Donald Trump’s regime this week is preparing the ground for a major authoritarian crackdown ahead of upcoming US elections – likely even worse than what we’ve already seen to date. Here in Britain, Nigel Farage, Liz Truss and the President’s other UK lackeys are all at Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC GB), salivating over the prospect of ‘Making Britain Great Again.’

Let’s begin with the President’s speech last night. In summary, he warned of Deep State “cover-ups”, unsubstantiated claims about Chinese election interference, and “vulnerability” in the nation’s “easily compromised” electronic voting system.

The White House released documents as “evidence” of these claims, but it doesn’t seem like they actually read them. Rather than confirming anything Trump said, some of the heavily redacted intelligence files instead suggest that Russia tried to interfere on behalf of Trump in 2020, with one declassified briefing claiming that the Kremlin tried to “orchestrate a high-profile corruption scandal” and push narratives about “voter fraud resulting from mail-in balloting.”

Ironically, Trump’s proposed solution – the ‘SAVE America Act’ – is built on this exact, ostensibly Putin-derived narrative. If passed it would heavily restrict mail-in voting on the basis of fraud, in addition to requiring all voters to provide proof of citizenship in order to register to vote. Trump is also reportedly directing states to purge their voter rolls of ‘non-citizens’ or other ‘ineligible’ voters.

But it gets worse. The regime may also be making good on Trump’s previous threat to sic the military against what the President has called “the enemy within.”

Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson is pushing Congress to approve a whopping $350 billion in new military spending, claiming funds were needed for “fighting communism on our own shores.”

“THE BARBARIANS ARE INSIDE THE GATE,” Johnson wrote on X. “We are fighting right now in Congress over whether we’re going to maintain our status as a constitutional republic OR trade that in, dismantle the foundations and GO DOWN THIS DARK ROAD OF DEATH TO COMMUNISM.”

The fact is that there is no force in American politics that can remotely be described as communist. It’s clear from Johnson and Trump’s prior comments that they’re actually talking about Democratic politicians, particularly a new wave of young progressives including New York City’s Zohran Mamdani. (The UK, in having the NHS, would presumably be considered communist by this definition).

Trump has also signed a directive called NSPM-7. According to White policy chief Stephen Miller, it “directs all of our intelligence agencies to work together to disrupt, identify, defund, de-bank, arrest, and prosecute these political terrorists that are operating in our country. “

What ‘political terrorists’ is he talking about? The US security state is increasingly framing anti-ICE protestors, environmentalists, anti-tech movements (there is a notable grassroots opposition to the construction of AI data centres), and anti-war campaigners as violent ‘far-left’ terrorists.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio made this clear on Thursday, when he hosted a ‘Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism’ with delegations from more than 60 countries attending.

“We are facing a transnational threat,” Rubio said. “These are not distinct and isolated cells. They are interconnected networks. [Left-wing extremism] has always been driven by a hatred, above all else, of civilisation itself.”

Of course, there was no mention of the many far-right hate crimes or violent attacks that have taken place in recent years. No mention of the school shootings that have tragically become normalised in America. No mention of the January 6th insurrection which tried to forcibly halt the machinery of democracy. Right-wing racist violence is orders of magnitude bigger than ‘left-wing terrorism’ (to the extent that even exists – I'm hard-pressed to find much evidence) – but they’re of course only interested in what’s politically expedient.

Speaking of violence, Trump’s immigration agents recently killed two people in the span of a week. Border Czar Tom Homan, asked about the killings, blamed Democrats for telling people to avoid ICE. He said:

“There will be more bloodshed unless they shut their mouth and let ICE enforce the laws.”

The midterms are going to be a chaotic affair indeed, with Trump likely to set ICE, intelligence services, and possibly the National Guard against his own citizens as they attempt to go to the polls (which will be harder to access because of his incredibly strict new voter rules).

And if there was ever a sign the UK isn’t above this kind of thing, it’s the fact that Trumpworld came to London this week. Nigel Farage, as I write this, is speaking at CPAC – an all-American, rock n’ roll fuelled weekend of far-right fear-mongering, put together by Liz Truss. Funded by crypto cash and host to a slew of far-right infuencers, conspiracy theorists, evangelical Christian nationalists, and election deniers, their tagline is “Save Britain. Save The West”.

We haven’t (and won’t) hear a peep from any of the UK politicians at CPAC about any of Trump’s escalations. No discomfort with the threats against political opponents, no concern about the militarisation of domestic politics, no awkward questions about voting rights. Just applause – and, one suspects, a little bit of professional envy.

The one slender silver lining: the halls at CPAC UK looked conspicuously half-empty. Reform UK has fallen on average seven points in the polls. Perhaps ordinary voters in Britain are finally beginning to see this increasingly anti-democratic politics for what it is – more so than the people on Liz Truss’ stage would like us to believe.

This week has been something of a rollercoaster in the Commons. You can be forgiven for not registering everything that happened.

Keir Starmer’s final Prime Minister’s Questions and the long-overdue unblocking of the Hillsborough Bill were just two of many major events. Both deserved the headlines they got.

But one equally important thing that barely registered in those headlines was the Representation of the People Bill.

It had been due to complete its Commons stages on Tuesday but was pulled from the agenda at the last minute. It is not particularly uncommon for Parliamentary business to change - but this felt different.

The widely reported explanation is that Andy Burnham wants an opportunity to reshape this important legislation. Presented from the start as one of the Government’s flagship bills, it was said to be a once-in-a-generation opportunity to strengthen our democracy, increase voter participation, and raise public confidence in politics. That is ground on which Andy Burnham has signalled he has different ideas to his predecessor.

It is only natural, therefore, that he would want to stamp his mark on it while it makes its way through Parliament.

But I suspect he also knows what we know - the bill just isn’t good enough yet.

One area where that’s particularly true is in relation to political finance. Before the Bill was rescheduled, Ministers tabled the long-awaited Government amendments on political finance. These were the official response to the Rycroft Report, translating some - though by no means all - of that report’s recommendations into law.

While there was plenty to welcome in those amendments, they were also a quiet admission that Britain’s political finance rules are no longer fit for purpose.

The full package includes a moratorium on crypto donations, a £100,000 annual cap on donations from overseas electors, changes to strengthen company donation rules and stronger powers for the Electoral Commission to investigate suspicious money.

Open Britain has spent years highlighting the risks posed by foreign money, calling for stronger safeguards against overseas influence, tougher enforcement of the rules, and greater transparency of sums and sources - so we genuinely welcome these changes. Anything that reduces the influence foreign money has on British democracy, clamps down on the shell companies used to disguise where donations really come from, and removes the scope to use crypto as an anonymous back door will get a thumbs-up from OB.

But while these long-awaited Rycroft amendments close-off the access foreign money has to our politics, they leave the door wide open for domestic millionaires and billionaires.

The Bill still does nothing to tackle the extraordinary sums wealthy individuals living here can pour into politics, giving them levels of access and influence that ordinary voters can never hope to match.

It’s baffling that the Government has decided a £100,001 donation from a British citizen living in Bali is considered a fundamental threat to democracy, while a £10m donation from a billionaire living in Belgravia isn’t. There’s an intellectual incoherence in this position that suggests other forces have been at work in Number 10.

We hold elections to find out what the country as a whole wants for the future and how our leaders should go about delivering that - we call that establishing ‘the will of the people’. A small number of very wealthy voters should never be able to bulldoze the will of the people into irrelevance, yet all too often, that is precisely what happens. And this bill will do nothing to change that.

This stark contradiction sits at the heart of the Government’s current reform plans, waiting to test Burnham’s appetite for meaningful change.

To have a truly healthy democracy, political influence should come from broad popular support, not extraordinary personal wealth. That isn’t an argument against wealthy people participating in politics. Of course they should. It’s an argument against anyone being able to buy a louder political voice than everyone else.

Politics works best when politicians have a mandate from millions of people. Trust grows when people see that government decisions are shaped by broad public support, and not by a handful of wealthy donors. Trust in our Government and institutions crumbles when the rules allow extraordinary wealth to speak so much louder than everyone else - something the Government expressly set out to tackle when they announced this piece of legislation.

Which brings us back to where we started.

Burnham’s Government now has a window - and, I’d argue, a responsibility - to improve this Bill before it becomes law.

The foreign money reforms should stay. But they should be augmented with measures to address the corrosive impact of big money from inside our borders too.

Politics should be steered by the votes a party receives, not the multi-million-pound donations it takes. Democracy should not dance to the tune of big money, wherever it comes from. So the big question is: will Andy Burnham deal with this fundamental issue, or duck it? I guess we’ll all find out over the summer.

*A modified version of this article first appeared in Byline Times

Reform UK is finally the subject of sustained public examination from mainstream journalists, regulators and official watchdogs. The true size and shape of the party’s crypto funding network is finally being excavated.

The latest scrutiny centres around ‘Posh George’ Cottrell, a convicted fraudster, crypto entrepreneur and Reform insider that Byline Times revealed as the Brexit Party’s de facto treasurer back in 2019.

Authorities have confirmed that there are ongoing investigations into Cottrell’s financial relationship with Reform UK. We now know that the Met Police have reportedly spent over a year probing at least £500,000 in donations from Fiona Cottrell (mother of George) to the party, following suspicions that she could be a proxy for an impermissible source of funds.

On top of that, the National Crime Agency (NCA) has reportedly received multiple suspicious activity reports relating to millions of pounds in transactions to organisations operated by deputy leader Richard Tice.

Pressed with questions about the Met’s investigation, Tice has presented himself and his party as being victims of a “politically motivated smear campaign,” claiming that “this is about the establishment trying to kill off a disruptive political party.”

Ironically, in the same breath, Tice came off like a paid-up member of Britain’s establishment. My family have known the Cottrell family for 50 years,” he said. “They’re a very successful aristocratic family.

According to the Guardian’s City Editor Anna Issac, Tice threatened the paper with an injunction to stop it publishing details of the NCA flagging. He appears to have swiftly sent over the newspaper’s allegations put to him – without answering any queries – directly to The Telegraph, who promptly wrote them up as an apparent spoiler of their story.

Isabel Oakeshott, Tice’s partner and the international editor of Murdoch-owned Talk TV, was flummoxed when she was informed of the investigation. Describing the revelations as “concerning,” Oakeshott just repeated Tice’s line: “Richard has said that he has known the Cottrell family for some fifty years.”

In truth, though, Cottrell – described in The Sunday Times as a “fixer-cum-financier to the ultra-rich in Mayfair” whose wealth “derives from crypto” – is just one tile in a much larger dark money mosaic.

There’s also the Christopher Harborne fiasco – a £5 million gift from a Thailand-based crypto billionaire that coincided with a pro-crypto policy push from Reform UK and apparently an effort to directly lobby the governor of the Bank of England towards policies that would benefit the crypto industry.

The Parliamentary investigation into the gift looms over Farage’s abrupt resignation and decision to stand again in Clacton (against Count Binface).

But the crypto ties keep piling up.

Another non-dom crypto billionaire, founder of BitMEX trading platform Ben Delo, has also given Reform UK £4 million. Delo pleaded guilty to wilfully violating US anti-money laundering rules before being pardoned by President Trump.

Earlier this year, Farage invested £215,000 in Stack BTC, a UK-listed bitcoin treasury firm where former chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng serves as executive chair. Farage took a 6.3% stake, later fronting a £2m corporate bitcoin purchase in a promotional video, which prompted the Liberal Democrats to demand a Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) probe.

And of course Nathan Gill – Farage’s confidante sentenced to ten and a half years in prison for taking pro-Kremlin bribes – was arrested en route to a conference of “political technologists” in Moscow where he was set to present on the role of crypocurrencies in politics.

Navigating the labyrinth of influence and financial connections beneath the surface of Reform UK, cryptocurrency really does seem to appear at every turn. The industry on its facade promises to usher in the utopian and democratic future of finance, but in practice it has become a magnet for opaque wealth, regulatory arbitrage and clandestine political influence.

It’s a natural link in a sense. Farage’s party is an elite-led and funded political project promising a populist anti-establishment revolt, just as crypto is an elite-led and funded financial project promising a decentralised revolution overturning the financial system. Both have taken genuine frustrations and sublimated them towards their own agendas.

But as ever, Farage is a stress-test for our political system. This litany of scandals, which took years to fully emerge, goes to show that our entire political finance system is completely unfit for purpose.

They’re just a symptom of the real problem. Big money has subsumed modern politics, with significant portions of it originating from nebulous or unknown sources.

Off the back of the Rycroft review, the Government has announced what they say are “tough new rules to crack down on foreign money in UK elections.”

It includes a new timebound cap on donations from those who move to the UK from overseas (potentially impacting donors like Harborne and Delo who may seek to return to Britain in light of other rules limiting donations for non-doms), tougher checks on company donations to ensure only “legitimate UK-linked” businesses can donate, and new requirements for candidates to prove funding comes from legitimate sources.

But this whack-a-mole approach of targeting specific donors and types of donations (while welcome) will still allow money to slip through the cracks. We need a funding system that rewards parties for building broad public backing, not one that leaves them dependent on a small number of exceptionally wealthy individuals. Democracy works best when political support is broad-based, not bankrolled.

Andy Pryce, a recently retired diplomat who spent a decade tracking Russian influence operations, warns that it would only cost roughly £25 million for a hostile foreign state to buy an election.

Reform has so far raised more than £30 million in declared donations since 2024. It is vital that – at the very least – the party should be able to demonstrate exactly where all of that money came from.

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There aren’t many politicians talking about rewiring Britain.

Most promise to spend more, regulate more, cut more or tax less. Andy Burnham is offering something much more fundamental. His argument is that Britain won’t become more prosperous by asking Whitehall to do more. Instead, power should move closer to the people and places that know their own communities best.

That promise immediately caught my attention because it chimes a lot with what our new Bigger Than Politics campaign is designed to achieve.

Bigger Than Politics is built around a simple idea: many of the biggest problems in our politics aren’t simply about the politicians we elect. They’re rooted in the rules and systems underneath them.

Burnham appears to be making a remarkably similar argument about government itself. His answer is “Manchesterism” - a model of place-based leadership, collaboration and devolution that has transformed Greater Manchester over the past decade. His ambition is to take that approach nationwide.

It’s a bold proposition.

No one has attempted anything quite like it at this scale. Few politicians have a stronger case for trying.

I’ve worked across several policy areas over the years, including healthcare and policing. One thing has consistently stood out. If you’re looking for examples of innovative public policy in Britain, Greater Manchester appears again and again.

The city’s transport transformation is the most obvious example. The Bee Network has become the first fully integrated public transport system outside London, bringing buses, trams, cycling and walking together under local control.

Healthcare tells a similar story. Greater Manchester’s Integrated Care Partnership brings together hospitals, GPs, councils and social care with a shared multi-billion-pound budget to coordinate services around neighbourhoods rather than institutions. The model has proved so successful that Greater Manchester was recently chosen as the NHS’s first national Prevention Demonstrator, helping shape how public services intervene earlier rather than waiting until problems reach crisis point.

The same collaborative approach runs through policing, economic development and civic life. Greater Manchester Police has pioneered initiatives later adopted elsewhere. Innovation Greater Manchester brings together universities, businesses and local government to drive research and investment. The groundbreaking Greater Manchester VCFSE Accord formally embeds charities and community organisations within local decision-making - recognising that lasting solutions rarely come from government acting alone.

None of this happened by accident.

It reflects a philosophy that trusts places to solve problems, encourages civil society and institutions to work together and gives communities a genuine stake in shaping their future.

The results are beginning to show. Centre for Cities recently found that Manchester has recorded the largest fall in inner-city deprivation anywhere in Britain since 2010. The proportion of neighbourhoods ranked among the most deprived fell from 75.7% to 58.4% over that period.

That isn’t to suggest Greater Manchester has solved deprivation. Far from it. Health inequalities remain. Many communities still face deep economic challenges after decades of underinvestment.

That’s precisely the point.

Burnham’s argument isn’t that devolution has finished the job. His argument is that it has demonstrated what’s possible, even within the constraints of Britain’s highly centralised political system. The logical next step is to devolve further and give more communities the tools to shape their own future.

That’s where the conversation becomes especially interesting.

Moving power closer to people feels instinctively democratic. Citizens gain more influence over decisions that affect their everyday lives. Public services become more responsive. Local innovation becomes easier. Successful ideas spread more quickly.

But none of that automatically produces healthier democracy.

Power can still be hijacked by disinformation when it’s exercised locally. Money doesn’t stop buying influence once decisions move out of Westminster. Public trust doesn’t magically recover when scandals involve town halls rather than Parliament.

Reallocating power is only worthwhile if we also strengthen the democratic foundations underneath it.

That’s exactly why the principles behind Bigger Than Politics matter.

First, communities need fair information.

Local democracy depends on people being able to make informed choices. Social media algorithms don’t distinguish between national politics and local politics. AI-generated misinformation can spread just as easily around a mayoral election, a planning decision or a local referendum. Recent riots and disorder demonstrated just how rapidly false information can inflame tensions within individual communities. Devolution without a healthy information environment leaves local decision-making just as vulnerable to manipulation.

Communities also need fair influence.

One argument sometimes made about devolving power is that it weakens the influence of vested interests. The reality is usually more complicated. Local planning decisions, procurement contracts and development proposals can all be heavily influenced by relatively modest amounts of money. In many cases, influencing local politics costs far less than influencing Westminster. Strong transparency rules, robust donation laws and effective enforcement become even more important as decision-making becomes more local.

Successful devolution also depends on fair votes.

Britain already struggles with low participation in many local elections. Low turnout isn't simply a local problem. Trust in politics is shaped by what people see at the national level, where millions feel their votes fail to translate fairly into political power. It's difficult to persuade people to engage more locally while that trust continues to decline. Creating new elected mayors or devolving additional powers won't change that on its own. If communities are genuinely expected to shape their own future, every voter should feel that participating is worthwhile, that their vote carries real weight and that the democratic system is genuinely worth investing in.

The goal shouldn’t simply be to create new centres of power. It should ensure that power remains accountable to the people it exists to serve. A healthy democracy should continually pull decision-makers back towards the needs and priorities of the communities they represent. The way we elect those decision-makers plays a vital role in whether that happens.

Burnham has already backed the idea of an independent National Commission on Electoral Reform. That’s encouraging. The question of how we elect representatives deserves exactly the same evidence-led, collaborative approach that has characterised so much of Greater Manchester’s success.

Finally, every level of government needs fair play.

Trust isn’t created by relocating power. Trust is earned through strong standards, clear rules and meaningful accountability. Public confidence grows when people know those exercising power face the same expectations regardless of whether they’re ministers, mayors or councillors. Strong institutions shouldn’t rely on good intentions. They should make integrity the default.

None of this diminishes Burnham’s vision.

Quite the opposite.

His ambition recognises something Westminster has often struggled to accept: Britain’s problems are increasingly structural rather than simply political. Shifting power closer to communities could become one of the most important constitutional reforms in decades.

That opportunity shouldn’t stop at devolution.

Rewiring where power sits should prompt us to rewire how power is won, exercised and held to account. The democratic rules that govern Britain deserve the same willingness to innovate that Burnham has shown in Greater Manchester.

My hope for his first hundred days would be simple.

Set the rewiring in motion. Start devolving power. Build on the lessons Manchester has already demonstrated.

Then go one step further.

Launch the National Commission on Electoral Reform that he has already backed.

Manchester has shown what’s possible when we rethink how government works. The next challenge is making sure our democracy is every bit as modern, resilient and collaborative as the places we’re asking to lead Britain’s future.

That really would be bigger than politics.

Reacting to a wave of long overdue scrutiny on his dodgy finances and associations, Nigel Farage engaged in a historic temper tantrum this week. He announced that he’d resign as an MP in order to trigger a “people vs the establishment” by-election. It will very likely backfire spectacularly.

It’s a simple scheme, really: resign in Clacton. Trigger a by-election in Clacton. Stand again in Clacton. Briefly avoid the standards sleaze probe. Win in Clacton. Face the probe again. And potentially trigger *another* by-election in Clacton if wrongdoing is found. A flawless plan; an excellent use of everyone's time and money.

Parliament’s standards watchdog is reportedly looking into both his £5 million undeclared (and tax-free) gift from crypto billionaire Christopher Harborne, AND his recently unveiled undeclared benefits from convicted fraudster (and long-time associate) ‘Posh George’ Cottrell. It looks like it’s got him jittering.

Ever the victim, Farage portrays himself as besieged on all sides by establishment forces, turning cap-in-hand to his Essex constituency to defend him from the onslaught.

In reality, he’s essentially trying to secure a constituency mandate (in Reform’s safest seat) for his dodgy undeclared donations. As Adam Bienkov in Byline Times put it: he’ll become the first UK politician to “run on an explicitly pro-sleaze, anti-transparency ticket.”

One irony is that the high-profile Conservative defectors to Reform UK didn't feel the need to seek fresh mandates at all. Even as they switched to the up-start populist party, Robert Jenrick, Suella Braverman, Andrew Rosindell, and Danny Kruger all decided not to stand for re-election.

The history buffs amongst our readership may also recall a man named Douglas Carswell. The Conservative MP for Clacton defected to UKIP in 2014 and immediately called a by-election, winning a fresh mandate as a representative of a different party.

Farage (then UKIP’s leader) is doing something quite different this time around: seeking a fresh mandate only as an evasive political manoeuvre, only because he wants voters to endorse his shady conduct while a standards investigation hangs over him.

It’s all the more absurd because Labour, Conservatives, Greens, Lib Dems, and even far-right Restore Britain have pledged not to run candidates against him.

Farage will be left facing off against only Count Binface, the notorious “independent space warrior” that pops up from time to time. Clacton is of course a safe seat for Reform and Farage is very unlikely to lose it.

It has to be said though that Binface makes a few good points. Referring to the cost of a likely second by-election resulting from the Standards probe, Binface told the BBC that voting for him would “save the British taxpayer £348,000 – without me doing anything.”

Seriously, though, if the great Farage-Binface contest of 2026 is to achieve anything, it’s to turn a formidable political party and its top politician into a laughing stock. The Bin is already doing the media rounds, and Reform accounts are already drowning in Binface memes. All of Farage’s anti-establishment hard-talk just falls completely flat.

Assuming we don’t witness a shocking Binface upset (it would have to be the funniest political event of our country’s history), Farage will not come out of this battle-scarred and vindicated in his fight against the much-dreaded establishment. He’ll come out of it looking like a sad clown.

My guess is he’ll win and say something like: ‘Look, I’m not corrupt, the democratic majority has spoken. Let’s all go back to talking about immigrants.’ Some people will buy it.

But overall I don’t think it will wash. The absurdity of this race will fundamentally change the tenor of the conversation in Clacton and across the country. Farage’s populist bona fides will be tarnished in a race against a Bin (which he can hardly paint as “the establishment”). Plus the sleaze probe won’t vanish, the media firestorm may only be beginning to ramp up, and this guy clearly just can’t handle the heat.

I won’t yet declare this the beginning of the end. The Trumpian clique has proven resilient before. But to risk a bit of hope, this time it does look different – Farage’s boss in Washington is on the ropes himself these days.

There’s a chance we’ll soon look back and wonder about Farage’s moment in the sun – about how our broken institutions enabled him for so long and how so many journalists hesitated for years to put the fire under his feet.

My hope is that this whole sordid story will serve as an instructional example, as the educational shock our leaders need to finally step up and address the creaking, captured machinery of our politics.

In the meantime, I’ve got to admit – Binface becoming an MP really would be the best possible ending to the saga of Reform UK.

There’s a saying that if fascism came to America, it would come draped in the flag and carrying the cross. It would arrive disguised as a plea for liberty.

That was on my mind as Dear Leader Donald Trump bathed in a sea of stars and stripes this weekend. The celebration for America’s 250th independence anniversary was a guns-blazing, bible-thumping, fighter jet-roaring, ego-stroking spectacle of performative patriotism.

From Mount Rushmore, the President rattled off personal grievances and attacked his Democratic opponents as a “communist menace.” The American story he told was about “the blood of heroes,” a tale of supremacy and domination. He cast himself as a star-spangled deity, bravely carrying the founders’ torch of liberty single-handedly into battle.

The founders were neither righteous crusaders nor perfectly enlightened egalitarians. They were products of their time: wealthy aristocratic slave-owners who thought the franchise should be limited to landed white men and advocated for the brutal extermination of the Native Americans.

But they were also visionaries who possessed that rare ability to peer beyond their dysfunctional society, to manifest a new social contract based on inalienable rights and the rejection of arbitrary executive power. They understood well the emancipatory nature of democracy and the ever-present threat of the demagogue.

The founders accused King George III of “cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world,” “obstruct[ing]” the Administration of Justice”, “excit[ing] domestic insurrections,” and “sen[ding] swarms of officers to harass our people.” Reading that now calls to mind Trump’s tariffs, weaponisation of the Justice Department, January 6, and ICE raids.

Alexander Hamilton warned that the republic could be subverted by a populist who “flatter[s] the prejudices of the people, and excite[s] their jealousies and apprehensions, to throw affairs into confusion, and bring on civil commotion.”

Many of them distrusted political parties because they feared intense factionalism would encourage demagogues to place loyalty to party above loyalty to the republic. Partisanship, Washington wrote, “agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms; kindles the animosity of one part against another; foments occasionally riot and insurrection. It opens the door to foreign influence and corruption.”

So yes, this President has transgressed their core uniting ideals to the utmost extreme. He’s made a joke of checks and balances, trampling over Congress and turning the US Supreme Court into his partisan plaything. He’s weaponised every institution at his disposal and accused his political opponents of “seditious behaviour punishable by death.” He’s vastly enriched himself and his family by leveraging the offices of state, admitting recently that: “almost anything my kids do - if they buy a truck - they have inside information.”

Trump and his cronies espouse a warped notion of liberty as the exclusive exercise of individual power. Successive generations of Americans have identified different threats to liberty: Jefferson feared monarchy. Hamilton feared faction and disorder. Lincoln confronted slavery. Franklin Roosevelt warned that concentrated wealth could become a private form of tyranny. Trumpism identifies a different enemy altogether: the institutions that constrain power itself.

Trump has it that liberty is most threatened by forces that challenge the supposedly righteous few. Political opponents like the “seditious” and “communist” Democrats, woke college campuses, witch-hunt special investigators or Congressional committees, pesky journalists, peaceful protestors and state regulators.

Palantir owner and Trump mega-donor Peter Thiel captured this mindset well when he said: "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” Democracy to these types is a limitation on individual dominion, a violation of their god-given right to build and conquer. Freedom to them is the right to escape the laws of the land and the will of their fellow citizens – who may collectively vote against their interests.

So Trump’s elite-led populist movement has pulled on dark threads from the early fabric of American history to justify their authoritarian ambitions. They’ve recast the founders as the war heroes of a nostalgic myth. They endorse a brutal arena of supremacism, where the powerful divide and dominate.

They ignore the genuinely exceptional story of the USA: the story of a safe haven for the world’s persecuted, with peaceful democratic transfers of power and universal laws that bind citizens and rulers alike, with checks and balances to impede the whims of would-be tyrants. Those are ideals worth fighting for.

Donald Trump stood beneath the faces of four presidents and claimed their mantle. But the founders’ greatest achievement was never the words they wrote in 1776. It was their willingness to imagine an entirely new political order. They broke from the past instead of worshipping it. They put democratic ideals into practice.

Jefferson wrote that “the Earth belongs to the living.” Perhaps the most faithful tribute America could pay its founders is not to mythologise them, but to emulate them – to recognise that democracy is never finished, and that every generation has both the right and the responsibility to become founders in its own time.

Two hundred and fifty years ago Americans asked what kind of democracy could replace a king. Trump's America poses a new question: what kind of modern democracy can survive this new Trumpian tyranny? That is no longer an exclusively American question. Democracies across the world - including Britain - should be asking how resilient their own institutions really are.

It emerged this week that Nigel Farage was paid £270,000 for just 12 hours of work promoting a gold bullion company. The man who once said “there’s no money in politics” is now pocketing a ludicrous £22,500 an hour – and that’s from just one of his sixteen side hustles.

There’s basically nothing the man won’t agree to for a fee. Since being elected to Parliament, he’s logged more than 231 hours (nearly 28 working days) reading scripts written by random people for cash on Cameo. Users have paid him to say “up the RA” – a slogan in support of the IRA – and also got him to praise a notorious paedophile.

He’s taken loads of cash from GB News and payouts from X.com, alongside speaking fees from cryptocurrency companies, PR groups, and Trump-aligned American think-tanks like the Club for Growth.

On a simple individual level, it doesn’t reflect well on him or his party. Farage has effectively ghosted his constituents in Clacton – they accuse him of “doing nothing” other than “looking for photo opportunities”. He’s also spoken far less than any other party leader in Parliament, failing to meet the basic job expectations for someone in his position.

And the jobs in question do matter. Taking money from X and GB News – two platforms owned by highly ideological billionaires – raises legitimate questions about whose interests he really serves. The same goes for crypto and gold hawking, two industries with innate political ties and a dodgy track record for fraud and scams.

So yes, he is Britain’s best-remunerated MP. But it isn’t just him. MPs have made £11 million in total in outside earnings since the 2024 election – and the top 10 MPs account for over £7 million of that haul, nearly two-thirds. By party share of all outside earnings, the Conservatives come out top at 66%, Reform (with just eight MPs) account for 20%, and Labour (with over 400) just 7%.

Farage is special here not because he is uniquely avaricious – though the argument could certainly be made – but because he functions as a kind of stress test for British democracy. In many ways, he’s an accidental auditor of our political ethics. He exposes every place where our ‘constitution’ still depends on Victorian assumptions of honour (that old ‘Good Chaps will do the right thing’ theory), rather than basic modern standards of accountability.

A constitutional system isn’t judged by how it accommodates the conscientious politician; it’s judged by how it constrains the opportunistic one. If our rules permit MPs to spend weeks earning vast sums from television contracts, corporate speeches and personalised video messages while still fulfilling the bare legal requirements of office, perhaps the problem is less the individual exploiting the loophole and more the system itself.

We were promised some tepid action on second jobs in Labour’s 2024 manifesto, and so far it’s come to nothing. On Wednesday, in a Commons debate secured by Richard Burgon MP, parliamentarians made compelling arguments in favour of a ban – the same ban we’ve been discussing since 2021, in the wake of the Owen Paterson affair, which erupted after the former MP was found to have repeatedly lobbied ministers on behalf of companies paying him as a consultant.

At least since Paterson, this has been a major factor contributing to the sense that politicians don’t play fair – that they’re in this game for their own benefit rather than public service.

The Reform UK leader didn’t even bother to show up to the debate, and got blasted by MPs from every angle. He deserved the scolding he got. But Labour’s lack of action so far has also done tremendous damage, fuelling the perception that all politicians are the same, and that democracy itself has been corroded and hollowed out.

It's perhaps no surprise then that YouGov figures show that just 4% of the public believe politicians act in the national interest, while a More in Common survey shows 87% have “not very much or no trust” in politicians.

Farage – the leader who presents himself as a man of the people while owning five mortgage-free homes and cashing in handily from billionaires at every turn – shouldn’t be listened to very seriously. But he can still teach us things. In fixing our political system, we should start to apply the Farage test: Could an opportunist easily abuse this system?

Until we answer that question honestly, we'll keep getting the same result. A ban on outside earnings isn't radical – it's the bare minimum for a profession that claims to be public service. The only thing more embarrassing than Farage's grift is Westminster's refusal to close the door behind him.

“If Watergate happened tomorrow,” Vice-President JD Vance said at Richard Nixon’s Presidential library last week, “it would be a twelve-hour news story.” He went on to defend the disgraced former President, whose Watergate cover-up is so synonymous with corruption that we still use the ‘-gate’ suffix for public fiascos to this day.

Breaking from his usual posture of moral superiority, Vance seemed to imply that he and his boss are involved in so many Watergates that the media just can’t keep up.

But his argument was that Nixon’s resignation over Watergate was the product of a malign “deep state” plot – led by the same shadowy “institutions” that sought to take down Donald Trump.

He’s referring, of course, to basic democratic checks on executive power. The real scandal for Vance was that Congress, the courts, prosecutors, journalists and ultimately members of Nixon’s own party were able to force a sitting president out of office. Nixon was pardoned soon after he resigned, but even the bare minimum accountability he faced is recast as illegitimate persecution.

Now from a strategic perspective, it makes sense why Vance might rehabilitate Nixon and minimise Watergate. After all, if that defining scandal wasn’t a valid cause for outrage at our leaders, then what is?

Vance’s name is inexorably attached to Donald Trump’s litany of scandals – a President that has used public office to enrich himself to the tune of roughly $4 billion (per one estimate in The New Yorker). Who has pardoned countless political allies, business cronies, and seditious far-right rioters. Who has transparently set the judicial and military powers of the state against his political foes. Who has gone to great lengths to insulate himself from egregious accusations relating to his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein.

But more crucially, I think Vance is giving us an insight into what today’s populist right parties – practically always elite-led and funded whether in the US or Europe – are really about. At the leadership level (I don’t think this is always true of their voters necessarily), they believe in utter impunity for the powerful few.

The supposedly righteous, born leaders – members of the political-economic elite like Nixon and Trump – can’t do wrong, they can only be wronged.

They usually can’t say that out loud, so they’ll continue to rile up voters with fiery rhetoric about DEI, about mass immigration, benefits claimants, or woke college students. I suspect the conversations they’re having in smoky backrooms are very, very different.

Thanks to the Epstein files, we can actually glimpse some of those conversations. We know that MAGA architect Steve Bannon and Jeffrey Epstein sought to use Trump’s movement to stave off women’s campaigns against sexual harassment in the workplace. We know the pair – and a host of their billionaire friends – also saw the populist right as a vehicle to advance a deregulated cryptocurrency agenda which would let them move money around with much less scrutiny.

I’ve looked through quite a lot of these files, and they show us not only that a powerful group of people saw themselves as utterly immune from the rule of law, but how they also saw right-wing populism in both Europe and the United States as a vehicle to insulate themselves from democracy and accountability.

Trump proved this almost immediately after returning to office. Alongside Elon Musk, he set about dismantling accountability mechanisms across government - from the rules that bound his own behaviour to regulators that contend with financial fraud, pollution, workplace discrimination and more.

Britain is of course just as susceptible to all of this.

While the architects of Brexit – one of whom could conceivably be our next Prime Minister – ran their campaign on immigration scare-mongering, it was frequently pitched to wealthy donors and business leaders as an opportunity to dodge EU financial regulations and avoid laws that would make them accountable.

Just this week, Nigel Farage (who calls Donald Trump “The Boss”), had a tetchy interview where he claimed “it’s not the public’s business” to know the details of the £5 million personal gift he received from a Thailand-based crypto billionaire. We don’t have the right to even ask, he says, why he wants to scrap all of the regulations for a notoriously scammy industry after one of its wealthiest figures bankrolled his return to Parliament.

Whether it’s a political executive or a corporate one, a polluter dumping sewage or a crypto scammer duping the public, the populist right across the West doesn’t fundamentally believe the powerful should be held accountable (unless you disagree with them).

So what Vance said this week revealed more than he intended. He was not just indulging in a bit of revisionist history. He was saying the quiet part out loud.

For the populist right, Watergate was not a warning about what happens when leaders place themselves above the law; it was a warning about what happens when the law still has enough force to reach them.

Vance, Trump, Farage and others posture as insurgents fighting a broken establishment, but what they really hate are the remaining parts of that establishment that can still tell powerful men “No.”

The role of Prime Minister in Britain today is starting to look a bit like a poisoned chalice. Over the past decade, six different leaders have taken the helm, and they’ve all wound up emotional at the resignation podium outside 10 Downing Street. We’re about to see how the seventh fares.

What happened this time? In a nutshell: like his predecessors, Keir Starmer didn’t have the mettle (or perhaps the inclination) to take on an utterly broken Westminster political machine. He tried to compromise with it. It undermined the public’s trust in him and made him historically unpopular.

Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour easily vanquished a beleaguered, directionless, and broadly loathed Conservative party in 2024. He made a grand promise to the country – one perhaps more difficult to fulfil than he realised. He told us he’d restore morality and principle to public life – that he’d put an end to a thirteen year cascade of corruption and chaos.

But it’s hard to be both principled and ruthlessly pragmatic. Starmer sought to win the game for a small faction of a political party – at all costs – within an existing Westminster framework. Whatever his intentions might have been, he didn’t treat the framework itself as the problem.

The extent to which Starmer shaped events - or was shaped by them - has been a recurring theme of his premiership. In Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund’s biography of the Prime Minister, Get In, they quote an unnamed member of Starmer’s inner circle. "Keir's not driving the train,” the source reportedly said. “He thinks he's driving the train, but we've sat him at the front of the DLR.” (Docklands Light Railway trains in London do not have drivers).

I imagine Starmer sees himself as a successor to the Blairite doctrine of ruthless political pragmatism. But when pragmatism meets a system defined by perverse incentives, principles often become negotiable. It’s easy to get inundated by the system itself.

Outside of a few stand-out exceptions like Votes at 16, Starmer never sought out the full democratic reset that we desperately need: campaign finance reform, strict lobbying rules, and electoral reform. Instead of taking on the system, he operated within its parameters.

Starmer was swept up by the Labour Together think-tank, the (dubious) mythology surrounding the strategist Morgan McSweeney, and the Atlanticist calculations of Peter Mandelson. He allowed himself to be courted heavily by the tech, finance, gambling and arms lobbies, as well as staunch pro-Israel groups that pushed hard against any action to alleviate suffering in Gaza.

He was subsumed by the frenetic logic of First-Past-The-Post elections – desperate to woo a specific subset of former Red Wall voters and unwilling to take the risk of offering them a bold new pitch. So he told his own voters “the door is open, and you can leave”, while embracing dark rhetoric on immigration that only served to lend credence to the elite insurgencies of right-wing populism.

And he was caught up, too, by the monopoly media. The Labour party has not denied that Starmer made a deal with Rupert Murdoch’s News UK to drop the crucial Leveson press inquiry in exchange for favourable coverage. A Labour source claimed the deal was “in the interests of the country” – because the ends, of course, justify the means.

While it’s true that Starmer was – especially towards the end – unfairly maligned by those papers on a number of nonsense non-issues, he was a major obstacle to enforcing accountability on them. In addition to breaking his pledge to never write for The Sun newspaper (he also repeatedly wrote for The Telegraph) Starmer hired the newspaper’s former editor David ‘The Dinosaur’ Dinsmore as a permanent private secretary for communications.

In essence, Starmer always assumed that trust was built by cold competence. His arithmetic never factored in that trust is built by congruence – by the visible, visceral alignment between what you say and what you do, between who you court and who you serve. You can’t reap the rewards of a broken system and expect not to face the consequences.

His compromises, taken cumulatively, told the public that his Government didn’t really believe strongly in anything at all. That might have played in the 1990s. But at a time when people are facing a lot of real, pressing problems, it cast him as a man for whom every red line had a shade of pink.

As Labour begins to look beyond Starmer, leadership frontrunner Andy Burnham says he wants to do things differently. If that's true, there's an easy way to prove it right off the bat. Do what Starmer wouldn’t (or couldn’t) do. Take on the system itself. Change the paradigm. Take control of that train and drive it to a better destination.

Start with donation caps to (actually) drain the swamp of money in politics. Establish a National Commission for Electoral Reform (NCER) to finally give Britain a credible, independent process for deciding how we elect our representatives. Overhaul lobbying so that access is transparent and strictly limited. Take social media giants to task for amplifying content that contributes to violence on our streets. Tell the Murdoch media it’s long past time they answered for their manipulations. And while you're at it, Andy, ban second jobs for MPs. Give Farage something to whinge about.

That’s how you get people’s trust back. That’s how you take the principled stand. That’s how you set yourself up for a bold agenda to address the real issues people care about. The last six PMs have folded to the perverse imperatives of a broken Westminster system. The seventh talks a big talk. Let’s see if he walks the walk.

I say it all the time: democracy is about more than mere elections. When you’re really peeved about a policy issue and polling day is miles away, there’s a standard set of democratic channels you’re strongly encouraged to use. Sign the Parliamentary petition. Demonstrate peacefully. Write to your MP.

Of those, writing to your elected representative is perhaps the most basic. A key tenet of our democratic contract is that citizens can freely and confidently tell their MP what they think – in confidence, without fear of reprisal. It really is the death knell for trust in public life if we lose that essential representative function.

And that’s why this story about Peter Kyle and his constituent is so deeply disturbing.

At 4:30 AM on June 17 2025, four police officers arrived at the basement flat of a 54-year-old woman in Hove. They arrested her, confiscated her phone and laptop, and held her in a cell for over eight hours – without any of her relatives knowing she was there.

Kerrison was arrested after sending emails to her MP, Peter Kyle, copying in the Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary. She was ultimately charged under the Communications Act of 2003, accused of sending emails “to cause annoyance/inconvenience/anxiety.” It’s understood that Kyle’s Director of Operations, Chris Henry, made the call to Sussex police.

I’ve seen the emails. In a series of brief, eloquent, and utterly unthreatening – if quite impassioned – messages, she implored her representative and her leaders to finally address the catastrophic human suffering in Gaza and the West Bank. She specifically urged them to protect the ‘Freedom Flotilla,’ a UK ship attempting to deliver aid to Gaza which was, at the time, illegally seized by the Israeli government.

This week – after a year of tribulations – Kerrison was acquitted.

“Lawfare is increasingly being used to silence our voices and quell our dissent,” Kerrison said after her acquittal. “This is not only a waste of time and public money, it is also an infringement of our rights and freedom of speech.”

This was no isolated incident. In February this year, Peter Kyle also called for police to investigate activists in Brighton who were urging residents to boycott Israeli goods, for “hate crimes” and antisemitic incitement. Police concluded there was “no evidence of criminal activity.”

It’s one thing for Peter Kyle – who is no random MP but the Secretary of State for Business and Trade – to ignore the prevailing sentiments of Labour voters about atrocities committed in Gaza. He’s in the minority of his party now, and that will cost him politically.

But it’s another thing entirely for a top politician to punish dissenters for leveraging key democratic channels – the same ones they’ve been encouraged to use all their lives. Of course anti-semitism is a real and pernicious problem. But it’s really dangerous to invoke it in order to cut people with genuine, non-hateful humanitarian concerns out of democracy.

Kerrison has every right to tell her MP – in confidence - what she thinks about his government’s foreign policy stance. The fact that a sitting Government Minister was able to involve the police in response to peaceful political activity should concern anyone who cares about democracy.

For years now, regardless of party affiliation, Britain’s leaders have been raising the cost of political dissent. A healthy democracy encourages pluralistic debate. It recognises that petitions, protests, boycotts and correspondence with elected representatives are not threats to democratic life but crucial expressions of it.

Our system instead broadcasts to its citizens that there may be hell to pay for caring too much, or for caring about the wrong things. There are millions of people in this country that care about what’s happening in Gaza, and they’ll take from this that they’ll be punished for making a fuss. That their civic engagement is illegitimate. That’s dire for trust in the democratic process.

This is really not the same as the right’s complaints about “free speech.” The Tommy Robinsons and Nigel Farages of this world whine whenever the national debate shifts away from migration for even one moment (which is rare). They demand constant airtime, attention, and impunity for genuinely hateful and violent rhetoric.

Claire Kerrison and the Brighton boycotters are not asking for impunity, and they’re not demanding a grand platform. They’re asking to exercise extremely basic democratic liberties, without fear of state retribution. It shouldn’t be a huge ask.

This, on top of the the UK’s draconian crackdown on protest rights across parties and governments, sends a clear message to an already disillusioned and distrusting public: the table is tilted. Your opinion, your agency, doesn’t matter. Don’t even try.

Does that sound like the ethos of a healthy democracy to you?

Every Prime Minister needs a legacy. Sir Keir Starmer’s, it seems likely, will be a ban on social media platforms for under-sixteens – and a curfew for 16 and 17 year olds – a policy with sprawling implications that did not appear in Labour’s 2024 manifesto.

In lieu of a white paper or an expert consultation, the plan is predicated on what appears to be quite a leading survey of parents who voiced overwhelming support. Starmer is framing it as a “line in the sand” – a great triumph over the Big Tech behemoths and a reclamation of traditional childhood.

To be clear, I have no doubt that parents are genuinely concerned about the noxious depths of social media today. I’m sure kids would benefit from spending less time online. We should do something to address the growing dystopian side of social media, the parts where trillionaires fiddle with your brain chemistry for political clout. Where nefarious actors radicalise our kids, spread lies, and gestate far-right street violence.

But three huge things are being ignored here. Firstly, the fact that this policy is unworkable without massive privacy and data rights concessions. Second, the fact that it shuts young people – some of whom will soon be given the right to vote – out of what is unfortunately still a crucial democratic and social forum (despite its myriad flaws). And thirdly, the fact that digging moats like this is precisely what Big Tech wants, because it preserves their predatory business model.

Bad Policy, Worse Risks

There is a tool known as a Virtual Private Network, or VPN. Most British teenagers will know all about them by next spring. They allow users to bypass local internet restrictions, and in Australia, where a similar policy has already been introduced, a sizeable majority of young people are reportedly still accessing restricted platforms through VPNs and other workarounds.

Ministers have hinted at a potential crackdown on VPNs. Apart from that being a hallmark of authoritarian internet regimes like North Korea and Russia, it’s also a notoriously difficult feat. China has spent years playing VPN whack-a-mole.

Then there’s the fact that a social media ban for under-16s means age checks for *all of us*. Handing over passports, credit cards or biometric scans to a growing industry of unregulated third-party verification firms.

Starmer’s recent answer to both VPNs and those privacy concerns is something called device-level age assurance: a cryptographic credential stored on everyone’s phone that can prove you’re over sixteen without revealing who you are. It’s genuinely clever technology. But, as cryptographer Steven Bellovin (the very guy who invented it) puts it, there are “insurmountable” legal, economic and social obstacles to making it work safely in practice.

It still requires trusted issuers, trusted verifiers and expansive (and costly) new official systems – it would mean we effectively lay the building blocks for the much-dreaded Digital ID scheme. Mission creep is a very real risk for any system so pervasive.

Given what we’re seeing from the Trump regime – subpoenaing tech platforms for information on anti-ICE social media accounts – and the prospect of a Farage premiership, perhaps it’s still something we should think hard about building right now.

Locked Out of the Public Square:

And we should think hard about why we’re building it anyway. If social media is so universally horrible, why do kids fight so hard to stay online?

Starmer’s not wrong that the platforms are addictive, and that there’s compelling evidence linking excessive social media use to anxiety, depression and poor wellbeing. I’d attribute that to the predatory way social media operates today – not necessary an innate feature. But that’s not the full picture.

They say they use it to communicate with friends. It’s easy to write that off – they could just go outside. We should probably factor in there, however, that Britain has spent decades closing youth clubs and treating teenagers in public as a policing problem. Perhaps there aren’t as many outdoor alternatives as many like to think.

Most crucially, many are ignoring the fact that social media is also a place for teens to participate democratically in national debates. They’re the most outspoken generation on issues like our climate and Palestine. They have a natural human inclination to participate in public affairs, just like the rest of us. They want to engage with the wider world and talk about issues that matter to them. You’d think Starmer, who is also giving 16-year-olds the right to vote, could understand that.

For all its many, many faults, social media is still the closest thing we have to a popular democratic debate forum. It’s important. Banning kids from it is like saying ‘a small number of kids get killed on the roads every year, so they all have to stay indoors’. Shouldn’t we make the roads – or the forum – safer for everyone to use?

Throwing in the Towel

The problem is that making social media safe and workable for everyone means going toe-to-toe with the Silicon Valley giants and their billionaire and trillionaire owners. It’s a hard fight.

What we’re seeing here from Starmer – and lots of other leaders around the world – is a concession. This ban will in fact stifle independent and non-profit competitor platforms and solidify the Big Tech monopolies that can afford to abide.

I understand that the economic calculus – the GDP growth figures these firms help generate – makes them difficult to confront. If Starmer wanted to fight for a free and fair internet, he would have to directly challenge their model of surveilling us for data and using that data to manipulate our purchasing habits and corrode our democracy. He’d have to hit their bottom line.

Barring that, you’d think at the absolute least that if Starmer wants to make a fanfare about online safety, he could start by leading by example. He could delete his Government's accounts on ‘X’ – a platform brimming with the kind of abuse and disinformation he’s warning about.

If Ministers won’t even leave the cesspit themselves, they can hardly claim building a fence around it is a moral victory. It makes the whole thing seem a lot more like a publicity stunt.

A lot of sensible commentators these days say Britain just needs a “progressive alliance” (PA) to stem the far-right tide and sort out the mess we’re in.

I understand why. The stakes are high: the radical right is falling in behind Trumpian anti-migrant, pro-trillionaire politics. The left and centre are brittle, more divided than ever, and liable to get steamrolled under First-Past-The-Post unless they find a way to work together.

But if wish-casting alone was going to make the PA a reality, we’d have one by now. People haunted by premonitions of Nigel Farage in No. 10 ask: why shouldn’t Labour, the Greens, Lib Dems, Plaid, the SNP, Sinn Féin, Gaza independents and the rest toss aside their petty differences? They all have an interest in stopping Reform.

The received wisdom is that the barrier is stubbornness driven by hard-headed strategy. There’s truth to that. Labour rejects standing down for any other party on principle. The Greens have been burned before, standing down for Labour and getting nothing in return: they’ve scaled back campaigning in the Makerfield by-election, but they won’t be stepping aside. For all of the progressive parties, it’s almost like nuclear disarmament. Even if you’re convinced that relinquishing your candidates is the path to a better world, you can’t rely on your opponents to do the same.

But the deeper barrier isn’t tactical. It’s that these parties don’t agree on why the far-right exists in the first place.

Diagnostic Differences

They agree the far-right is bad. They have radically different theories about where it comes from and how to beat it.

Labour increasingly sees the far-right as a product of valid concerns around migration and social cohesion. Its strategy follows directly: compete with Reform for voters in former industrial towns, and prove its credibility on immigration and border control. Andy Burnham seems likely to continue this approach, at least in part.

The Greens diagnose the opposite. For them, immigration and identity are proxies for deeper frustrations around stagnant living standards, housing shortages and failing public services. So they won’t fight Reform on its own terrain. They go after non-voters and former Labour supporters who have lost faith.

The others vary. Lib Dems treat populism as a symptom of institutional decline and target specific seats with pragmatic fixes. Plaid and the SNP don’t really separate the far-right from their broader disdain for Westminster, which leaves them with the elegant solution of simply leaving the Union.

Under FPTP, this is fatal. You cannot agree who is best placed to take which seat when you can’t agree on the objective, or even on where the battlefield is. The Greens won’t lift a finger to help Labour chase Reform, because chasing Reform is precisely what they think is killing the country. And Labour isn’t thrilled about having its former voters hoovered up by people who call its government a betrayal.

Vision Deadlock

This is the biggest obstacle, and it runs deeper than strategy. These parties have drastically different visions for the country beyond beating Reform, and they increasingly see each other as irredeemable. Labour and the Greens above all.

Starmer copies Farage’s homework and calls the Greens “sectarian” and “extremist”. The Greens frame Labour as sell-outs who let their voters down and enabled the far-right. They don’t want to ally with Labour. They want to replace it.

What turned disagreement into contempt was Gaza. For a great many progressives, the failure to act, combined with the crackdown on pro-Palestine protestors, was a moral litmus test that Starmer’s cabinet simply failed. Winter fuel, benefit cuts and draconian immigration measures then confirmed the verdict rather than caused it. The point isn’t that progressives have a list of grievances. It’s that these particular failures function as disqualifiers: they make any future coalition feel less like compromise and more like collaborating with the enemy.

Despite some under-reported progressive wins, especially on solar energy and tenants’ rights, a lot of progressives now look at Labour as a party that no longer speaks for them. And in fairness, Starmer told them as much: if you don’t like the changes we’ve made, the door is open, and you can leave.

That exodus is the lifeblood of Zack Polanski’s Green Party. Even when Burnham takes the helm, many Greens will hold on to their contempt. He could conceivably win some of them back with genuinely radical policy, an olive branch. We have no idea whether he’ll extend one.

A progressive alliance needs the Greens to see Labour as a flawed ally in a shared fight. Right now they see Labour as the thing they’re fighting.

The mechanical version

Here PA advocates have a fair objection. An alliance doesn’t require love, or even agreement. It requires disciplined, seat-by-seat tactical withdrawal: you stand down where I’m better placed, I stand down where you are. That mechanical version has worked before, in council pacts and the odd Westminster seat. No shared vision required, just arithmetic.

True. But notice that even the mechanical version has largely stalled, and ask why. Tactical withdrawal still needs someone to decide who stands down where, and that decision smuggles the diagnosis back in. Labour and the Greens can’t even agree which seats are winnable for whom, because they don’t agree on which voters are in play or what those voters want. The arithmetic looks clean until you realise both sides are using different numbers. The mechanical alliance is easier than the visional one. It is not as easy as its champions claim.

Finding Unity

None of this makes a Progressive Alliance impossible. It means its advocates have to be honest about the size of the job.

France’s New Popular Front is the obvious lesson, and usually the wrong one is drawn from it. The takeaway is not that ideological differences melt away in the face of a common enemy. The French left spent years attacking each other. They came together because they faced an immediate, existential threat two weeks out from a far-right landslide, agreed on one narrow objective, and shelved everything else to meet it.

Britain’s progressives are nowhere near that point. They are still arguing over who should lead, which voters matter, where the battleground is, and what caused the rise of the far-right to begin with. Many don’t merely disagree. They see each other as the obstacle.

Maybe Farage’s rise will eventually deliver the same shock the French right delivered, and force the same reckoning. But if that day comes, it won’t be because a progressive alliance was the obvious or inevitable answer. Coalitions don’t assemble themselves out of shared dislike. Somebody chooses to build one, pays for it in concessions and trust, and earns it from rivals who feel they’re owed it. That choice is available now. So far, nobody has made it.

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Andy Burnham, Labour’s candidate in the forthcoming Makerfield by-election, could conceivably be Britain’s next Prime Minister. The ‘King of the North’ has been Mayor of Greater Manchester since 2017 and, if he returns to Parliament next week, polls suggest he could emerge as a serious contender to replace Keir Starmer.

A former Labour leadership hopeful, Burnham has spent the past decade immersed in local politics. Unlike most senior politicians, he remains genuinely popular.

His return to the national stage has created a bit of a buzz amongst democracy advocates. Burnham positions himself against Britain’s Westminster-centric political culture, calling instead for “wholesale cultural change” in how the country is governed.

Sounds good. What does it mean?

Some clues can be found in Head North: A Rallying Cry for a More Equal Britain, the 2024 book he co-authored with Liverpool Mayor Steve Rotheram. Drawing on their experiences of Northern neglect and the legacy of Hillsborough, the pair advocate devolution, regional autonomy, an end to the party whip system, and a legal duty of candour for public authorities.

But as Burnham has become a plausible contender for the premiership, it is important to distinguish between the reforms he explicitly supports and those his admirers merely hope he might endorse.

It’s important to remember that Britain’s democratic problems run deeper than questions of devolution and parliamentary culture alone.

So what does Burnham actually stand for? I’ve taken a look at what we know – and what remains unclear – across four key areas: fair votes, democratic accountability, money in politics, disinformation and online harms.

Fair Votes

We’ll start with the good stuff. Burnham is a long-standing advocate for proportional representation, and he has even explicitly endorsed plans for a National Commission on Electoral Reform (NCER).

Burnham’s allies have said that he would use the NCER to determine the best electoral system for the UK and then seek a mandate to implement it. Burnham himself has indicated that his preferred route for securing that would be through a general election manifesto commitment.

Accountability

This is another strong area for Burnham. His previous proposals to ditch the party whip system could do a lot to restore trust – allowing MPs to not get sucked into the whims of Government and take more of a stand for their constituents.

But the big one here is the Hillsborough Law. Burnham is one of the legislation’s longest-standing champions – he’s long argued that officials and authorities must be held directly accountable for what they say. Currently, the Bill is in a bit of a Parliamentary quagmire, bogged down by disputes over carve-outs.

We can fairly safely presume Burnham will want the legislation in full force, given he’s spend decades campaigning on it and wrote a whole section of a book about it. It would be a massive step in changing the public’s disillusioned relationship with Government.

Dark Money and Influence

Now we get into hazier territory. Burnham’s broader mission suggests that he should be on board with getting wealthy, vested interests out of our political system. After all, it’s hard to have a place-based, decentralised and community-centred politics when politicians are doing the bidding of multinational giants or expat crypto billionaires.

We hadn’t heard much specifically from Burnham on this until this week. He revealed to a Byline Times reader that he did support placing a cap on donations. “This would guard against the perception of any one party being unduly influenced or swayed by one person or organisation,” he wrote. He claimed he would want to start with a higher cap and aim to reduce it over time.

If there’s going to be any point to a cap, it needs to be reasonably low. I’d also caution against the ‘we’ll get to it later’ logic that’s long plagued democracy reform in Britain. Burnham also hasn’t had much to say about the political lobbying system, leaving us relatively in the dark on what he’d do there.

Fair Information (Dis/Misinformation)

Burnham has spoken about the corrosive effects of mistrust and online political culture, though he has yet to articulate a detailed reform programme on disinformation comparable to his positions on devolution or constitutional reform.

Frankly, it’s not clear to me that he understands the scale of the digital threat we face. He’s called for the police to be faster in publishing information to avoid scenarios like the recent events in Belfast, Southampton, and Southport. But is that really going to stop a concerted, digitally driven incitement campaign?

Burnham has endorsed plans to ban under-16s from using social media. You may feel differently, but I think this gets it the wrong way around – adults are not immune to digital manipulation, and we should probably focus on going after the companies and their dodgy algorithms to make the whole thing better for everyone rather than building up more firewalls.

Burnham is currently the blank slate that a lot of people are casting their dreams and aspirations onto. He’s clearly got a lot of valuable things to say, and his focus on local solutions calls to mind that Zohran Mamdani-style politics that really invigorates people. A full-fledged Hillsborough Law is also clearly a good idea if we ever want to restore trust.

But we should remember that the system insulates itself against change. Part of the threat of democratic backsliding is that for every step back you take, the next step forward becomes twice as arduous. He’ll have his work cut out for him – the system will resist.

And to accomplish a true democratic revival in Britain, we’re going to need a comprehensive package. Every part must sing together in harmony, and they must be viewed as legitimate by the general public – lest the far-right exploit them.

It’s early doors yet, but Burnham has some blind spots to address if he wants to get serious about changing Westminster and the course of Britain.

JD Vance called for “righteous anger.” Nigel Farage demanded “pure, cold rage.” Elon Musk reiterated what he said to anti-migrant marchers last year: “you either fight back or you die.”

They seem to have got what they wanted in Belfast yesterday. Masked men pulled migrants and non-white residents onto the street and set their homes alight. Once again, we’re witnessing streets littered with broken glass and the shells of burned out cars.

Belfast South MP Clare Hanna put it simply. “What you’re seeing is a race-based pogrom,” she told the BBC.

“We are seeing men going door to door asking to get the foreigners out based exclusively on the colour of their skin. It’s not based on what they’re contributing to society, what their status here is and it’s terrifying for people in Belfast who want this sort of politics to be far beyond them.”

Every summer, the far-right incitement machine churns that much faster. From Southport in 2024 to Southampton last week and now to Belfast, the pattern is the same.

It begins with a terrible crime. A mass stabbing targeting young girls in Southport. A student, Henry Nowak, murdered and written off by police in Southampton. A brutal knife attack in Belfast, thwarted by a brave local man. Real and heinous acts.

But they are rare outbursts of extreme violence. Products of complex failures across prisons, policing, mental health and more. You shouldn’t use outlier examples to set national policy. And you certainly shouldn’t pretend immigration is the only issue at hand.

That’s precisely what the global far-right does. They tether these events inexorably to “mass immigration”. They envelop them into a grand conspiracy – Western civilisation is being destroyed from within. Regardless of how victims’ families feel, these human tragedies are ruthlessly harvested for a pre-existing cause.

Telegram channels repost grainy footage. TikTok accounts narrate the “slow-motion genocide of the native population.” X, stripped of content moderation, becomes the central nervous system of a viral panic. Each like and share is a small detonation in a campaign to manufacture consent for anti-migrant violence and ultimately ethnic cleansing.

Within hours, the talking points crystallise. “Two-tier justice” – systemic bias against white people – has made a comeback. It doesn’t matter that decades of evidence shows policing biases run against black people. The crackdowns on Palestine and climate protesters, the impunity often afforded to the very wealthy, those facts are washed away in favour of a convenient and emotionally charged narrative.

These little phrases – “two tier justice” “take back our country” “millions must go” – become airborne pathogens. They emanate from the Vice President of the United States to Elon Musk, on track to become the world’s first trillionaire.

The frenzy culminates in street violence, terrorising communities still grieving the initial crime. It will never hurt well-insulated people like Farage, Vance, or Musk, but it causes untold damage to ordinary families.

Given this is an intentional global influence campaign, it’s incredible how little Britain has done to protect itself. We should be treating this as a severe national security threat.

Instead, mainstream politics too often views this as spontaneous working-class frustration. On the demand side, people feel left behind – because they have been. But on the supply side, this is a professionalised, international, well-funded instigation campaign. The anger is real. But it is also directed. Harvested. Sold back as a product – designed, optimised, and deployed.

Powerful interests are circling Britain like sharks. Few on the reasonable end seem to be taking the threat seriously. Taking them at face value, listening to their words and not looking at their project.

In my view the ultimate goal of the global far-right, at least their donors and figureheads, is a world without accountability. A world where crypto tycoons skirt rules, polluters dump freely, racists shout slurs, and handsy men grope without consequence. Where the profits and the power of figures like Donald Trump and Elon Musk is never again restricted by democracy or the rule of law. Utter impunity for the few.

The only proper response is a secure, resilient democracy serious about foreign interference, serious about people’s concerns, serious about holding people accountable, and utterly unromantic about what the far-right actually is.

You already know what that looks like. Robust digital regulation that goes after companies like X. A proportional political system that can hear the disillusioned and the left-behind. An end to billionaire-backed campaigning and dodgy £5 million gifts. Protections against foreign influence from Russia and America alike.

And perhaps most urgently: mainstream politicians with the backbone to stand up for our neighbours who are under attack.

I wrote last week that Nigel Farage and Rupert Lowe are dragging Britain down a sort of “death spiral.” As they spar for the keys to the far-right kingdom – a largely online realm of ethno-nationalists – they’re dragging the rest of us down with them.

Farage provided us with an excellent case study of the cycle in action this week. His ‘emergency address’ on Tuesday saw him plumb new depths of depravity – almost certainly an appeal to the far-right fervour brewing amongst Lowe’s tribe.

The Reform leader is caught in a storm of questions about his crypto benefactors and the past conduct of his Makerfield candidate. But of course he didn’t address any of that. The “emergency,” Farage tells us, is that white people are under attack.

Despite passionate pleas for civility from the victim’s family, Farage weaponised the fatal stabbing of 18-year-old student Henry Nowak by a Sikh man. He presented the police’s poor response to the murder as iron clad evidence of “two-tier policing” and “anti-white prejudice.” He called out for a response of “pure, cold rage”, telling the public that “White Lives Matter.”

It’s an escalation on an existing theme. Reform has been on a crusade against so-called “two-tier policing” for some time. The concept is, of course, completely ridiculous. This country is notoriously quick to round up Palestine protestors and surprisingly lenient with events like Tommy Robinson’s recent hate parade. Not that facts hold any power here.

The other false insinuation, other than police being biased against white people, is that this kind of violence is inexorably linked to migration. Sikhs, interestingly, have traditionally been a sort of model minority for many on the right – Tommy Robinson has repeatedly praised the Sikh community – but it would appear that desperate times call for someone new to be thrown under the bus.

Farage’s address teleported me back to late 2010s and early 2020s. When I was living in Texas, ‘White Lives Matter’ was a rallying cry for neo-Confederates and other unsavoury types. It was then a direct response to the growing Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, and it paired up neatly with silly arguments about “white genocide” and calls to make America a white ethnostate.

Farage's comparison of Henry Nowak to George Floyd was particularly revealing. When Floyd's murder ignited the Black Lives Matter movement, Farage treated it as a dangerous cultural contagion and compared its activists to the Taliban. Now he reaches for the same imagery himself.

So in summary: Farage’s rhetoric is often couched in dog-whistles, a subtle game of winks and nods. But this one was more like a racist fog horn. The radical Restore Britain gang have been castigating the Reform leader for his perceived weakness on identity politics - and this seems like an attempt to tell them that he’s heard them.

So Lowe, of course, had to go further. Restore Britain pledged that it would summarily execute Nowak’s killer Vickrum Digwa and deport his “foreign family.”

“Laws will change, the country will change, everything will change,” Lowe wrote on X. Elon Musk quoted his tweet, adding that “it is this or death.”

In the wake of the frenzy, the far-right descended on the streets of Southampton where eleven police officers were injured. The publicity around Nowak’s murder has been like jet fuel, Neo-Nazis and Tommy Robinson’s clique leveraging the scandal as a recruitment tool.

We’ve seen the violence that can erupt from this kind of apocalyptic rhetoric – it can very easily spill out into the streets. Once politicians start telling people that they are victims of a vast conspiracy against them, that the authorities are covering up the truth, and that the country is being stolen from them, it becomes increasingly difficult to control what happens next.

For Farage and Lowe, those drastic potential consequences are completely secondary to their battle for control over the rising populist tide. They don’t really care.

The danger of the "two-tier policing" narrative is that it can easily become self-reinforcing. If far-right activists are arrested, that supposedly proves the authorities are targeting them. If they are left alone, it proves the authorities are weak. Either way, the grievance carries on.

Farage and Lowe both benefit from a political environment in which every confrontation, every arrest and every public controversy can be folded back into the same story of victimhood and betrayal.

Without a fundamental rethink to our political system, this kind of race-based politics will just get more and more normalised. Reform and Restore’s race to the bottom this week has seen the national media talking about “two-tier policing.” The public discourse is shifting towards their framing of the world.

I wrote last week that putting an end to this death spiral once and for all will involve bringing back mutual trust. To build a democratic counter force that can win hearts and minds, relegating extremists back to the fringes of politics.

But to do that will require a confrontation with a broken system. A system that fails to solve people’s actual problems, ignores entire blocs of voters, and bends to the whims of uber-wealthy bankrollers like Elon Musk and Christopher Harborne.

Until that day, the far-right cascade will continue.

Having lived in the States and written about American politics for years, the amount of money involved in British donation scandals can sometimes feel surprisingly small. The hard reality for us at the moment is that the bankrollers of US politics are breathtakingly well-resourced. They view Britain’s politicians as an absolute bargain. And they’re looking for a new venture.

Sixteen years ago, a key US Supreme Court decision (Citizens United) solidified the idea that money was a form of political speech. Those who said it at the time were largely ignored, but it truly set the stage for a Presidency like Donald Trump’s.

Fast forward fourteen years, and the total election expenditure during the US’ 2024 cycle was a whopping $14.8 billion (roughly £11 billion). It’s the second highest of all time, beaten only by an inflation-adjusted $18.3 billion (£14.6 billion) spent in 2020. These are astronomical sums of money for political campaigns – more than any other country on Earth.

The United States is about seven times richer than the UK by GDP and about five times larger by population. But its federal elections in 2024 consumed more than 115 times as much money as Britain's 2024 general election campaign (£94.5 million).

At first glance, that disparity might sound reassuring. You might say that Britain has seemingly avoided the runaway arms race of American campaign finance so far. But our figures are increasing with each election at pace. The opposite conclusion may ultimately be closer to the truth.

Because British politics is so much cheaper, it is also far easier to influence. Indeed, many of Britain’s most potent donation scandals would barely register in American politics.

Reform’s former Welsh leader Nathan Gill was bribed by pro-Kremlin interests for a paltry £40,000. Going further back, Neil Hamilton's career was effectively destroyed over allegations involving payments of roughly £2,000 per parliamentary question.

Even Christopher Harborne’s £5 million gift to Farage – unprecedented and absolutely staggering in British politics – pales in comparison to the $277 million Trump received from Elon Musk or the $100 million he received from Israeli billionaire Miriam Adelson.

Britain offers a better return on investment.

As Oliver Bullough, author of the very good book Butler to the World puts it: US billionaires could buy Britain for the cost of a single senate seat in Texas. “And, let’s face it, that money wouldn’t be going to the Greens, to Labour, or even to the Lib Dems.”

If Farage (or Rupert Lowe) are as good an investment as Trump, they could open new, unregulated markets for fraud-laden cryptocurrencies. They could slash regulations, dismantle public assets, weaken labour protections, and appoint sympathetic figures to key regulatory bodies. And best of all, they can be bought on the cheap.

The great danger is that our political system is utterly ill-equipped to stop any of this from happening. We’re barrelling towards outright oligarchy, and that risk is no longer abstract. You can look at Trump’s America and see it clearly. Once an oligarch class becomes entrenched, they have a tendency to disassemble democratic safeguards and accountability mechanisms. They can be nigh on impossible to dislodge.

So we’re sat here at this critical juncture, our governing party squabbling within its ranks, utterly distracted from the impending tidal wave poised to hit our shores.

How do we stem the tide?

MPs are working to strengthen the tepid campaign finance reforms in the Government’s Representation of the People Bill (RPB). The measures currently proposed, including a £100,000 donation cap for Brits living abroad and a moratorium on cryptocurrency donations, are certainly welcome. But they’re just not going to be enough.

MPs are putting forward a range of amendments, most notably a proposal to limit annual donations to £1 million a year for all British donors. Others argue for restrictions on cash donations from specific types of donor – fossil fuel companies, property developers, cryptocurrency companies, and companies attached to public contracts. All of these are welcome in my view.

And we’ve long argued that a stronger Electoral Commission – which never really recovered after Boris Johnson stripped its powers in 2022 – is a necessity. What good are campaign finance laws if they’re not being comprehensively enforced and not properly deterring bad actors?

Bullough, who knows a thing or two about how dark money works in Britain, argues we should go even further. Only people on the electoral register can vote, he writes, so they should be the only ones eligible to donate. No more shell companies, no more unincorporated associations. He suggests donations be made in sterling with proper background checks (to prevent ineligible individuals donating by proxy), capped at £100,000 per elector.

He also points to a key avenue of influence-buying that is seldom discussed in these debates: the media contract. GB News and Elon Musk’s X are bankrolling politicians on the far-right. They’re another channel through which billionaire cash can enter our political system.

In essence, we need a system so simple, so air-tight, that it can stand guard against a class of people who seek to own the world. Our outdated 1990s-style system of regulation isn’t going to last long in the new digital dark money frontier we find ourselves in. It’s time for a comprehensive update. Starting with this RPB. And not stopping after that.

Yes, Nigel Farage and his former disciple Rupert Lowe have come to blows again, battling for custody of an angry little populist fiefdom.

Each accuses the other of being a fraud and a sell-out – accusations that may contain more truth than either would care to admit. So the temptation to say “Let Them Fight” and leave it at that is almost overwhelming.

Polls show that Lowe’s Restore Britain, while far smaller than Reform, could act as a spoiler for Farage in the forthcoming (and absolutely pivotal) Makerfield by-election. This schism threatens to loosen Farage’s iron-clad grip on the British right.

But zoom out, and it’s also a symptom of something deeper. A chaotic cascade of grievance politics. Britain will keep churning out ever more noxious far-right mutations until we have a political system capable of actually fixing people’s problems.

Let me explain.

Farage outflanked the deeply unpopular Conservatives by grasping something the traditional right never could: in an age of economic instability and collapsing public trust, passionate insurgents eat pencil-pushers for breakfast.

So instead of talking about marginal tax rates or fiscal frameworks, he castigated woke metropolitan elites in their ivory towers. He built a hit-list of permanent political enemies – migrants, activists, judges, journalists, academics, “globalists,” the BBC. He convinced a growing audience these are malign forces never to be reasoned or compromised with. He offered up incredibly simplistic solutions targeted at people who can’t fight back. He spoke in fiery tones of betrayal, of civil war, of a burning reckoning just over the horizon.

And crucially, he changed not just the message but the medium. Farage abandoned the stiff choreography of traditional politics for something more intimate and addictive. He roused his audience with frenzied monologues filmed on his smartphone. He broke the establishment’s decorum and called people rude names in public. He fed content-hungry platforms like TikTok and ‘X’ with viral retorts and fear-mongering videos.

Say what you want about the right-wing populist playbook, but it works. The trouble comes later – when they actually have to govern. Farage isn’t quite there yet.

But with the help of wealthy donors like Christopher Harborne, a compliant media ecosystem, and a political establishment too cowardly to challenge his framing, Farage transformed himself from fringe demagogue into the gravitational centre of the British right.

The irony is that Rupert Lowe is now deploying the exact same tactics against Farage. And Farage has no idea how to fend them off.

Lowe casts Reform as weak, compromised and contaminated by Farage’s ego. He positions himself as the “real” insurgent speaking uncomfortable truths that Farage no longer dares articulate. He escalates the rhetoric. He pushes further right. He promises a purer confrontation with Britain’s enemies, a more authentic rebellion against the so-called system – which he and Farage are of course both very much part of.

Backed by Elon Musk’s vast algorithmic power, Lowe believes he alone will bring the right’s populist crusade to glorious fruition. He seems to think he alone can wage the imaginary battle for the future of Western civilisation – against Islam, Wokeness, and whatever else keeps his followers angry – that so many on the right now treat as holy scripture.

Farage doesn’t know how to deal with Lowe because Lowe doesn’t fit into his operating model. Farage designed his machine to attack mainstream politics from the outside. He never built a firewall for an attack from his right flank. And now his party potentially stands to lose a pivotal election in Makerfield because of it.

But don't mistake this for the far-right eating itself. Lowe will fail, or he won't. Farage will adapt, or he won't. Either way, the machine keeps churning, and the finished product is only likely to be more extreme, more outrageous, more committed to the agendas of powerful donors.

Because the underlying rot here isn’t about Farage and Lowe as individuals. It’s the political system that propels people like them to positions of power. A system that fails to solve people’s actual problems, ignores entire blocs of voters, and bends to the whims of uber-wealthy bankrollers like Elon Musk and Christopher Harborne.

As I’ve said, it’s clear that we need a break from the old regime. We need nothing short of a comprehensive democratic revival. A historic restoration of our public institutions. It’s long, hard work to build a political system people can trust. But it must be done.

Because if we don’t find a way towards mutual trust, towards functioning public services, towards affordable bills and rents – we’ll be left with an ever more extreme procession of self-interested egomaniacs.

When 21st-Century Influence Meets 20th-Century Rules

Elon Musk’s intervention in British politics yesterday - he reposted a six-minute video by Rupert Lowe, Leader of the far-right party, Restore Britain (viewed 26m times at the time of writing) - offers a stark illustration of how modern influence operates beyond the reach of traditional democratic safeguards. While the world’s richest man can reshape political narratives through algorithmic amplification and strategic content suppression, Britain’s electoral regulators remain equipped for an era of paper leaflets and public meetings. This mismatch between technological capability and regulatory capacity represents one of the gravest threats to democratic integrity in our time.

Why This Matters More Than Ever

The stakes could not be higher. Everyone now knows that social media platforms set the political narrative, fundamentally altering how democratic discourse operates. And our democratic institutions struggle to keep up with the pace of change. The speed of technological development has coincided with institutional confidence crisis, enabling foreign states and ultra-wealthy individuals to destabilise our democratic institutions.

When platform owners can amplify or suppress content in real-time during critical political moments, they wield influence on a scale that dwarfs anything our antiquated regulatory systems were designed to address. A single algorithmic tweak can direct political messaging to millions of voters instantly, instantly shaping their understanding of political events without any meaningful oversight. This is happening right now and it is shaping how our next election will play out.

The New Reality of Digital Influence

The mechanics of modern electoral influence bear little resemblance to the campaign finance laws designed to regulate them. Current electoral law focuses on traditional donation and spending limits but cannot regulate platform owners’ ability to amplify or suppress content during elections. Posting a political leaflet to a million voters would cost millions of pounds - directing a tweet to many more costs virtually nothing. And while politicians are bound to declare donations above modest thresholds, platform owners operate in a regulatory vacuum where their influence-shaping decisions face no electoral oversight.

AI-generated content and algorithmic amplification present new opportunities for electoral interference that current regulations do not address. These technologies operate at machine speed, capable of generating and distributing persuasive content faster than human fact-checkers can respond. During election periods, when public attention is at its peak and decisions are made rapidly, this speed advantage becomes decisive.

The asymmetry is profound. Traditional media face relatively strict rules about political advertising, disclosure requirements, and editorial balance during election periods. Digital platforms, despite their far greater reach and influence, operate under minimal constraints. They can serve different political content to different users, making detection of bias nearly impossible, while maintaining plausible deniability about editorial intent.

How Outdated Systems Enable Modern Manipulation

Britain’s regulatory response to these challenges has been woefully inadequate. The Electoral Commission has publicly criticised the government’s claimed ‘zero-tolerance approach to foreign interference’, warning of significant loopholes in new legislation. When even the government’s own electoral watchdog disputes official claims about regulatory robustness, we know we have a significant problem.

Recent legislative efforts have missed the mark entirely. The Representation of the People Bill, currently making its way through Parliament, has been criticised for containing ‘nothing much that would improve the state of online campaigning’ despite explosive growth in digital political advertising. While digital political advertising has exploded in both volume and sophistication, the regulatory framework remains focused on traditional campaign methods.

Current regulators lack real-time monitoring capabilities for platform-based influence operations, creating dangerous regulatory blind spots. And this is not just a problem with resourcing - though resourcing is a factor - it is a problem of fundamental design. Our electoral oversight was built for visible, traceable activities: printed materials, broadcast advertisements, public meetings. Digital influence operates through opaque algorithms, micro-targeted messaging, and platform-mediated interactions that leave minimal public trace.

The inadequacy of enforcement mechanisms became clear in recent cases. The Nathan Gill scandal revealed how our politics can be influenced by hostile foreign states. And just how inadequate our existing enforcement mechanisms are. When electoral violations are detected, often months or years after the fact, the penalties are often woefully out of proportion to the potential benefits of manipulation. And the damage has been done. The burglars have long gone with your telly by the time the police arrive.

The Evidence of Regulatory Failure

The transparency gap between traditional and digital campaigning exposes the system’s fundamental flaws. Social media platforms are now so powerful that they can bulldoze any agenda being set by more traditional - and regulated - political activities. Yet transparency requirements for digital political messaging remain minimal. While newspaper political content must include clear attribution and funding sources, social media political content can be promoted with minimal disclosure requirements.

This creates perverse incentives. Sophisticated actors quickly learn that influence exercised through platform control faces minimal scrutiny compared to traditional campaign activities. Why bother with processes that require mountains of paperwork to record, track and declare donations when you can simply shape political narratives through algorithmic manipulation? Spending limits are an irrelevance when you can amplify preferred messages through opaque and virtually costless recommendation systems.

The Musk intervention illustrates these dynamics perfectly. His ability to influence British political discourse operates almost entirely outside traditional electoral regulation. He can promote certain political content to millions of users, suppress opposing viewpoints, and shape trending topics - all without triggering any meaningful oversight mechanisms.

What Democratic Defence Requires

Effective regulation for the digital age demands several fundamental shifts. First, we need real-time monitoring systems capable of detecting algorithmic manipulation, at least during election periods, if not constantly. This means more than just providing our regulatory bodies with legal authority. They must have the technological capability and the resources required to use that authority effectively.

Second, platform transparency requirements must match the scale of influence these companies wield over democratic discourse. If platforms shape political narratives, they must face commensurate disclosure obligations. This includes algorithmic auditing, content amplification reporting, and clear attribution for all political content.

Third, regulatory frameworks must address AI-generated content and algorithmic amplification as electoral interventions in their own right. The current focus on paid political advertising misses the vast majority of political influence that platforms exercise through their core functions.

Finally, enforcement powers must match the speed and scale of modern influence campaigns. Post-election investigations of pre-election manipulation serve little democratic purpose. Real-time detection and response capabilities are essential.

The Choice We Face

We have some important decisions to make. We can continue pretending that 20th-century regulations can govern 21st-century influence, watching our democratic discourse become increasingly vulnerable to sophisticated manipulation, often by foreign actors, many of them openly hostile to our national interests. Or we can acknowledge that technological change demands institutional change and act now to put it in place.

The latest Musk intervention should serve as a genuine wake-up call. We should not simply tut and roll our eyes, as is our tendency in Britain. As AI capabilities expand and platform influence deepens, the gap between technological possibility and regulatory capacity will only widen. The question is whether we choose to close that gap while we still can, or whether we allow democratic discourse to be shaped by whoever commands the most sophisticated influence technology.

Our democratic institutions have adapted before - to radio, to television, to 24-hour mass media. The digital age presents challenges of greater complexity and speed, but the fundamental principle remains unchanged: democratic discourse requires effective democratic oversight. The alternative is rule by algorithms, accountable to no one but the billionaires who own them.

You’ve probably seen this week’s news splashes, read the sweaty palmed op-eds or seen the former cabinet ministers doing the talk show rounds. They’re all saying the same thing: “Britain is becoming ungovernable”.

Now on the surface, it can seem like they have a good reason to say something like that.

Since 2016, Britain has had six Prime Ministers, eight chancellors and nine foreign secretaries – with a new premiership already looking increasingly likely. In just ten years, the country has churned through almost as many leaders as it did in the nearly four decades between Thatcher entering Downing Street and the Brexit referendum.

Turbulent indeed. But where the commentariat and many of the politicians diagnose the electorate with a terminal case of rowdiness, there’s a far, far simpler truth here – one those same people are incredibly reluctant to admit.

The people and the institutions that make up Britain’s political apparatus have completely lost the public’s trust. And you really don’t need a doctorate in political science to understand why.

We’ve got a first-past-the-post voting system that throws people’s votes out the window and puts only a select few constituencies in the spotlight. The rest be damned.

A lobbying industrial complex whose business model involves crowding out the aspirations of ordinary people to make way for the whims of billionaires.

A routine political habit of making promises to the public that aren’t kept – or worse, of neglecting to address people’s needs at all.

And perhaps worst of all: we have a calcified and out-of-touch political class that benefits from all of this and can’t ever possibly understand what the public is so upset about.

It sure has its problems, but Britain is a country with a robust civic and democratic tradition. It’s immensely governable. People still join associations, volunteer, petition, leaflet, fundraise, sit through planning meetings, serve as councillors, form campaign groups, write angry letters, and queue patiently outside polling stations in the drizzling rain. So many of us still believe in the power of democracy.

The message that Britain has sent premiership after crumbling premiership is not that we want out of democracy – it’s that we want in. People want a part to play in the crucial decisions about the future of their communities and their country. They’re tired of being dishonestly performed at during the campaign and then managed from above after polling day.

And instead of confronting that genuine democratic failure honestly, much of the Westminster establishment has chosen an easier explanation: blame the public. Blame voters for being too angry, too volatile, too irrational to govern.

What has collapsed is not the public’s appetite for participation, but their confidence that the existing political system is capable of translating that participation into meaningful power.

Westminster increasingly resembles a sealed machine which absorbs public pressure without ever fundamentally responding to it. Governments rotate in and out while the underlying settlement remains oddly untouched: over-centralised, opaque, short-termist and insulated from meaningful accountability. It’s no wonder people tire of them so quickly.

People notice when their devolved nations and regions – who have long been promised a fair shake – are still treated like administrative inconveniences.

They notice when Parliament can find limitless energy for internal psychodrama but suddenly becomes paralysed when confronted with housing shortages, crumbling public services or collapsing local economies.

They notice when politicians speak endlessly about “hard-working families” while constructing and defending a political economy in which asset wealth matters far more than work itself.

So when Westminster insiders lament that Britain has become impossible to govern, they’re really complaining about how hard it is to win over public consent without fixing Britain’s democracy or addressing the issues people care about. They’re blaming the patient for the disease.

The lesson, then, for our self-satisfied political-media class is simple: listen to people and change those systems. Cure this affliction. You cannot indefinitely run a twenty-first century society through institutions that increasingly resemble closed off old boys’ clubs. At some point, the country naturally starts pushing back.

And no, the cure for distrust is not better or more efficient management of the same insulated institutions that produced the distrust in the first place. People want a break from the old regime.

Pretending this crisis can be managed without meaningful democratic reform will simply continue producing more Nigel Farages and Rupert Lowes – entrepreneurs of political distrust feeding off institutions too arrogant to notice their own decay.

The cure is the same as it always was: distribute power more widely, scrap FPTP and make representation fairer, strengthen local democracy, reduce the stranglehold of money and patronage on political life, and rebuild institutions that people can genuinely see themselves reflected in.

It’s certainly not an easy task. But it is achievable.

And if we don’t want to discover what a truly ungovernable country looks like, it’s our only path forward.

I strongly commend the Prime Minister for blocking eleven far-right instigators from attending the Divide the Kingdom march organised by Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (Tommy Robinson) yesterday.

But it comes tragically late in the game. Robinson’s politics - panic about migration, national decline and demographic “replacement” - has steadily seeped into the mainstream. And Starmer himself has embraced and abetted the broken Westminster political system that has permitted the far-right to fester.

Starmer was right to bar Robinson allies like Filip DeWinter (a Flemish nationalist with an affinity for Nazi slogans and iconography), Valentina Gomez (a far-right Colombian-American influencer who opened her speech last year with “England for the English”), or Joey Mannarino (a US influencer who calls for “remigration” - the forced removal of all non-whites).

And he was correct to describe the march as hateful and divisive. Flyers yesterday called to “secure a future for white people” (eerily close to the Nazi’s infamous 14 words) and placards read “stop white replacement.” Speakers described Muslims and migrants as civilisational and demographic out-groups that could never be British, and they roused the crowd with thinly-veiled threats of civil war.

I’ll accept that there were probably people at that march who were simply misled or manipulated. Frustrated about politics and fed a pack of lies. But I will extend no such courtesy to any of the speakers or organisers.

Robinson has essentially led a trojan horse into the heart of British politics. His movement claims it’s protecting “our women” and “our streets,” that it’s promoting “national unity.” Talking heads will say they have “legitimate concerns about migration” or "genuine critiques of Islamic culture.”

But their defining belief is that different ethnicities cannot co-exist. Like the BNP crossed with 11th century crusaders, they see the world as a civilisational clash between “The West” (white people) and hostile, anti-modern outsiders. They are consumed by a paranoid obsession with racial demographics, and champion a performative cruelty toward migrants, minorities and the multicultural life of modern Britain itself.

And while it masquerades as a grassroots uprising, it’s all astro-turfed to hell by big bankrollers like the right-wing American financier Robert Shillman and everyone’s favourite white nationalist billionaire Elon Musk.

For all of those reasons, the Prime Minister’s belated intervention this weekend was welcome. But if he really sees this as a “fight for the soul of the country” as he claims, he needs to acknowledge that his premiership has enriched the toxic political atmosphere Robinson and Farage thrive in - it helped that trojan horse make it through the gates.

It was just last November when Robinson himself celebrated and publicly endorsed Starmer’s hardline immigration policy. “The Overton window has been obliterated,” Robinson cheered. “Well done patriots!”

Much to the delight of Robinson, Farage, Rupert Lowe, and others of that ilk, nuance and compassion was all but eradicated from the national immigration debate under Starmer and Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood. Labour adopted the policy and rhetoric of the populist right: “smash the gangs”, tougher deportations, endless rhetoric about borders, control and national decline.

And they didn’t do it for ideological reasons.

They ceded that ground because it was what the hollow game of Westminster politics commanded them to do. It was a cynical, consultant-brained political calculus. And the math was wrong, too - they could never beat the nativists at their own game.

Under First-Past-The-Post, modern British politics has become a frantic competition for a relatively small number of culturally conservative swing voters in post-industrial constituencies. An entire political apparatus - strategists, lobbyists, and consultants - has been erected around that narrow contest. A lot of voters are just left out in the cold - and become ripe for the picking by far-right opportunists.

The bigger problem is that consultant-driven and donor-oriented parties no longer attempt to transform public opinion or articulate coherent moral visions. They mirror anxieties back at the electorate in focus-grouped fragments: tougher borders, bigger flags, crueller slogans, more enemies at the gate.

I remember last summer when Starmer wholeheartedly embraced the online “Raise the Colours” phenomenon - people plastering St George’s and Union flags absolutely everywhere. Starmer thought he was “reclaiming patriotism” (a worthy endeavour), but in practice he just lent legitimacy to a campaign organised by far-right nationalists.

Because it goes against the conventional wisdom of Westminster strategy, Starmer did not truly seek to reclaim the flag - to articulate a deeper, better democratic vision of what loving one’s country actually means. That would be too risky under the perverse incentives of FPTP.

So in the twilight days of his premiership, Starmer has taken a welcome stand. But he still seems to think the far-right is a simple problem of bad people saying ugly things. He doesn’t acknowledge that Robinson is a morbid symptom of the political system he himself inhabits: FPTP-oriented, consultant-driven, donor-pleasing, devoid of moral nerve.

And until that system is fixed - until our leaders can look beyond this hollow politics, build more functional institutions, and make the moral case for decency - the battle for the soul of the nation will rage on.

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