AIBU? Billionaires donating £72 million to Reform

Of course it is different. Unions support people and without unions the majority of us would still be on lower wages along with a number of changes that have been made to improves workers rights

that’s not to say there isn’t issues within some unions

there is something very wrong that people are making so much money their money makes them even more money and this gives them influence simply because of their wealth

Yanbu

EasternStandard yes if individual contributions were subject to a statutory cap across all parties of 81p a month (av political levy donation), so,say £10 per person per year, that could work, but the problem for the other political parties has always been that their membership numbers have been so alarmingly low. The conservatives have around 123,000 members and reform has around 270,000 members, so they need to rely on huge individual donations from extremely wealthy people to get by. Of course there would be nothing to stop reform eventually registering with a body such as the Certification Officer and collecting political donations from their members’ subs as Labour do provided the union is affiliated to the Labour Party (some eg the RMT or the Bakers union are not)..

Collecting individual donations from large numbers of working people have always (until now) been the counter balance to enormous individual donations - to try to have a functioning representative democracy. But Something like this was always going to happen as the checks and balances in party political funding have always been weak and have relied on this fundamental understanding of the need for a viable representative democracy. I really shouldn’t need to be explaining this to you. But eg this morning Farage was reported as saying that if these £75 million donations are stopped then a future reform government will prevent donations from trade unions - and there you have it - fascism in action. We should all be alarmed by this.

Those individuals can donate directly to Labour, as for every other party.

We need to restrict donations overall and have a cap on how much one individual can give. Also fed up of billionaires foisting horrible tech onto us we don’t even need. I’m so sick of multiple platforms / authentication, can you imagine the headache if payments were in crypto to a reform government!!

individual union members are completely free to decide not to pay a political levy as part of their membership and they can opt out whenever they want to. It’s pretty tightly regulated by the 2014 lobbying act (the conservatives wanted to break the labour funding mechanism by going as far as to turn it into an opt in mechanism but they weren’t able to do this at the time.

To compare thousands of individuals each paying a political levy in their membership fee to a single giant donation by one person is incredibly stupid - sorry. The conservatives - and the tabloid press have done this for years though, and now with these giant and somewhat fascist donations they are rather hoist by their own Petard. They have had so many opportunities to properly reform political funding over the years to cap individual donations. The conservatives should have agreed a £100k cap, but in return they wanted the union funding to change to an opt in instead of an opt out mechanism and everyone knew this would have collapsed union funding while leaving the conservatives with large individual donations from the very wealthy which would have broken our democracy - and here we are …

By not voting for the party they support, and thinking through why they are so supportive of them in the first place.

I earn more than minimum wage thankfully. Made sure to knuckle down in school.

Maybe Nige will try Trump’s strategy of ‘everyone who votes for me will be given $5000.’

people would be thick enough to vote for it (as demonstrated by the “whataboutism” on the thread here.. honestly the lack of brain cells makes me despair).

just before I go, here’s another lovely story of money impacting policy and choice.

Money in this case buying new friends and sacrificing an entire continent and a hundred years of alliance.

But yes of course, money is all that matters and it should be allowed to buy what it wants, Disney laws, even entire countries. Countries like Ukraine, Greenland, where next?

news.sky.com/story/donald-trump-jr-says-putin-ally-paid-for-two-nights-of-his-wedding-celebrations-as-generous-gift-13585900

Billionaires are the problem. We could all stand against them but people are unfortunately too stupid to realise that we are being pitted against each other

@Maeve0098 How would we stand against billionaires?

It is their money and they can decide who to give it to.

But enjoy your innocence, or deliberate gaslighting, whichever. I have to get up for my minimum wage job tomorrow.

Free to donate billions in exchange for laws that favour their interests?

I can hardly equal the donation of billions. Hell I can remember when the - original -Green Party, the ones who were interested in the environment rather than Palestinians and misogyny, sent me a letter complaining that I was not doing my bit because I couldn’t afford a regular donation of £50 a month! At the time I couldn’t have spared £5 a month, thanks to the shift to the rentier economy and being a bit younger than the baby boomers who sent the letter.

((Which is how that party became the corrupted mess it is now. Ditto, the rest of the slow degradation of this entire country, with all the family silver sold off to foreigners.))

Therefore I have no power at all, unequal to that wielded by the billionaires, thus demonstrating the undermined principles at the heart of democracy - equality, law, justice.

I’ll remind you that the British Empire called itself a democracy too, and that it was ‘the mother of all Parliaments’ . Sure, all those serf miners had just as much right to influence the British Parliament as Lord Salisbury or whatever. They had rights to gather too and not be cut down in the street at Peterloo.

I think people should be free to donate to reform. As you are feeling to donate to labour, the green, the lib dems or the Tories.

We are up for sale to anyone who offers money. Have you not heard any of the complaints from MPs themselves about how ineffective Parliament is?

We are a parliamentary democracy

It is up for sale. Brexit was a prime example of just how much money matters now, how much of modern policy choices it buys. So is the whole trans rights / male activist debacle. You think these billionaires are offering philanthropy and improved lives along the lines of the Victorian Rowntree family or Carnegie?

Britain a democracy? How many other policies of the last 30 years have we been given a real choice about? Even under its own rules, it’s classed as a minimal democracy. Every 5 years a choice of red and blue ties offering very similar policies gets put to a multiply-Gerry mandered electorate. We have no local democracy worth the name, no choices, and most of us are now just serfs. We are losing rights, especially if we’re female.

We still live in a democracy. What's so wrong about the UK?

It is just sickening that so few have so much, and it is terrible to watch the destruction of all the values I knew that defined the western world. Democracy, justice, law, fairness, equality, basic decency. It’s all dead. Everything has been sold. We have all been sold.

Space exploration is cool

Maybe they are hoping the UK will stop going to shit 🤔

Lord Sainsbury has donated millions to Labour over the years. Something like 12 million quid. We were okay with it then though… because it wasn’t Reform…

Edited for terrible maths