Goodbye 2023. Hello 12 months that could break our democracy

Dark money, disinformation and secretive ‘astroturf’ campaigns won’t only threaten democracy in the US, or India, in 2024. We must look closer to home

024 could be the most significant year for democracy in generations.?

Next year, billions of people all around the world will head to the polls, from India and Mexico to Taiwan and the United States. (There’s European Parliament elections, too.)

Rishi Sunak could drag it out into January 2025 but for once it looks like we can believe the prime minister when he says that there will be a UK general election next year.?

But all these elections - all this democratic participation - also comes at a time of mounting threats to democracy.?

It would be easy to look across the Atlantic, at Donald Trump’s declaration that he will only be a dictator on ‘day one’ if elected president, and conclude that British democracy is in decent nick by comparison.

It would be easy - and it would be wrong.

A gaggle of Tory donors and flunkeys have just been elevated to the House of Lords in the new year’s honours list. There is a word for this: corruption.

(There should be a word for those who accepted gongs for their role in Liz Truss’s disastrous premiership. Chutzpah doesn’t even come close.)

The selling of legislative seats for life to financial backers is far from the only ill in British democracy. As I reported last month, the government rushed through massive increases in political spending and donations thresholds without holding a single parliamentary vote.

With more donors than ever before hidden from the public, 2024 will be the dark money election.

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The regulation of British elections is appalling.?

We know that foreign states want to exploit vulnerabilities in the British electoral system - which was not long ago victim of a ‘complex cyber attack’ that exposed details of electoral registers. But the Conservative government has weakened the Electoral Commission, stripping its independence at the same time as attacking the media, the judiciary and watchdogs.??

Remarkably, Britain goes into the next general election with both parties raising record sums of money - in the case of the Conservatives, ￡40m since the start of last year - but no law enforcement body overseeing the political system. Great news if you’re a dodgy donor that wants to underwrite a political campaign - bad if you’re a citizen who cares about democracy.

The government has also refused to do anything about shadowy unincorporated associations that have funnelled millions into British politics in recent years. The last time any of them declared a donation? Way back in 2014.

To fight Britain’s first election in the age of generative AI, Rishi Sunak has brought back Isaac Levido, the Australian spin doctor who ran the Tories’ election-winning campaign in 2019 using tactices that included rebranding the party’s Twitter account as a fact checking site during a live debate.

At the same time, pro-Conservative astroturf ‘third party’ campaigners that spent hundreds of thousands of pounds in the run-up to the last general election without declaring a single donation seem to be gearing up again.

Going through Facebook’s ad library recently - yes, I did like that in between watching It’s A Wonderful Life and Home Alone over the holidays - I noticed that two pro-vaping campaigns - Save My Vape and Say No to Who - spent more than ￡120,000 between them on Facebook adverts in the three months since Rishi Sunak announced his anti-smoking drive.?

The campaigns are orchestrated by a pro-Brexit pressure group run by former Brexit Party MEP and Scottish Conservative MSP Brian Monteith who, in 2019, ran the ironically named Capitalist Worker, spending more than ￡50,000 on anti-Labour Facebook ads without declaring any donations.?

There’s more. The dark money think tanks of Tufton Street that ‘incubated’ Liz Truss continue to exert a massively out-sized influence on our democracy. The Institute of Economic Affairs had more than 5,000 media hits in the last year alone.

The cronyism that saw Michelle Mone push for - and then lie about - hundreds of millions of pounds in Covid contracts remains.?

Lobbyists continue to warp our democracy, whether they’re working for fossil fuel firms to water down legislation or, as the Good Law Project recently discovered, running clandestine influence operations to attack campaigners.?

Indeed, the revolving door between government and vested interests is likely to speed up as more and more Conservative MPs look for lucrative new gigs. No wonder Tory backbencher Graham Brady has set up his own consultancy.?

It’s clear from opinion polls that the public wants British democracy cleaned up - although the jury is very much out on whether opposition politicians are willing to fix a broken system that they feel they can benefit from.

So what can we do over the next year?

Well, for one thing, we can expose the threats to our democracy from dark money and hidden influence. This is exactly what I will be doing in this newsletter through 2024.?

I will also be looking to drive more change through my journalism (like this) and to collaborate with others to amplify these stories and raise awareness.?

It can be tempting to hope that anti-democratic forces will simply wither away - but a glance westwards, to the United States, shows the danger of playing Dr Pangloss. We all need to be vigilant, together we need to hold power accountable.?

This newsletter now goes out to thousands of people. I am really grateful to you all for subscribing. And I want to say a special thanks to those of you who have upgraded to a paid subscription. Your support means that I can do more journalism that holds power to account. (And all for less than the price of a pint of beer a month.)

If you don’t already please consider supporting Democracy for Sale.

And have a very HAPPY NEW YEAR!

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