They think you're thick

Sharon Graham, the ministers, and the oldest trade practice in the world

Listen to what Sharon Graham’s said over the weekend again, slowly, because the whole argument is hiding in one verb. ‘Union money should be exempt from any cap on political donation’s’, she explained on Sunday, ‘because it isn’t the same as two crypto millionaires waking up and giving £72 million’.

Waking up.

Not deciding. Not concluding, after two years of watching the country they were born in mismanaged by people who have never met a payroll, that they would rather spend the money on this than on a second (third, fourth, whatever) house. Waking up. Christopher Harborne rolled over on a Tuesday, blinked at the ceiling, thought ‘thirty six million, why not?’, and went back to sleep. Ben Delo, who left Hong Kong and came home so that he could go on giving lawfully, apparently did the same thing twenty four hours earlier on the other side of the very comfortable mattress.

It’s a small word and it gives the game away, as small words do. If the giving is a whim, then the receiving must be a reflex. And that is the argument. Not the stated one about foreign money or crypto or transparency, all of which Reform has answered and will answer again in front of the Electoral Commission. The real one. The one underneath, which nobody says out loud because saying it out loud would cost votes.

They are thick, we are thick, and most importantly, you are thick.

That’s it. That’s the entire intellectual content of the past seventy two hours.
‘Oooh, Reform have got some money. Ooooh!’
Says the great sheep-eyed public,
‘Well I’d better vote for them then’.

Angela Rayner worries about people who might overpower and buy their way into democracy, as though democracy were a shop and you the stock. The Liberal Democrats want emergency legislation, which is what you call an ordinary bill when you’d rather not explain why you want it. Spotlight on Corruption warns that the game will be rigged in favour of those with the most cash, a sentence I would take rather more seriously from an outfit that had been anywhere near as exercised about the £6 million Quadrature Capital dropped on the Labour Party.

And at the bottom of every one of those statements, load-bearing and unexamined, sits you. Biddable, distractible, waiting to be told.

The cassette tape hasn’t even degraded. In the summer of 2016 seventeen point four million people voted the wrong way, and within about four days the country’s brightest minds had assembled an explanation that took in everything except what those people said.

Russian bots did it. Cambridge Analytica did it, with psychographics, a word that turned out on inspection to mean a sales deck. The bus did it. And when none of those quite held, old people did it. Grandparents, we were told, had knowingly wrecked the futures of their own grandchildren out of nostalgia for rationing, cold baths and National Service.

Whoever wrote that had never met a grandparent. Mine put a fiver in a card and pretended she’d forgotten to. The average British grandmother would cross hot coals barefoot to get a grandchild into a decent school, and does, in the form of the driving lessons she paid for and never mentioned again, and the deposit that came out of a building society account she’d been feeding since 1974. The idea that this woman went to a primary school on a Thursday in June ten years ago and cast a spite-vote against her own bloodline is not an argument. It’s what you produce when you have decided in advance that the answer cannot possibly be a reason.

Stupid, uneducated, fat, provincial, racist, and above all thick. Never that people wanted their laws made by people they could remove. Never that they had been lied to about immigration for thirty years by men who then affected surprise at the resentment. Never that they were sick of being told their country was a slave-ship with a union jack on it, and their culture a series of apologies waiting to be issued.

Now the same instrument, re-tuned. Different decade, same contempt, and this time it costs £72 million.

Here’s the awkward part for the cap enthusiasts. If money worked, they’d have won already.

In 2016 the government spent £9.3 million of public funds putting a leaflet through every door in the United Kingdom telling people how to vote. Remain outspent Leave on top of that, comfortably, with the CBI and the Bank and the President of the United States thrown in for nothing. It lost.

Jeremy Hosking put over £4 million into Reclaim. Laurence Fox lost his deposit with a thoroughness that deserves its own blue plaque. Establishment money went into stopping Nigel Farage in Clacton last month and produced a novelty candidate, a letter from Kemi Badenoch and a swing the wrong way.

Nobody has ever seen a Facebook advertisement and changed their mind about the country. Advertising can raise your name, remind a supporter to post a ballot, get a leaflet into a hand. What it cannot do is take a woman in Wakefield who thinks Labour has served her well and turn her into a Reform voter with a boosted post. She got there on her own, over about fifteen years, watching.

We are five years old. Five years ago this month we touched 5% in a poll for the first time and I remember precisely how chuffed we were. Everyone rang everyone. If it were today, the WaGs would be buzzing.

That is the entire institutional history. We own nothing worth the name. Labour has buildings, halls, rental income and a hundred and twenty five years of accumulated property. The Conservatives have an association in every market town, most of them sitting on a freehold left to them in somebody’s will, with a bar. They have generational voters, the sort who tell you their family has always voted a particular way as if reciting a christening. They have the pipeline into the civil service, the seats on the quangos, the alumni in the corporations and the heritage bodies and the broadcasters and the vice-chancellors’ offices, the whole warm interlocking apparatus that means their view of the world arrives pre-installed.

We have none of it. We have growing pains, a membership that assembled itself in about eighteen months, and a great deal of work to do on agents, lawyers, candidate vetting and research before anybody hands us a government. That is what the money buys. Not your mind. Filing cabinets.

The incumbent facing a new entrant has exactly two options. Get better, or get the rules changed. Nobody in recorded history has picked the first one voluntarily.

The Arthashastra sets out how the guilds of Mauryan India are to be licensed and controlled, and who may not trade. Rome spent a century dissolving and re-licensing its collegia depending on which faction was frightened that week. The London livery companies employed searchers with the power to walk into a workshop and smash up work they judged substandard, which in practice meant work by a man who wasn’t a member, and it is not a coincidence that the interesting craftsmen of Tudor London set up in Southwark and the liberties where the searchers couldn’t reach. Elizabeth granted Edward Darcy the sole right to make and sell playing cards in England. A haberdasher called Allein made some anyway and the court threw the monopoly out, which is one of the very few times in this story that the referee wasn’t also playing.

The playbook doesn’t change because the technology does. Two tier policing, two tier justice, two tier sentencing guidelines, all of it is the same reflex wearing a rainbow lanyard. Protect the inside. Regulate the outside. Call it standards.

What Labour has that Darcy didn’t is the whole apparatus in one pair of hands, its own. It commissions the review. It writes the bill off the back of the review. It amends the bill. It whips the vote on the bill. And by a coincidence so pure it belongs in a laboratory, the bill lands on one party. The overseas cap set at £100,000, arriving just as two of our donors lived overseas. The residency clause that keeps a returning Briton foreign for a year after he gets home. And now a suggestion from the Deputy Prime Minister that the whole thing might be backdated to the twenty fifth of March, a rule written after the act and applied to the act, which is a principle we used to attach to bills of attainder.

The Lords debate the Representation of the People Bill today. Watch which amendments get sympathetic noises and which get talked out.

Why do the unions fund Labour? Because it works for them. The Employment Rights Act is very close to a straight transfer of TUC conference policy into the statute book, and nobody involved is embarrassed about it, nor should they be, since that is what affiliation has meant since 1900.

Sharon Graham has been admirably plain about this. Standing for the general secretaryship she told Keir Starmer there would be no more blank cheques. She has put Unite’s funding under review when Labour councils have crossed her. She treats the money as leverage because it is leverage, openly, on the record, in the Sunday papers. Then she stands up and objects to donations from men who want nothing.

Because that’s the difference, and it’s the bit her argument cannot survive. Harborne and Delo aren’t buying policy. There’s nothing to buy. We were low tax, pro-enterprise, anti-quango and hostile to the regulatory state before either of them wrote us a cheque, and we’d be all of those things tomorrow if both of them stopped. You cannot purchase a conviction from someone who already has one. All you can do is pay for the envelopes.

What they’re buying, as far as I can see, is a fair fight. The most conventional British appetite there is, the one that makes a crowd turn on a man who kicks somebody off the ball, and the one thing the modern establishment has decided it cannot afford to concede.

Nobody woke up. That’s the insult, and it isn’t aimed at two crypto billionaires who can look after themselves. It’s aimed at you, and it always was.