DARK MONEY
In mid-November, The Wall Street Journal published an interview with US petrochemical tycoon Charles Koch. The timing was apt: Koch, and his late brother David, had spent more than $1.5 billion over four decades to push the Republican party to the libertarian Right. Now the GOP’s candidate, Donald Trump, was refusing to accept that he had lost the White House.
Koch, now 85, cut a contrite figure. He said he regretted the partisanship that his money had done so much to produce. As he wrote in his new book, ‘Boy, did we screw up.’
If irony had not died when Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize, it would surely have keeled over at Charles Koch’s words. The billionaire can be described as the grandfather of ‘dark money’, an American neologism for an increasingly global phenomenon: funds from unknown sources that influence our politics. This money gets into the political system in an increasing variety of ways, from loopholes in Much of this went through largely anonymous ‘political action committees’ (PACs). In Britain, money has long played a determining role in politics. The ‘rotten boroughs’ of the 18th and 19th centuries were notoriously crooked, and their tiny electorates could be bought by influential patrons. In spite of electoral reform in 1832, money has continued to corrode the political system in myriad ways. Fast forward to November 2020 and a damning National Audit Office report found that firms with political links to the Conservative party were 10 times more likely to receive lucrative contracts as part of the British government’s pandemic response. British politics is comparatively low-spending, especially when set against the United States, but there is plenty of evidence that the American model of hidden finance and clandestine influence has traversed the pond. Britain, as the US political analyst Anne Applebaum notes, ‘has become a place where untransparent money, from unknown sources, is widely accepted with a complacent shrug’. The relatively small sums involved can make it even easier to get access to the top table of British politics.
