The cure for money in politics is minarchy

Polly Toynbee is complaining again about money in politics:

Money, money, money brings politicians down time and again. People expect corrupting cash from the Tories, with their last cabinet of zillionaires umbilically linked to finance of every kind, but voters expect better from Labour. The first painful dent in the moral armour of Keir Starmer’s cabinet was the revelation of freebies he and others accepted in clothes, glasses and tickets. There was a chance then to get on the front foot, using that minor but shabby embarrassment to declare a great clean-up of the sewage inflow of influence on politics from mega donations. But No 10 missed it.

Polly’s suggestion is therefore that:

Democracy relies on party volunteers, but they need professional organisers, too. Taxpayers may not like it, but put the choice to people straight: would you rather a small subvention from the state of around £100m, or in this time of power-crazed mega masters of the world’s wealth, will you leave it to the likes of Musk to buy up political parties as they buy up everything else? Few people think democracy should be up for sale, which is why a majority of the public supports a cap on party donations. That £100m is a tiny price to pay for politics uncontaminated by cash.

Politics would not be uncontaminated by cash of course. It would just be different cash contaminating in a different way.

Now, yes, one of us here has a known partiality for a particular political party and viewpoint. But this following point still stands despite that.

The big sea change in British politics this past 30 years has been the successive rises of Ukip, Brexit Party and Reform. Under a system of state funding dependent upon vote share at the last election this would have been somewhere between near impossible and not happening at all. We can think of many who would welcome that alternative past of course. But to think that democracy should be run so as to make it even more difficult for new ideas, new parties, to arise would be, well, odd. Especially in a place where that’s exactly the story of these past decades, successive new parties.

If you’d prefer less partiality the Greens and Your Party would face even greater hurdles than they currently do.

State funding therefore tips the scales to stasis.

But back to non-political reasoning. The reason people buy politicians is that politicians are unbelievably cheap. The British state disposes of £1.2 trillion or so a year. The entire political system that chooses who gets to decide there costs £100 million a year by Polly’s number. Politics - to buy the whole thing - costs 0.008% of the prize of controlling politics. And given how interfering that British state is there’s always a corner of that state spend that can be directed to repay political donors.

As with everything the way to reduce purchases is to raise the price. Reduce that size of the state and fewer will be willing to try to buy influence over it. Make politics more expensive to buy by reducing the benefit of having done so.

The solution to money in politics is minarchy.

Reduce government to what can only be done by government and what absolutely must be done by government and no one would bother to try to buy it. Works for us.

Tim Worstall