Back in 2019, David Milliband delivered the annual Fulbright Lecture at Pembroke College, Oxford University. The speech was titled ‘The New Arrogance of Power’ and he argued people were no longer protected from abuse by their leaders by international law and standards of behaviour and that this, in turn, had led to appalling humanitarian horrors. This was all before Ukraine and Gaza, the latter having taken us firmly into the realm of crimes against humanity and genocide. People constantly repeated the ‘never again’ mantra, but such protestations amount to nothing in what he termed ‘the age of impunity.’
The age of impunity. Perhaps the most dangerous, pernicious and morally-bankrupt age yet. Societies are held together by respect for the law and the fair administration of justice. It is hard to retain compliance when the rich and powerful are seen to be above the law, day in and day out. No Covid arrests and convictions in the political class. No meaningful sanctions for lying to parliament and the people. No prison terms for corruption, for the Post Office affair, for the pollution of our rivers and seas, or for association with sexploiters like Epstein. No consequences for breaching broadcasting codes. No consequences for the liars who promoted Brexit and gaslit millions into voting for a poorer, weaker Britain.
Look at the US. Trump: 37 times convicted felon, who is surrounding himself with men who have been accused and, in some case, been found guilty of criminal offences. Are there any guard rails to stop him? Both houses are Republican. The courts are stuffed with his cronies, his government filled with his henchmen. And there’s Elon Musk, who now thinks he singlehandedly won the election for Trump and can use his money to buy elections anywhere in the world. He no doubt thinks he’s master of the universe…and the chilling thought is that maybe he is.
It’s hard for people to get their heads round just how much money this one man (who has never invented anything, by the way) has. Imagine you had a bank account with so much in it that you could buy whatever you wanted (and I mean pretty much ANYTHING) every single day and not run out…in fact, the money is replenished by interest, so that if you did absolutely nothing at all, you would end each day richer than you began it. We are talking obscene sums. Musk spent US$44bn to hollow out Twitter and weaponise it for Trump; and he only had to put up a headline figure of US$250m to ‘invest’ in the Trump victory to be rewarded with a position of unprecedented power to gut the US government, destroy rivals, serve his own interests and make himself even richer than he already is. US$250m for a country is a helluva bargain.
Now there is talk of him donating US$100m to Farage and Reform. There is nothing in our laws to prevent him doing this outside of an election period. Nothing. That’s US$100m (around £79m) to spend on the sort of targeted ads that tricked people into voting against their own interests in the Brexit referendum. A whole heap of money to spend on gaslighting and radicalising whole swathes of society, whose dissatisfaction with Labour will have been carefully nurtured by the largely right-wing press. Do you think it’s acceptable for a foreign national to interfere, destabilise society and buy power? Do you think our democracy should be for sale like this?
Jon Sopel, on the News Agents argued that if Starmer managed to tackle immigration, Reform’s fanbase would erode. You think? I’m with Emily Maitlis. She can see that Reform would just pivot to something else – abortion, LGBTQIA rights , the freedom to drive a gas-guzzling car, be obnoxious, racist, misogynist, etc anything that can create a sense of unity against a manufactured or imagined enemy. None of it is about policies for the people for these Far Right parties. It’s all about power and delivering for the vested interests – big oil, the Russians, the oligarchs, the tech bros.
All the far-Right need is the Trojan horse of NOT being the establishment parties, to point to the failure of the Tories and Labour and claim to be disruptors (which they most certainly are!), change-makers, the guys who are going to harvest your hate and make you feel happily superior again and back in ‘the good old days’. Then they can do exactly what their backers want. Deregulation. Doing away with environmental, health and employment protection. Banging up their critics and rivals. Shutting down any remaining critical press. Freedom of speech? Yeah, only if it’s the freedom for hate speech. What they really want is freedom of reach – the freedom to say whatever they want, wherever they want, to incite whatever reaction they want and for there to be no consequence. It won’t matter that they don’t have policies that will deliver for their voters, because they’ll do their damnedest to make sure you never get the chance to vote in free and fair elections again.
The age of impunity.
It’s utterly, stupidly, naïve to think that the British sense of fair play will disapprove of such a massive distortion from a foreign donation. We might not even know that Reform has been given the money; it’s not an outfit known for its transparency and candour, after all! And it’s utterly, stupidly, naïve to think that the law will take care of this. The laws around political activity on social media and online targeting are risibly weak. We’re out on a limb. We are on our own, without any of the protections that EU-membership afforded us and hopelessly glib about our ability to resist the forces ranged against us.
There are so many parallels with the Remain campaign – a blithe assumption that Leave could not win, ignorance of the data mining and manipulation that was going on behind the scenes (now more refined and powerful than ever), dismissive of Russian and dark money interference. When are we going to wise-up? We are vulnerable. Very vulnerable. Fossil-fuelled Russia and the far Right in America didn’t actively intervene to split us off from the EU for fun. It was all part of a long game, a long game in which Trump and Farage are very effective puppets.
We believe that Musk’s US$100m to Reform would be an absolute disaster for our democracy and it must be stopped. Labour need to use their majority to get laws in NOW that stop donations of money from foreign individuals, bodies and powers. We urgently need to address our unwritten constitution, too. The ‘good chaps’ theory of government is pretty much dead and a whole bunch of us are getting pretty sick of being called Cassandras and conspiracy-theorists for pointing out what is going on. ‘Never again’ and ‘it couldn’t happen here’ are not magical charms that protect us. They just make us feel comfortable ignoring all the signs. Progressive politicians need to wise up. We are in a war. We need to get tooled up, before we get mown down.
You can help build awareness and pressure on government by completing this questionnaire and signing this petition. Our democracy is not for sale.
Please also sign this petition. Although the government have pushed back, 100,000 signatures would mean it has to be considered for debate:
Create a public consultation on freedom of speech and disinformation
“We believe that lies, fraud, and media toxicity threaten our way of life. We think new mechanisms are needed to preserve confidence. How else can people know what to trust?
Create a people’s consultation to drive debate on the following areas:
– Safeguarding free expression
– Promoting digital literacy
– Accountability of media platforms
– Accountability of individuals, ministers, the media, and tech
– The effects of AI and algorithms on our national narrative
– Regulation of news publishers
– Potential financial incentives of inciting division
We believe we must learn and act to protect our democracy.”