We can be grateful for two things in the United Kingdom: the restrictions on election campaign financing and the legal obligation on national broadcasters to provide balance in their political reporting. In America, there are no limits on either. The total spending by all the parties involved in the UK’s general election last year was around £97 million. This was mainly the bigger ones; the smaller parties spent less than £2 million. The total is absolute chicken feed compared to America. Last year’s presidential and congressional elections (not all congressional seats are contested) cost a fraction under $16 BILLION (around £12 billion). Even accounting for the difference in population (the US has about four times the electorate) this is still a massive disparity - close to 120 times as much.
American elections have become the playthings of the wealthy. If you look at the top donors to Donald Trump they are all either corporations or the owners of corporations. To be clear, they can’t give money directly, but pass it through PACs or Political Action Committees. Musk and his SpaceX company coughed up the most, $276 million. That one single donation could have paid for the last three British general elections.
It wasn’t always so. Before 1971, although there was no specific legal restriction on campaign spending, businesses in America left politics to politicians and activists. But a man named Lewis Powell changed all that.
Powell was a corporate lawyer commissioned by a director of the US Chamber of Commerce to write a confidential memorandum entitled "Attack on the American Free Enterprise System" described in Wikipedia as an anti-Communist and anti-New Deal blueprint for conservative business interests to retake America. It sounds suspiciously like Project 2025 although much shorter and less specific.
It was in response to the work of activist Ralph Nader, whose 1965 book on General Motors, Unsafe at Any Speed, exposed the auto industry putting profit ahead of safety, and triggered the American consumer movement. Powell said the nascent movement was an "assault on the enterprise system" and was "broadly based and consistently pursued" by among others "the Communists, New Leftists and other revolutionaries who would destroy the entire system, both political and economic." He thought there was a "stampede" by politicians to support almost any legislation related to “consumerism” or to the “environment” that needed to be stopped.
He called for American business — "which has demonstrated the greatest capacity in all history to produce and to influence consumer decisions — to apply their great talents vigorously to the preservation of the system itself."
You can read more about the memo HERE.
The document eventually caught the attention of President Richard Nixon, who put Powell on the Supreme Court and the rest is history. US companies took Powell's advice, and this is why American elections developed into a financial arms race that the left could never match. It's also one of the reasons Europeans enjoy far more employment and consumer rights, environmental protections, and higher food safety and quality standards.
Corporate America has spent its way to power, displacing or more often simply buying the democratically elected representatives of the voters. One analyst, James Thurber puts the number of working lobbyists in the US at close to 100,000 and that the industry brings in an amazing $9 billion annually, mostly from corporations. These are astonishing sums of money
Coupled with that, between 1949 and 1987 there was The Fairness Doctrine, a policy adopted by the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC), that required the holders of broadcast licenses to present controversial issues of public importance in a manner that fairly reflected differing viewpoints. This was abolished under Ronald Reagan in 1987 and the rule that implemented the policy was removed entirely in 2011, under Obama.
So, now we have heavily partisan broadcasters like Fox News (they temporarily removed the on-screen stock market ticker they have had since launch when Trump's tariff policy caused a crash) and Newsmax, plus a mass of paid 'influencers' operating podcasts and social media accounts, who have almost unlimited spending power generated by corporate advertisers.
Elon Musk, of course, has two hundred million followers on his own personal platform and does it for free.
This isn't just on the right either. There are Democrat-leaning broadcasters like CNN and MSNBC and podcasters, who are almost as biased the other way.
We should be wary of what's happening over here. Open Democracy reports that in the days after Reform’s local election campaign launch in Birmingham last month, there was talk of Lord Bamford and JCB taking "a leading role” in a national pothole repair programme under a Reform government. These claims, attributed to “sources close to Farage”, were first published in the in-house journal of Great British PAC (GB PAC), a newly established political organisation that wants to unite the British right ahead of the next general election to "save the country."
Their 'mission' is:
" ......to challenge Labour’s overreach through legal and procedural means in the short term, and to lay the groundwork for a strong, centre-right government by 2029. We are committed to developing the legal frameworks, policy drafts, and operational strategies necessary to reverse Labour’s damaging policies and steer Britain back towards growth, independence, and prosperity."
They proclaim:
"Launched in 2024, the Great British PAC is a coalition of business leaders, politicians, lawyers, police chiefs, journalists, patriots, and activists from all walks of life, united by a shared love for our country and a commitment to its future."
You can see the usual suspects behind it HERE.
"Inspired by the powerful impact of Political Action Committees (PACs) in the United States, we believe it’s time for Britain to have its own formidable force—a Great British PAC."
We know Elon Musk once talked about donating $100 million to Reform UK, money that he wouldn't miss at all, but would easily sway an election in this country.
These are worrying times
Labour and the EU-reset
Steve Reed is Secretary of State for the Environment (DEFRA) and has again denied that the ‘reset’ negotiations with Brussels will ever amount to freedom of movement or rejoining the single market or the customs union.
This is no doubt sticking to the Labour Manifesto but it’s disappointing, short-sighted and bad politics. Labour is neck and neck, slightly behind if anything, with Reform UK. Starmer can’t really attack Farage on Brexit because he is essentially on the same side. It would help Labour’s case if they can hang the blame for many of our current problems around Farage’s neck, where it belongs. As it stands, they can’t.
They are also in danger of taking the anti-Brexit vote for granted.
It’s short-sighted because public opinion is obviously moving in that direction and it opens up the possibility of the LibDems and the Greens, both openly pro-EU, making big gains at the next election, squeezing Labour from both sides.
Unless Starmer changes tack, I for one couldn’t support him and I don’t think I’m alone in that.
