The Best Politicians Money Can Buy

Our democracy appears to have been bought and sold

From multiple media reports in recent days weeks and years, it’s clear our democratic system is facing a crisis of corruption greater even than the Tories faced in their “cash for questions” car boot sale of politicians in the 1990s.

Nepotism seems to be rife in the corridors of power and in the selection processes for councillor and MP candidates across political parties, as politicians form and perpetuate an exclusive political class of and for itself. Reform UK (Plc) have even managed to stand candidates who don’t exist and are just an Elon Musk AI avatar.

Favoured candidates are dropped into constituencies hundreds of miles from where they live on the basis of factional membership, cronyism and loyalism, recreating the infamous “rotten boroughs” approach to democracy practised by the mega-rich 200 years ago. Huge undeclared overseas donations are made to senior politicians, with Nigel Farage the latest to be found out. But even more money – some declared and some not – is apparently channelled in penny packets to a range of loyal candidates at local level through organisations such as Labour Together.

The official, but apparently partial, Register of Members’ Interests in parliament, where all donations should be declared, shows Government Ministers and Shadow Ministers taking large donations from private companies often based abroad with a direct interest in their area of responsibility – most famously the hundreds of thousands of pounds paid to Health Secretary Wes Streeting by private healthcare providers and insurers. It’s out in the open, and published and largely ignored by a media until now that seems to be in on the game.

It's time we asked two basic questions from both those who are buying our politicians and those who are receiving these payments: exactly what is being bought and sold?

Is it the old school Cash for Questions of the Tories? Or is it cash for access, cash for jobs, cash for policies or even cash for votes?

Most people, given the scale and amounts, simply will not accept that these payments are merely political donations with no strings attached. And are fed up with being patronised and treated as children by our political class

And many are now asking why these donors can’t just stand for election themselves, answer questions from us and let us decide their value instead of trying to buy our politicians. As Robin Williams, and others, famously suggested some years ago, politicians should be like Nascar drivers and be made to wear the names of their sponsors on their jackets wherever they go.

And for elected politicians struggling to find answers to the apparent, to them at least, conundrum of why voters have started to turn against the legacy parties of Labour and Conservative; they may want to reflect on the old adage first attributed to Boris Johnson: that when people conclude that politics is a circus they will vote for the clowns.

Many people feel betrayed and abandoned by politics and democracy just now, as simply not working for us - and a political Party to which we are never invited, to misquote Billy Bragg.

The prolonged disconnect with the political system of many communities is coming home to roost in what is now a seven horse race in a democracy built for two. The cronyism, careerism, entitlement, corruption, grifting and nepotism we watch on our TV every night is systemic and has been far more corrosive on trust in democracy than current politicians can account for.

Politicians routinely spout the line that they “stayed within the guidelines” when they are caught receiving “gifts” of football and concert tickets, clothes, holidays and so on, much to the fury of many working class communities who can only dream of accessing such ‘freebies’ and demand the guidelines are changed. And see little difference between the Labour Together government of Starmer, Streeting, McSweeney and Mandelson to that of Johnson, Cummings, Sunak and May before them.

A growing sense that what we are talking about at home at work and at the bus stop is very different to what politicians are talking about in our House of Commons and on the TV news.  And that the radical changes many are crying out for like just transition for workers faced with AI, water pollution, and wealth tax don’t even get debated and are absent yet again from the 2026 Kings Speech, which Labour describe as “radical”

And a feeling abroad that the people we vote for may not be the people making decisions. And expressed in that famous doorstep phrase “you’re all the same”. Which any politician of any stripe would be best advised not to sneer at as there’s often more thoughtful analysis behind it than the “voter apathy” they often assume.

Candidates for office appear drawn from a very narrow base and look and sound very alike – climbing into the politics clubhouse through the same narrowing Overton window together and drawing the curtains so no-one can peek inside the room.

Karl Marx predicted that there would be an increasing accumulation of wealth at the top of society as a result of unfettered capitalism - unless democracy checked it. Wealth trickling up and not down. He predicted that this surplus money would be used first to trigger wars, then to buy and control the Earth's resources, then the media and finally politics itself. You don’t have to profess to be a Marxist to engage with that prediction 200 years on. You just have to watch the news.

The reality of our sold democracy is staring us in the face – and the well recorded disaffection of so many voters with democracy itself manifests itself as votes for legacy parties consistently fall (with a significant blip only in 2017).

Some pundits however have begun to argue that this is because the majority of voters in working class communities feel their values have been left behind and abandoned as an entryist middle class liberal “woke” elite have infiltrated and taken over the legacy parties of Labour and Conservative.

Speaking at a May Day debate in the rarefied reading rooms of the Durham Union on the issue of left-behind and abandoned communities, the gulf in lived experience and culture between those in the hall was laid out starkly when most of the assembled students stared blankly as the call was made to forgive student loan debt as a fiscal drag on our economy. For the simple reason that few in the room had needed to take out a loan to fund their studies, and presumably viewed paying vast sums for their education at all its stages as perfectly normal. But despite many having little experience of the issue beyond that of interested tourists, the students debated whether the “Modern Left” had “abandoned the working class”, hearing arguments about the rise of “woke” culture wars and identity politics being responsible for disaffecting Labour voters in particular.

But this analysis is to focus on a symptom of our sold democracy rather than the cause. As politics looks to please a small number of private and global donors rather than the millions of working people donating directly or through their trade unions, it feels no need to listen and hear our concerns, aspirations and basic needs.

Politicians dance on the head of a pin focussed on issues of personal identity in an attempt to differentiate themselves from each other, demonstrating what Anton Jager has referred to as “hyper politics” as it emerges from the “anti-politics of Johnson and Farage. (A. Jager. Hyperpolitics. Verso Press. 2026) Absolutely everything around us is polarised and politicised largely via social media but at the same time little if anything ever changes and such politics is safe to engage with as it has little consequence for the individual, which also drives the brutality with which such politics has been conducted. Politics as pantomime or circus, played out in 221 characters in the pounce and denounce culture of X

And all to impress donors who promote essentially the same political goals: opposing wealth and transactions taxes, promoting flat taxes and tax loopholes for themselves and their corporations, trickle up economics for them through permanent austerity, privatisation and deregulation,  disguised by trickle down rhetoric for us. And the ongoing threadbare myth of the public finances being the same as a household budget, and that cutting public spending automatically leads to economic growth

But as many in our communities know all too well, as well as the permanent underemployment we live with, attacks on our pensions and benefits and rising rents and mortgage debt being working class issues, so too are LGTB+ and, particularly, trans rights. Black Lives Matter is a working class issue, as is feminism, antisemitism and Islamophobia. Global heating and the effects of water privatisation pollution are also working class issues. Some seek to cancel class politics and divide us with hatred by "hyper-political" debates on identity. But to define campaigning on these issues as merely a woke attack on traditional working class values of “flag, faith and community” is to pander to the growing far right narrative being stoked by Reform UK (plc). And the political results are right in front of us. Older people arguing against the triple lock on pensions, people in work opposed to Universal Credit and minimum wage, renters opposed to housebuilding, zero hours workers opposed to employment rights. As Farage orders another warm pint, lights another Cuban and laughs at us.

So in order to avoid being accused of abandoning the working class, what is the modern left to do to recapture our democracy and its own future? And is the Labour Party any longer a formal part of the Left? That is yet to be seen but to misquote Tony Benn: “the Labour Party is not socialist although it has some socialists in it, in much the same way that the Church often has some Christians in it.” But it can attempt to regain control of its own future, break with the agenda of the billionaire funders and re-earn the trust of our communities and its claim to be a social democratic or even left party. As is often the case when building unity in a workplace or community through practical solidarities, it starts with a story of us. Who we were, who we are now, and who we will be.

Reform UK (Plc) always gets stuck, by design, on the story of who we were and falls into cliché narratives of supposed traditional working class values and opposition to not only any new change but any change since 1950, in particular “illegal” migration and the growth of Islam. With their aggressive use of flags, rhetoric about invasion by “men of fighting age” and the imposition of Sharia Law they set out to divide working class communities – setting us against each other in a culture war against the “woke left”. Which for them, by the way, includes the Conservative Party.

But a detailed look at their narrative and that of their prominent supporters, including some in “Blue Labour” shows that, if they could, they would gladly return us to a time when divorce was illegal, domestic violence and rape in marriage was acceptable, abortion was illegal, the death penalty existed, gay marriage was illegal – and even being gay was prosecuted. A time when our neighbours were attacked in the street for holding hands, being brown skinned or wearing the clothing of their religion, all with no police interest. A world view of the “permissive 60’s” that the Alf Garnet character was created in the 1970s to lampoon has now emerged as a serious talking point in the Twittersphere.

To recapture the narrative of our geographical communities – the story of who we were, are and will be – the history of the left is as important as what we now stand for.

In the middle Nineteenth century the left was faced with the first and second industrial revolutions – steam powered machinery slowly morphing into electric powered machinery. Employers dragged us into new towns and pushed us into factories. We responded by organising trade unions as a defence and to push ideas of co-operation in the face of co-ercion

Stances that helped define the Left as we have navigated the third and fourth industrial revolutions since and now stand on the brink of the fifth. All these upheavals have created, recreated and created again new versions of working class communities who know the challenges of being as agile as they can be to secure the long-lasting bond of solidarity between all working class people – getting and keeping a decent share of the economy through their work.

The initial demands of the working class around the first May Day celebrations were over a reduction of working hours to 8 a day without loss of pay – and the weekend. Because working people are people who have to work to live and have few if any assets, rental or investment income. Working people want to work to live, not live to work. In today's world of Bullshit Jobs, as David Graeber refers to them and, similarly on demand, app- based zero hours and micro hours casual work, it already begins to feel to some like there is not enough work to go round and the days of the Docker’s Shovel feel around the corner.

While for others the working week has stretched back to 10 hours a day including weekends just to make ends meet in low-paid jobs where the minimum wage often has become the maximum wage and working as few hours as 8 a day is an impossible dream.

As in the late Nineteenth Century, the left addresses itself to these economic and social challenges despite being ignored by Westminster:  A living wage that people can live on free from state benefits; Universal Basic Income to free working people from the means test and to stop the state subsidy of employers providing poverty pay through a policy of under-employment. Even though many of these businesses pay zero corporate taxes in the UK. Making the real “Benefits Street” in the UK the M1, with its huge mega-warehouses straddling much of its length as monuments to state subsidised business on a scale the late USSR would have envied.

Little of course was said in our Parliament when the third industrial revolution destroyed admin jobs in offices and production lines through basic computerisation. Still less when the fourth slashed jobs in logistics, warehouses, and high street retail and services through basic digitisation. But with speculation growing that the fifth industrial revolution will attack lawyers, university teaching, software engineers, creative industries and so on, Labour and Conservative Parties are waking up – and even the billionaire “tech bros” are now collaborating with each other to issue a joint call to introduce a form of basic income to help people cope, presumably to be funded by those same taxes they will continue to refuse to pay.

Austerity has been given a new name by today’s government - Labour’s “fiscal rules” – but it amounts to the same thing; “we can't implement what you voted for because the bond markets won't let us.” The bond markets have also decided that spending our own money is to be called “borrowing” and will always push inflation up. We’re meant to have short memories, of course. The Bank of England under its Quantitative Easing policy created trillions of pounds at the push of a button from 2009 to bail out the banks’ gambling debts with almost no impact on inflation. But still classical “household” economics soldiers on, obsessed with the fear of Germany’s hyper-inflation of 100 years ago, and oblivious to things like facts.

A permanent policy of cuts in public spending are demanded of the two legacy parties by the markets to “enable the private sector to invest and to help wealth trickle down” – like crumbs from a table we’re not invited to sit at. As Alexei Sayle famously said “Austerity was the idea that the global crash happened as a result of there being too many libraries in Wolverhampton.”

In our communities we still see the empty libraries and police stations, closed bus routes, sure start centres, boarded up shops and street lights turned off at 11pm. And we’re still waiting for the Big Society to arrive and for the wealth to start trickling down.

It is politics itself – and politicians currently doing politics to us - that have abandoned working class communities. And a good clue to this is the language and framing that politicians use to talk about the majority of their potential supporters. Take Keir Starmer’s speech, shortly after losing 1500 council seats in May 2026, in which he said of working people: “I am fighting for them. We are fighting for them. I am their PM and this is their Government”. To re-earn some trust and respect from working people, he might have tried: “I am fighting with you. We are fighting with you. For a better life for all. A PM standing with you and by your side and a Government for us.”

Despite recent concessions such as sick pay from day one, renters’ rights and paternity leave, many feel abandoned and ignored and the speed of collapse in trust and support for Labour over the last two years is historic. The current Government approach of the “what’s the least we can get away with?” on issues such leasehold reform and employment rights does not help.

People have voted for change for many years and haven’t yet seen it. Working class communities have been upended by the instability that comes from insecure work and under-employment and un-tethered from previous party loyalties.  Neither main legacy party at the moment shows signs of internalising these new realities into their campaign philosophies, both of which are stuck in 1997 era “differential turnout” and triangulation election practice and tactics.

The only way out of this deadlock now, back towards a form of politics that delivers for people, rather than ignoring them, is far reaching electoral reform.

Capping personal donations of cash and kind, banning the laundering of donations through party factions, banning second jobs for MPs, proportional representation with a constituency link, automatic bi-elections when politicians change sides, tighter residency and tax qualifications for candidates, a ban on public and media roles for defeated MPs for 10 years, a ban on government contracts for political donors, digital voting, mandatory voting. As a start

We must rebuild both trust in politicians and trust in politics if a distinct working class agenda is to even be debated in our House of Commons. A different conversation with people of what is possible where they live and work. Rather than talking at people as our representatives - telling us to be grateful for what we’re given and know our place. A major problem of the Old Labour approach in the past and which still emerges today in much of the rhetoric of both Labour Together and Blue Labour factions supporting Starmer's Government.

These are the conversations happening in a great many trade unions with their members, with the socialists in the Labour and Green Party and with the bewildered others who know they need to deliver the change they promised but can't see a path.

The current government still has a mandate to make a difference and offer the real change it promised rather than a few managerial tweaks. But if it fails to re-posses our sold democracy fewer and fewer voters will turn up to the circus.