What’s Your Price?

Ben Wildsmith

News that Reform UK received £72 million in donations within 24 hours this week was unremarkable in a political landscape that has normalised graft.

That such a sum should arrive from only two donors is reflective of the inequality our system of governance promotes. We raise an eyebrow, but nobody is really surprised or motivated to do anything about it.

We’re used to being controlled by the rich, so it’s nothing new.

In the same week, our ‘special relationship’ buddies in Trumpistan were offered five grand each to vote Republican in their upcoming elections. That would cost $1 trillion, supposedly to be recouped from further tariffs on foreign trading partners.

If democracy has a price, it becomes window dressing for oligarchy and, evidently, that is where we are in the 50-year unravelling of our social contract. It’s not even just a run-of-the-mill oligarchy, either.

If our governance had been taken over by job-creating industrialists, or even aristocratic enthusiasts for national traditions, there would be benefits for some of us as interests intersected with our masters. Instead, we’ve been sold to crypto tycoons – people who fabricate value from absolutely nothing; the latest operators of pyramid schemes that suck profit from productivity.

Anyone with a social media account will have twigged that if ‘crypto’ is mentioned in someone’s profile, you can discount anything they have to say. They fall into two categories: people who are trying to rinse you by offering advice, and those who are yet to realise they have been so rinsed themselves.

Absolutely all of them are positioned somewhere on the Farage-Robinson political spectrum. Whether con artists or mugs, they are products of a system.

This all has echoes of the South Sea Bubble affair in the 18th century. We all learned this at school – companies being set up to trade in hair, speculative ventures in machines of perpetual motion, the Dutch Tulip Crisis etc. stood as powerful warnings about financial systems that were allowed to become closed and divorced from real economic activity.

We refuse to learn, though, don’t we? The tantalising appeal of receiving wealth beyond effort is hopium for the masses, and never more alluring than when honest business is on its knees.

Grifters

So, it’s nothing new. Bribery and corruption have always attached to democracy; they are the price we pay to escape autocracy. If left unchecked for too long, however, the grifters begin to seem heroic to some.

In the same way that disadvantaged kids look up to drug dealers driving around in flash cars, powerless citizens in an unreactive democracy see the agency of people who bypass it altogether and admire their enterprise. Nigel Farage dresses up as a fictional conman, affecting Arthur Daley-style camel hair coats as a badge of Artful Dodgeriness.

Who would you rather be, Rhun ap Iorwerth or Elon Musk? Tell the truth, now, and remember Christmas is coming.

This week’s Channel 4 exposé on Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (“Tommy Robinson”) revealed how blatant and heartless these scams have become in our society. The diminutive cocaine enthusiast’s claim to be raising funds for the victims of grooming gangs turned out to be cruel lies.

Having recorded a woman’s suicidal phone call to raise awareness for his campaign, he sent her precisely nothing from the money sent in by his supporters.

Saviour

As if on cue, a new saviour for ‘our women and girls’ rose to prominence last weekend on a float of American cash and newspaper connivance. ‘Danny Tommo’, a privately educated man previously jailed for attempted kidnapping, led his gaggle of nonce-bonneted, racist mouth-breathers through a couple of well-publicised but oddly perfunctory protests before immediately asking everyone to buy his mum a new house.

Jesus, Danny, tits first, mate, we’re not that easy.

Or maybe we are. Trump’s visit to Ireland this weekend illustrated how vulnerable sovereignty and international alliances are in a political sphere that is allowed to become purely transactional.

Tossing out support for a united Ireland like a tidbit from a golden carriage for the sans-culottes, Trump confused loyalists and republicans alike. I mean, how are they supposed to feel?

Could the campaign for Welsh independence be captured by the global elite and pushed through their algorithms to punish Westminster for some infraction? Who would have a price? What would it be?

---

Get more trusted Welsh news

Choose Nation.Cymru as a preferred source in Google News to see more of our journalism.