's probably why it's a big issue for the party too". Just four months later, at the next budget, the 50p rate was scrapped.
What, by contrast, has Uncle Len ever got from Ed Miliband? A promise of an end to the pay freeze for public servants? Nyet. A commitment to break from austerity? Nein. In spring 2010, the Telegraph claimed that Labour ministers "echoed the union's opposition to Kraft's takeover of Cadbury". This would be the takeover that actually went through. There are shades here of the MPs' expenses scandal, when the Tory schemes for lifting money from taxpayers were so baroque that they attracted less opprobrium than Labour parliamentarians claiming for bath plugs and blue movies. So it is with McCluskey's plan to fill Falkirk's constituency Labour party with Unite's Keystone Cops, even while hedgie Michael Hintze puts nearly £40,000 towards the chancellor's expenses alone and reaps the reward of a cut in his taxes.
But there's something else going on, too. Westminster and the press are still ruled by the idea that if workers' representatives seek to influence politics they must be bullies; while if capitalists get their way, then that's inevitably good for capitalism. Five years on from the banking crisis and all the evidence to the contrary, that really is a link that needs ending.
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