AIBU? Billionaires donating £72 million to Reform

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

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

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?

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

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).

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

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

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 …

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!!

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

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.

Yanbu

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