The key paradox of today’s politics is this: people are incredibly passionate, vocal and engaged, but our efforts to create lasting change seem to evaporate on contact with reality. As historian Anton Jäger has put it: we are slamming the accelerator with no petrol in the tank.

His new book, Hyperpolitics: Extreme Politicisation Without Political Consequences, offers a compelling diagnosis. The institutions that once channelled our political energies – mass parties, trade unions, churches, civic associations – have steadily withered. (I do think his book romanticises these often prejudiced and hierarchical organisations a bit – but the point stands that there used to be stronger bonds between civic, social and political life).

The prosperous, depoliticised “end of history” that began in the 1990s, and accompanied the erosion of these social bonds, was shattered by the 2008 financial crisis. People returned to politics in the late 2000s with a vengeance. But no one rebuilt the collective institutions that once channelled passion into power. Instead, we tried to replace them with the internet.

The result has been what Jäger calls “hyperpolitics”: a society saturated with political fervour, protest, and extreme polarisation, but increasingly confined to an algorithmic realm of fleeting outrage.

It seems naive now to think the internet could truly replace mass organisations. But we forget how strong that promise of digital democracy was – the promise of unprecedented new horizons of human connectivity. Instead – thanks to the Elon Musks and Mark Zuckerbergs of this world – we got echo chambers. A historic level of political balkanisation, a fragmented series of identity clusters, each screaming into its own algorithmic void.

The main beneficiaries of hyperpolitics have been the populist right. They figured out early (think back to Brexit and Cambridge Analytica) that grievance, division, and outrage could be gamed and monetised. Deploying simple catch-all slogans (“Make America Great Again,” “Take Back Control”), backed by mega-donor cash and troves of personal browsing data, they cobbled disparate groups together into coalitions that stuck together just long enough to win elections.

They continue to farm agitation: outrage over Black characters in The Odyssey, a trans person in a Bud Light advert, or manufactured panic about migrants eating swans. But as Trump’s second term demonstrates, their popularity stumbles once they attain power and routinely prioritise the interests of wealthy donors over their constituents.

The centre of politics, meanwhile, is struggling globally. Figures like Morgan McSweeney – Keir Starmer’s former Chief of Staff – remain wedded to a model that, as Jäger puts it, “treat[s] the electorate like a black box from which one hopes to extract insight after a plane crash.” Rather than rebuild relationships, they study an increasingly fragmented electorate from above: polling, focus-grouping, and segmenting it into ever-finer demographic slices.

This triangulation is the strategy of political actors with little to say. In an era of stagnant wages, soaring inequality, and crumbling public services, technocratic “evidence-based policy” is not speaking to people’s genuine frustrations.

That leaves the left, which has repeatedly mistaken online mobilisation for organisation. Various movements have created “repertoires of social expression that require little to no long-term obligation”: viral campaigns on Instagram, flash-in-the-pan mass protests and insurgent movements. From Occupy to Corbynism, the left has repeatedly demonstrated its ability to mobilise enormous numbers – often composed of young people – but has struggled to turn that mass energy into any kind of durable power bloc (despite often openly stating their intention to do so).

So where do we go from here?

There are obvious places to start. Getting big money and revolving-door lobbyists out of politics would force parties to cultivate members rather than mega-donors. And ending First-Past-the-Post would stop parties ignoring millions of voters while obsessively polling a handful of swing seats.

But none of this, on its own, rebuilds the collective life Jäger describes. To truly revive the mass politics of the 20th century, Jäger says, is like “the genomic reconstruction of a mammoth from DNA samples extracted out of the Siberian permafrost.”

All he has to say about the prospect of renewal, somewhat disappointingly, is that it will emerge in “everyday life” – in places where people communicate and express “common concern.”

But seeing as civil society and much of the economy have now gone digital, I do wonder if one such place could still be the internet. If only we could find a way to fulfil that original digital promise of meaningful and consequential connection, to break down the barriers of our echo chambers, liberate people from Big Tech’s walled gardens, and build systems that facilitate association, mass cooperation and healthy political competition.

The tools, as far as I can tell, exist: encryption, open-source software, interoperable networks, community-owned platforms and digital systems for deliberation and participatory decision-making.

Today’s billionaire-owned internet is designed to turn our fleeting attention into massive profits. Not to turn our connections into binding political associations.

It’s quite hard to envision a different kind of web, and the power-mad tech bros certainly wouldn’t welcome that act of imagination. There are plenty of questions that neither Jäger nor I can yet answer about what it would actually look like.

But if the thesis of Hyperpolitics holds true, perhaps that’s the place (beyond the obvious, immediately actionable regulatory reforms) where those of us who care about the future of democracy should start looking.

Last year, the United States published a National Security Strategy with an extraordinary diagnosis of Europe. It warns of “civilizational erasure”, predicts some NATO countries could become “majority non-European” within decades and celebrates the growing influence of “patriotic European parties” a cause for “great optimism”.

US policy, it says, should include “cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations”.

This isn’t a leaked diplomatic cable or an allegation made by America’s opponents. It is US government policy, written down.

The language of patriotism does a lot of work. Migration and demographic change are presented as a threat to European civilisation itself.

The strategy’s language was quickly linked by analysts and reporters to one of the international far right’s most notorious racist conspiracy theories: the Great Replacement - the idea that Europe’s existing population is being displaced through mass immigration.

Now there is money attached.

The US State Department intends to provide $12 million to conservative organisations in Britain. $7 million is destined for 878, a recently established organisation co-founded by former Conservative Minister, Jacob Rees-Mogg. Its priorities include ending mass immigration.

Another $5 million is reportedly going to Free Speech Union International, an offshoot of the Free Speech Union (FSU), founded by Conservative peer Toby Young.

Meanwhile, senior State Department official Sarah Rogers has been on a European road trip promoting the grants and the MAGA administration’s free-speech agenda, meeting figures from Reform UK and strengthening ties with the European right.

The money, the political outreach and the published strategy are all pointing in the same direction.

Taking back control, with help from Washington

Free speech is central to the justification. The Trump administration increasingly portrays European attempts to regulate online content as censorship, with Britain’s Online Safety Act becoming a particular target.

The Free Speech Union shares that fight. It has described the Act as “Orwellian” and cultivated relationships with figures in the Trump administration.

This week, the Financial Times reported that the FSU had gone a step further, urging US Vice-President JD Vance to press the British Government to pause the Online Safety Act and stop funding its anti-disinformation unit.

A British campaigning organisation was inviting Washington into a British policy fight.

Toby Young himself criticised Barack Obama’s intervention in the Brexit debate in 2016. Britons, he argued, could make up their own minds. Apparently foreign intervention in British politics looks rather different when the foreign government agrees with you.

Perhaps the strangest thing about all of this is how little it looks like foreign interference. We’re used to looking for Russian money, shell companies, bots, cyberattacks and covert networks.

Here, almost everything is happening in broad daylight.

The Government clearly knows foreign interference is a risk. It’s already tightening the rules, including a new £100,000 cap on political donations from overseas electors. That’s welcome.

Foreign money, though, doesn’t need to go anywhere near a political party to influence British politics.

Modern political influence has a supply chain. Money funds organisations, research, campaigns, events and social media. Ideas move into newspapers and television, reach politicians, shape political debate and eventually become policy. No foreign cheque needs to arrive at party headquarters.

If we’re serious about stopping foreign interference, I’d argue we need to look further up the chain too - long before foreign money turns into a political donation.

Normally, the hard part of foreign interference is proving that it’s happening. This time, America has written down what it wants for Europe, put millions of dollars behind it and started building relationships with the people who will help deliver it.

We don’t need an intelligence agency to uncover that.

We need a democracy equipped to deal with it.

New polling this week showed a sharp fall in the number of people who feel proud to be British.

National pride has fallen from 74% to 47% over the past 15 years.

Working for a democratic reform organisation, I can’t say I was wholly surprised by some of the other findings either. Pride in Parliament has fallen by 34%, while pride in the monarchy has almost halved.

It’s hard to feel pride in institutions you feel disconnected from. Trust in our politics has been falling for years, with too many people feeling ignored, shut out of decisions and unconvinced that the institutions governing them really work for them.

That trust needs to be rebuilt.

But there was one finding that genuinely encouraged me.

Pride in our local communities has actually risen, from 29% to 40%.

For all the talk of a country hopelessly divided, people feel a growing sense of connection to the places they live and the communities around them. That feels important.

The danger comes when uncertainty about national identity is spotted and exploited by people who see division as an opportunity. We have seen plenty of that recently.

Anti-migrant rhetoric, disinformation and hate spread rapidly online, encouraging communities to see one another as competitors for homes, public services and even the right to belong. In recent months, some of that anger has spilled from our screens onto our streets.

There are real consequences when division is allowed to flourish.

But perhaps our communities also show us part of the way forward.

If pride in our communities is growing while pride in our country and institutions is falling, the challenge is to reverse that trend - to build a bridge between the communities people increasingly value and the democracy and country they collectively make up.

That means listening to people rather than simply telling them what the country thinks.

It’s one reason the National Conversation exists - and why Open Britain has joined forces with it.

The National Conversation is asking people across the UK about the communities they value, what brings us together, what makes them feel they belong and what kind of country they want to become.

I’ve been filling in my own National Conversation this week, and some of the questions have made me think harder than I expected. Perhaps inevitably, some of my answers come back to Northern Ireland.

I grew up near the border, in a place where identity has never fitted neatly inside a single box. British, Irish and Northern Irish can overlap in ways that are deeply personal, cultural and political.

I’ve seen what can happen when flags, identity and even our sense of belonging are hijacked and turned into dividing lines.

In Northern Ireland, those divisions were never abstract. They shaped where people lived, where they went to school, the opportunities available to them and, at their worst, whether people felt safe.

But I’ve also seen that division doesn’t have to be permanent.

Northern Ireland has changed enormously during my lifetime. Not overnight, and certainly not through conversation alone. Political agreements, fairer laws, investment and people willing to cooperate across old divisions all played their part.

There is still a long way to go. Segregation remains stubbornly embedded and questions of identity can still pull people apart. But Northern Ireland is not the place many once assumed it was destined to remain.

The political settlement has endured. Fairer housing and employment have widened opportunity. Support for integrated education is growing. Investment has followed, while tourism, culture, music, food and the screen industry have flourished.

That experience makes me wary of anyone who tells us division is inevitable. It isn’t.

A conversation won’t rebuild trust, fix our democracy or make deeply held differences disappear.

But listening is how we start.

Right now, there is something worth listening to: people still believe in their communities.

If we can understand what holds those communities together, give them a greater voice and build a stronger bridge between them and our democracy, perhaps we can start rebuilding some of what has been lost.

If you have ten minutes, add your own experience to the National Conversation. What comes next shouldn’t be decided by the people shouting loudest about who belongs.

It should be shaped by all of us.

Take part in the National Conversation

“I asked the voters of Clacton to be my jury,” Nigel Farage said as he declared victory over the “establishment candidate” Count Binface in his self-induced, shambolic by-election campaign. “And the verdict has now come in.”

Asked by GB News about the Parliamentary inquiry into his £5 million “gift” from crypto tycoon Christopher Harborne, Farage responded: “Who cares? Who cares? The voters of Clacton don’t care.”

Winning an election, in Farage’s mind, effectively serves as a pardon. Never mind that no major parties competed in it, never mind that it’s in Reform UK’s safest seat in the country, never mind that more people in Britain would have preferred his novelty candidate opponent to win. For Farage and his media allies, the result represents the absolution of all sin.

In the same way that Donald Trump sought to frame his 2024 Presidential election win as a twisted exoneration from various forms of official scrutiny, Farage has it that Britain’s democratic institutions – accountability watchdogs, regulators, and even the police – should essentially give way to the whims of a small subset of voters.

Of course, that makes absolutely no sense for a variety of reasons. Defendants in court don’t get to choose their own jurors and then declare themselves exonerated by the verdict. There is an established code of ethics all must abide by, and an independent system in place to determine whether it has been breached. You might call it ‘the rule of law.’

I’ll be the first to agree that the system Britain has for enforcing ethics and accountability on officials is utterly broken. It’s exceedingly rare for elected politicians to be charged with misconduct in public office, and the fact that Farage has coasted on a tidal wave of dodgy donations for this long shows that the system we have to regulate campaign finance isn’t fit for purpose.

But even under a system in dire need of fixing, Farage will still find that the people of Clacton rightly lack the power to free him from consequences.

It didn’t take long for the Parliamentary probe into Nigel Farage’s £5 million ‘gift’ from Christopher Harborne to re-open – it’s already up and running again. His dramatic resignation in July merely bought him a 38-day grace period, at least away from the prying eyes of the Standards Committee. But that’s just one probe of many.

The Met police are actively investigating donations to the party amid questions about the ultimate source of funds, and the National Crime Agency has reportedly received multiple Suspicious Activity Reports relating to millions of pounds in transactions to organisations operated by deputy leader Richard Tice.

Our friends at Unlock Democracy and Compassion in Politics have now also reported the Reform leader to the Metropolitan Police, calling for the force to “investigate whether Nigel Farage MP may have committed the offence of misconduct in public office” over that £5 million gift.

And new information is constantly emerging that just raises more questions :

• Byline Times revealed today that Reform UK paid £440,000 to firms linked to party insiders;

• The Financial Times has uncovered *another* dodgy Polymarket account in the name of Reform donor, Farage confidante and convicted fraudster George Cottrell – placing big bets on Donald Trump’s 2024 election campaign.

• Tether.bet, the offshore crypto gambling company with links to both Cottrell and Harborne, mysteriously shut down in the UK in the wake of revelations in The Times about potential criminal wrongdoing.

So yes, fine, Farage is entitled to celebrate his electoral victory. The voters of Clacton have given him a genuine mandate to represent them in Parliament (at least as genuine as it can be when no other serious party was on the ballot). He should probably still be a bit embarrassed that a bin secured 26% of the vote.

What they have not given him – and could never give him – is a mandate for sleaze, or any kind of immunity from the rules that govern elected officials.

Perhaps he understands that his greatest challenges are yet to come, because the Reform UK leader hasn’t exactly behaved like a politician proud of a hard-won triumph.

He neglected to turn up to the declaration for a race that he himself called, saying that “I am damned if I am going to stand on a stage, having won a resounding victory […] and be demeaned and humiliated by nobodies.” He also conflictingly cited security concerns, suggesting that Essex Police advised him not to attend for fear of a “major disturbance” (Essex police say otherwise).

Farage won the by-election. What he didn’t win was the right to decide that the questions no longer need answering.

The coming weeks will test whether Reform UK can outrun its own paper trail. Farage says the verdict has come in. The trouble is, several others are still pending.

Politicians defending money in politics often sound the same. Rarely do they make the case that our system is in any way improved by massive and growing influxes of donor cash. Instead, they lament the campaign-finance-industrial-complex as an unfortunate but necessary evil.

I’ve come to think of it as a sort of ‘arms race’ mentality, fuelled by the frenetic winner-take-all logic of FPTP elections. It’s propelled America to ridiculous extremes, with the wealthiest spending $2.6 billion on the 2024 Presidential race compared to just $31 million in 2010. British politics isn’t quite at America’s absurd ‘actually donations are free speech’ level yet, but we’re certainly trending in that direction.

This ‘arms race’ mentality is sustained by a political and consultant class, on both sides of the Atlantic, that is utterly bereft of imagination. To these people, politics is a static grid. The system – however broken – is merely the water they swim in. Of course you need the billionaires: the other lot have billionaires. Of course you need the lobbyists: the other lot have lobbyists. Winning requires concessions, you know, and winning is everything. (These types always have a great deal to say about winning and rather less to say about what they intend to do once they’ve won.)

It’s a sort of political fatalism: voters believe what they believe, the system works how it works, and the shrewd politician merely plays the field. It’s how you end up with Keir Starmer’s ‘Island of Strangers’ speech, which (disastrously) tried to pander to the xenophobic anxieties of Reform UK voters.

But the terrain has changed, and the playbook must follow. A cloud of contempt and political disillusionment looms over both Britain and the United States. The general quality of life is stagnating – in some cases even declining – and prospects for young people are bleak. People are crying out for wholesale system change, and unless you buy the hard-right’s anti-immigration snake oil, there isn’t really much on offer.

Big money is part of the reason. When politicians are beholden to donors, they tend to govern tepidly – protecting incumbent industries, watering down reform, and prioritising the quarterly earnings of their backers over the pay packets of their constituents. The result is often policy paralysis on housing, healthcare, and wages. Voters feel the stagnation in their wallets and conclude that the whole system is rigged.

In Michigan, a state that Donald Trump carried in 2024, progressive outsider candidate Abdul El-Sayed just delivered a catastrophic blow to this received establishment wisdom. Last week, the doctor and former public health official won an uphill Senate primary against his opponent Haley Stevens – despite the fact that she had a record-breaking $60 million spent in her favour.

El-Sayed’s double-punch campaign was remarkably simple, as summed up by his killer refrain: “money out of politics, money in your pocket.” He rejected SuperPAC spending (the bloated fundraising vehicles that have all but conquered US campaign finance), and campaigned hard against America’s unaffordable health insurance system.

Under that conventional thinking, Stevens should have walked it in. But her greatest asset – a lot of money – instead became her greatest liability. El-Sayed was able to present her as another bought-and-paid-for politician. Crucially, he pointed to the donations she’d received from big players that have also backed Donald Trump: the health insurance lobby, oil and gas interests, cryptocurrency and gambling giants, big tech firms, and above all AIPAC (America’s notorious hard-right pro-Israel funding group).

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Politicians today can actually become more impactful – and far less robotic – when they shed vested interests. Like Zohran before him, El-Sayed is able to speak off the cuff about issues that matter to him (especially Gaza and universal healthcare) without worrying about upsetting powerful donors or interest groups. Democratic primary voters, who are increasingly tired of political automatons that routinely speak at length about nothing at all, clearly saw it as a breath of fresh air.

The smear-machine is already churning out fear-mongering disinformation about El-Sayed, and he’s still got to face off against Trump acolyte Mike Rogers in November. A lot more money will be spent trying to stave off this threat – as ever, the system protects itself – but it’s early doors and they’re already resorting to petty personal insults. As with Stevens, Trump and Rogers will struggle to properly rebut a campaign that puts their own perceived corruption at its heart.

The fatal flaw of the ‘arms race’ school of thought, then – which El-Sayed and others have exposed – is that public opinion has always changed. Ideas and connections can be explained and highlighted in ways that voters didn’t see before (money in politics is connected to the lack of money in your pocket). Political coalitions are not naturally occurring background phenomena – they’re built and rebuilt.

Perhaps the lesson for us here in Britain is that democratic reform needn’t remain trapped in roundtables about recommendations from the last roundtable. We have a habit of treating the rules governing political power as constitutional housekeeping separate from day-to-day politics, when it may actually offer – or at least be a gateway to – the change that people so desperately want.

Indeed, there’s currently an elections bill moving through Parliament that’s quite thin gruel when it comes to campaign finance – especially given all of the insane recent revelations about Nigel Farage’s finances. The one thing that Reform and MAGA alike fear most, I strongly suspect, is a genuine revolt against money in politics that exposes their billionaire-funded populist charade for the sham that it is.

When Andy Burnham suggested this week that Britain may eventually need a written constitution, he opened the door to one of the biggest constitutional conversations this country has had in generations.

His immediate focus was devolution. As power moves out of Whitehall and into towns, cities and regions, Burnham argues the UK will eventually need a clearer constitutional settlement built around shared principles.

He’s probably right.

The danger is that we immediately start arguing about where the furniture goes instead of whether the house is fireproof.

Most debates about a written constitution quickly descend into questions of structure. Which powers should remain in Westminster? Which should sit with mayors, councils and devolved governments? How should the constitutional map be redrawn?

Those are important questions. They’re just not the first ones.

A written constitution shouldn’t be a photocopy of the system we’ve inherited. The more important task is deciding what a modern constitution should actually protect us from.

The world has changed dramatically over the past decade. Democracies have been tested in ways that once seemed unimaginable. Foreign interference has become a national security concern. Political finance has become more opaque. Public trust has continued to drain away. The comforting assumption that democracy will somehow look after itself feels far less convincing than it once did.

We don't have to imagine what happens when democratic safeguards fail. We only have to look around.

Hungary should be compulsory reading.

Viktor Orbán didn’t abolish democracy overnight. He won elections. Then, over the course of years, he systematically dismantled many of the institutions designed to limit executive power. Independent media was gradually brought under the influence of government allies. The Constitutional Court was weakened through changes to appointments and jurisdiction. Electoral laws were rewritten to favour the governing party.

None of those decisions, taken in isolation, looked like the end of democracy. Taken together they transformed Hungary into what Orbán himself described as an “illiberal state”.

The United States offers a different warning.

Project 2025 was an instruction manual for governing without the old constraints. Across almost 900 pages it mapped out how the Trump administration could remove senior civil servants, expand presidential control over supposedly independent agencies, weaken regulatory bodies, reshape the Department of Justice, concentrate executive authority and replace experienced officials with partisans.

It was a disturbing mix of ambition and strategy which treated democracy as a system to be reverse engineered.

America had plenty of warnings. They were all dismissed as alarmist. Until they weren’t.

One of the biggest mistakes democracies make is assuming they are somehow exceptional. Americans believed their Constitution would hold. Hungarians believed their democratic institutions would protect them. Somehow, Britain still clings to the belief that constitutional safeguards are something other countries need.

We prefer the “good chaps” theory of government: the idea that those in power will voluntarily play by the rules, respect unwritten conventions and politely refrain from exploiting every loophole available to them.

That’s less a constitutional safeguard than a fingers-crossed strategy.

If all of this still feels like someone else’s problem, Britain’s recent politics should make you think again.

Here’s the thing. The modern populist right does homework. It watches, borrows, shares tactics and learns. Nigel Farage didn’t stumble into Donald Trump’s orbit by accident. Political movements learn from one another. They study what works. Perhaps it’s time defenders of democracy started doing the same.

Britain already has enough warning lights flashing on the dashboard. Foreign interference is no longer a conspiracy theory but an established security concern. Political funding is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a tiny number of ultra-wealthy donors. Reform UK has attracted astonishing sums of money for a party barely out of infancy, while questions around transparency, financial influence and the conduct of senior figures have become regular fixtures of the news cycle.

None of these developments, taken individually, means Britain is destined to follow the path of Hungary or the United States. What they do tell us is that these aren’t hypothetical problems anymore. They’re already part of British politics.

Good constitutional design has never been about today’s government. It’s about tomorrow’s, and the one after that. Constitutions aren’t written because we trust politicians. They’re written because democracy shouldn’t depend on trusting them.

That shifts the debate away from constitutional plumbing and towards the questions that actually matter. How do we stop vast wealth buying disproportionate influence, defend elections from foreign interference and make sure new technologies don’t undermine democracy? Above all, how do we ensure that the rules of our democracy aren’t simply rewritten by whichever party happens to win the next election?

Andy Burnham is right that Britain may need a new constitutional settlement. But the real opportunity isn’t to write down the rules we’ve inherited. It’s to write the rules we’ve learned we need.

Hungary showed us how democracies can be hollowed out. Project 2025 showed us that someone is already writing the playbook. Britain still has limited time to strengthen the guardrails around our democracy, something both Hungary and the US once believed they had in abundance.

Constitutions are usually written after democracies learn painful lessons. The real test is whether Britain can learn them first.

It’s one thing that Kemi Badenoch’s Conservatives let a former Neo-Nazi slip through the cracks and stand as a councillor in Somerset. But what’s even more remarkable is that Badenoch herself – despite the terrible headlines – has come out to openly justify the decision.

Her defence of Joshua Bonehill-Paine (known online as ‘Crewkerne Man’) is not entirely coherent. On the one hand, she claims that he is “more than contrite” about his past and that people deserve second chances when they genuinely change. But at the same time, she says she wouldn’t give him a “national platform” and let him stand for Parliament. So has he changed or not then?

Looking at this fellow’s social media history, it seems like he simply swapped out one outmoded strain of far-right radicalism for a more acceptable online variant.

Bonehill-Paine founded the National British Resistance Party – a fringe fascist group looking to fill the niche of the BNP – in 2014. It didn’t perform particularly well. Describing himself as a “proud anti-semite” in 2015, he was charged with malicious communications offences relating to an online disinformation blog, The Daily Bale, which produced scare stories about migrants and high-profile left-wingers.

He was also convicted of inciting racial hatred after laying out plans to threaten the Jewish community in Golders Green with holocaust imagery and Nazi iconography. In perhaps his most high-profile scandal, he was charged for religiously aggravated harassment after targeting Jewish Labour peer Luciana Berger with antisemitic hate.

These are abhorrent acts and beliefs, but I do believe this kind of person can genuinely repent and change. I’m minded of high-ranking Ku Klux Klan Members in the States that have defected from and disavowed their organisation, morphing into impactful anti-racism campaigners. Or the reformed neo-Nazis that help groups like Hope Not Hate conduct crucial investigations into the British far-right.

This is precisely the sort of journey that Bonehill-Paine now claims to have undertaken. In fairness, he has rightly renounced his egregious anti-semitism. But that doesn’t necessarily mean he’s transitioned into a genuine advocate for a tolerant and open society. He seems to harbour little remorse for his disinformation campaigns or his nasty rhetoric about women, the gay community, Muslims and migrants.

Since his supposed ‘reformation’, he’s dedicated his time to churning out viral AI slop music videos under the moniker The Crewkerne Gazette. The most famous, ‘Take a Dump on No 10’ (which somehow made it to #3 on the UK charts in December 2025 – god that’s incredibly bleak) shows Nigel Farage climbing down Keir Starmer’s chimney on Christmas, pooping out a large snowball, and throwing it in the former Prime Minister’s face. His videos broadly push right-wing populist, xenophobic, nationalist and deportation-focused narratives. They’ve become increasingly anti-Farage and pro-Badenoch.

Rather than reforming, he seems to have resettled into the growing pro-Israel far-right – a cohort which rejects anti-semitism but champions Islamophobia and anti-migrant narratives about ‘Western civilisation’ being destroyed by migrants. It’s akin to the ‘MAGA’ philosophy, which is united with Israel’s own right-wing in its belief that multiculturalism doesn’t work and that militant mass deportations and enforced segregation are the only way forward.

The fact that this constitutes ‘contrition’ and redemption for Bonehill-Paine should concern us all. The Conservative leader claims to have a revamped new candidate selection process that led to the rejection of former Conservative ministers including Grant Shapps. What does it say that someone like this could not just slip in, but receive a full-fledged defensive intervention from the party leader?

“I don’t believe this man should have any role in public life – because of both his racism and his view of women”, Baroness Berger (who he targeted) said of his selection. The Board of Deputies of British Jews has said that the selection "beggars belief.”

Kemi Badenoch disagrees. She instead sees someone who is at least reformed enough to handle your bins and your parking (if not national lawmaking). A certain kind of bigotry – the type that Nigel Farage has spent the last few years incubating in British politics – is now seen as an electoral asset.

Farage tried to jump on the bandwagon and condemn the selection, missing the extremely critical fact that his own party also tried to recruit Bonehill-Paine for the very same election. It’s the latest in a string of embarrassments for the embattled Reform party.

But even if Farage is toast (which is no guarantee), Reform have clearly set the mood music for the right going forward. All past sins can be forgiven by the right-wing establishment if you attack Palestine protestors, Muslim Britons and migrants. Badenoch’s public defence of ‘Crewkerne Man’ is another sign that the boundaries of acceptable politics have been completely redrawn.

When Andy Burnham said he was prepared to spend political capital on fixing social care, it caught my attention.

Now, political capital isn’t exactly an unusual concept. Westminster runs on it. Advisers talk about it endlessly. Journalists are forever declaring that Prime Ministers have either accumulated it, squandered it or run out of it altogether.

What’s unusual is hearing a Prime Minister say it out loud.

Normally, politicians reach for softer language. They talk about mandates, difficult decisions, doing the right thing or making the tough choices. We all know what they mean. They’re talking about political capital without ever quite admitting it exists.

Burnham didn’t bother with the euphemisms. He acknowledged something every government knows but rarely says publicly: political capital is finite. You only get so much of it, and every big decision spends some.

There’s something refreshingly honest about that.

It also raises a much bigger question than social care.

What is political capital actually for?

Because if it’s a finite resource, surely the point isn’t simply to preserve it. It’s to spend it on the things that matter most.

Every Prime Minister has two things when they walk through the door of Number 10.

The first is political capital. Burnham certainly has some. More than 349 Labour MPs backed his leadership, and the polls suggest the public are still willing to give his government the benefit of the doubt. Like every new Prime Minister, he’s enjoying that brief period where goodwill is plentiful, authority is strong and people are prepared to believe change might actually be possible.

The second is inherited unfinished business.

Some of it is obvious. Social care. Housing. Living standards. The kind of stubborn problems that have outlived governments of every colour because they’re politically difficult as much as they are technically complicated.

Those are exactly the kinds of problems political capital should be spent on. Burnham is right about that.

But it also made me wonder whether we’ve been thinking about political capital too narrowly.

Those policy challenges don’t exist in a vacuum. Every government inherits them within a political system that has repeatedly made those problems harder to solve.

One of the things we talk about is how our voting system shapes almost everything else. Not because changing the voting system magically fixes social care or builds more homes, but because it changes the conditions in which governments govern.

When people believe their vote counts, they’re more likely to participate. When participation is stronger, governments enjoy greater legitimacy. When governments have greater legitimacy, they’re in a better position to take difficult decisions that last beyond a single Parliament instead of being endlessly revisited or quietly abandoned.

Politics becomes better at dealing with long-term problems when the institutions themselves better reflect what people actually want.

That’s why electoral reform has always struck me as slightly different from most constitutional debates. It isn’t simply another item on a government’s to-do list. It’s one of the few reforms that has the potential to make everything that comes afterwards work better.

Which brings me back to Burnham - and what else he could choose to invest his political capital in.

Governments usually spend their opening months deciding what they want to do. Burnham doesn’t have to start from a blank page. His government has something that’s rather unusual - a roadmap already sitting on his desk.

Last year’s elections strategy set out an ambitious programme to rebuild trust in politics. The Representation of the People Bill is already before Parliament, bringing forward important reforms to strengthen the way our elections are run, improve integrity and modernise participation.

But for all its ambition, it still leaves the biggest democratic question unanswered.

It looks at how we run elections. It doesn’t ask whether the voting system itself still does the job it was designed to do.

That’s the missing piece.

If rebuilding trust, ensuring voices are heard and views fairly represented are really the goals, then it’s hard to avoid asking whether the voting system itself is helping or holding us back.

Governments rarely begin with this much momentum. Even fewer have a piece of unfinished work that already has broad political support, a legislative route through Parliament and the potential to make every other ambition easier to achieve.

So, unlike most Prime Ministers, Burnham doesn’t have to begin this conversation from scratch. The groundwork has already been done. The roadmap exists. The legislation is already before Parliament.

The answer isn’t to start again. It’s to finish what has already begun. Establishing a National Commission on Electoral Reform would finally allow the Government to answer the one question its own programme still leaves hanging: is the way we elect our MPs still fit for purpose?

It would also be entirely consistent with Burnham's own long-standing support for electoral reform, making this one of those rare moments where political conviction and political opportunity align.

If political capital exists to tackle the things previous governments avoided because they were politically difficult, then democratic reform looks like exactly the kind of challenge it was made for.

Not because proportional representation would magically solve social care, build more homes or raise living standards overnight. But because it would leave future governments better equipped to do those things.

The next Prime Minister will almost certainly stand outside Number 10 talking about the mandate they’ve been given. Wouldn’t it be better if that mandate genuinely reflected how people voted?

Political capital is precious because it doesn’t last. The best use of it might not simply be solving today’s hardest problem. It might be leaving the next government with a political system that’s better equipped to solve tomorrow’s.

Count Binface, Nigel Farage’s opponent in his shambolic Clacton by-election, belongs to a rich British tradition of mercilessly lampooning politics. But is there any deeper point to these ‘intergalactic space warrior’ shenanigans?

The Reform UK team and their media pals are keen to tell us about the man under the lid. Jonathan Harvey, the comedian behind Count Binface, is an anti-Brexit Oxford graduate who has written for The Thick of It and the BBC’s Have I Got News For You. In Reform’s mirror universe, this apparently makes him a card-carrying member of Britain’s left-wing cultural elite. As Simon Evans argued recently in Spiked, Binface is somehow “the establishment candidate”.

It all comes across as rather desperate. Nigel Farage has spent decades casting himself as the anti-establishment outsider. Yet in calling a by-election to escape a mounting sleaze scandal, only to find himself squaring up to a man in a silver dustbin, he has thoroughly hoisted himself on his own petard. This whole election is a joke. Increasingly, thanks to Count Binface, Nigel Farage himself seems to be the punchline.

Still, it’s fair enough to ask what the Bin is seeking to gain from all of this.

It certainly isn’t about the money. Since first appearing against Theresa May as Lord Buckethead in 2017 (before a copyright dispute forced the move to Count Binface), Harvey has routinely forfeited his £500 candidate deposit, donating surplus crowdfunded donations to charities such as Shelter.

Nor is he pursuing some narrow partisan cause. He stood against Andy Burnham in Makerfield. He promises to fill potholes in Clacton with surplus copies of Labour’s 2024 manifesto. Watch his Oxford Union speech from a few years back and you’ll find him mocking virtually every party in Westminster, arguing that “fakery” has come to define British politics.

And it’s not exclusively about attracting attention, though Nigel Farage has given him an unprecedented national spotlight. The Count has already had his fair share of photos on stage with various Prime Ministers, and he’s already the subject of media spectacle and countless internet memes.

The project, in fact, seems to be somewhat personal. Writing under his own name, Harvey has described losing his brother Dan, with whom he shared a love of politics, football and comedies like Blackadder. Count Binface, he says, is in part a tribute to his brother – a way to “help his joy continue to radiate.”

But grief, in Harvey's hands, doesn't curdle into bitterness; instead, it channels into something more useful: a refusal to take seriously a political class that has long stopped deserving seriousness.

What if beneath this metallic cylinder there is someone genuinely frustrated by what our politics has become, who is using their comedic stylings as a clarion call for people to wake up and realise how ridiculously broken this system has become?

There is a great deal of precedent there. Even before Britain developed its longstanding penchant for ridiculous novelty candidates, medieval court jesters had a special license for brutal honesty, often the only people permitted to mock monarchs to their faces. The king claimed to speak for his people, but the jester could truly voice the raw, crude feelings that others tiptoe around.

That explains why Binface has become such an unexpectedly effective foil for Nigel Farage.

Farage’s politics have always depended on the carefully cultivated persona of the renegade outsider. He’s even used a certain type of comedy (often petty personal insults) to signal his status as an insurgent against the Westminster system.

But now he’s running an indignant, defensive, and cynical campaign, with expensive ads and fiery rhetoric, against a refuse-themed science fiction character. He increasingly looks like the establishment insider by comparison to the Count. And Binface is very happy to keep ribbing him for being a quintessential Westminster politician, complete with billionaire donors, a permanent spot on Question Time, and more time spent in Washington than in Clacton.

Kemi Badenoch put it best: “If it’s the people versus the establishment, I think Nigel Farage might be looking like the establishment, and Count Binface may be the people.”

In an age when politicians are endlessly media-trained, focus-grouped and coached to death to appear authentic (often flopping horribly) Count Binface is the only candidate who is open about the theatrics he’s putting on. Standing in a silver dustbin, he exposes the fact that everyone else is acting too.

The bookies say he has a genuine, if slim, chance of winning Clacton. And that says as much about our politics as it does about him.

In a system drowning in pandering and performance, it’s no surprise that someone willing to point out the props has found an audience.

Politics loves a fresh start.

A new Prime Minister arrives. A new Cabinet is assembled. New priorities are announced. Westminster dusts itself off, everyone talks about turning the page and, for a few weeks at least, it all feels a bit hopeful again.

Andy Burnham has certainly wasted no time in getting to work. He has spoken about rebuilding trust in politics, doing things differently and listening more closely to people across the country. After years in which politics has too often felt like something done to people rather than with them, that’s a welcome change of tone.

But every new government eventually arrives at the same question. How exactly do you rebuild trust?

Yesterday, more than 13,000 people offered one answer.

We took their names to Downing Street with a simple request: establish an independent National Commission on Electoral Reform within the Prime Minister’s first 100 days.

Those weren’t just names on a spreadsheet. They were people from every corner of the UK who believe how we elect our MPs must be part of the conversation on rebuilding trust in politics.

Reading through the thousands of comments people left alongside their signatures, a pattern quickly emerged. People wanted to know their vote counts. They wanted Parliament to reflect how people actually vote. They wanted to stop feeling as though where they happen to live determines whether their voice is heard.

Different words. Different experiences. The same underlying frustration.

There was something else in those comments too. Hope.

Politics can be a cynical business. People have grown used to promises being made, forgotten and quietly replaced by the next announcement. It would have been easy for the comments to become another catalogue of complaints.

Instead, thousands of people saw an opportunity.

They pointed to this new Government as a chance to do something previous governments have consistently avoided: take the question of how we elect our MPs out of the usual political trench warfare and hand it to an independent, evidence-led National Commission that puts voters at its heart and follows the evidence wherever it leads.

Another thing that struck me while reading through the comments on the petition was how rarely people talked about political parties. They talked about fairness. They talked about representation. Above all, they talked about wanting politics to work better.

Most people don’t lose sleep over electoral systems. They lose sleep over the cost of living, finding somewhere affordable to live or getting a GP appointment.

People care about democracy because they care about whether politics is capable of solving those problems. If they stop believing the system itself is fair, it becomes much harder to convince them that the decisions it produces deserve their confidence.

A government that genuinely wants to rebuild trust should at least be willing to ask whether the rules of our democracy still deserve that trust.

One of the clearest ways to show you’re serious about doing politics differently is to be willing to examine the rules by which politics itself operates.

The Prime Minister has spoken about doing politics differently.

Thousands of people have just suggested one place to begin.

The clock is already ticking

Today is day 10 of the Prime Minister’s first 100 days.

Over the coming weeks, we’ll keep making the case that rebuilding trust in politics starts with giving people confidence that our elections are fair.

More than 13,000 people have already joined that call. If you haven’t yet, add your name today and help make these first 100 days count.

Nigel Farage’s ‘man of the people’ act is crumbling before our eyes. Revelation after shocking revelation portrays the Reform leader not as a grassroots insurgent speaking for the average punter, but as the frontman for an incredibly dodgy network of elite financial interests.

A lot more skeletons in Farage’s closet have come to light since my last update on the Reform crypto saga.

The latest – and perhaps most damaging – skeleton goes by the name of ‘Posh George’ Cottrell. The well-to-do financier and crypto enthusiast has been nestled in Farage’s inner circle for a solid decade – he’s ‘like a son’ to Nigel (in his own words).

Cottrell played a pivotal fundraising role in UKIP, its successor the Brexit Party, and now unsurprisingly in Reform UK. He secretly provided benefits in kind to Farage in 2024, and also seems to have donated to the party via Richard Tice’s think-tank and through his mother Fiona (which police are actively investigating).

Two particularly damaging new allegations have now emerged concerning Cottrell, who was convicted for wire fraud in the US and literally wrote the book on money laundering.

The Financial Times has revealed that a Polymarket account in Cottrell’s name received $9 million from unknown sources in 2024. (Polymarket is a Peter Thiel-backed betting site banned in the UK where you can wager on everything from elections to the apocalypse – exactly the sort of playground a high-rolling risk-taker like Cottrell would frequent).

Posh George appears to have immediately staked these funds on Trump’s election victory, netting a cool £4.5 million in profit. As the FT notes, the timing coincides with the undeclared gifts and benefits Cottrell provided to Nigel Farage.

And if that wasn’t enough, our friends at Byline Times had another explosive scoop on Cottrell this week – the product of an eight-month investigation.

The key revelation was that Cottrell had a fraudulent Swiss passport under the name ‘Oscar Drewitt.’ He was hired under this false identity at a City firm by a man named Mehrtash A’zami. That same A’zami would later go on to manage finances and donation vetting for Reform UK – overseeing the very funds Cottrell is alleged to have provided the party.

I could spend this entire article unpacking every revelation and its implications, but suffice to say that there are new, incredibly urgent lines of (potentially criminal) inquiry opening up around the party’s connections to the murky world of elite crypto-gambling.

Uncharacteristically, Farage and the gang have not managed to spin any of this away. In lieu of the usual bluster and bravado, they’re coming off tetchy, cornered and above all desperate. Their only defensive rebuttal line is the tired old claim that everyone’s out to get them.

The Times revealed on Friday that all Reform councillors have been urgently directed to write off the Cottrell allegations as an "establishment hit-job.” Reform UK is genuinely now trying to suggest that the Murdoch-owned Times is somehow in cahoots with the Labour party in a sinister plot to take them down.

For those of us still inhabiting base reality rather than Reform’s fun-house of permanent self-victimisation, this doesn’t resemble an establishment witch hunt. It resembles the bare minimum of scrutiny for a party that has consistently resisted transparency. It looks like even our archaic and broken political system finally caught up with them.

Genuinely, imagine if the Green Party had been accused of even a tenth of this. We'd be on day 243 of GB News' non-stop special coverage. Every front page would scream "GREEN GRAFT", every minister would demand resignations before breakfast, and Zack Polanski would marched on live television into the Tower of London.

Reform is receiving this level of scrutiny because it routinely ignores the normal conventions of political transparency. Because it masquerades as a democratic popular movement while it’s being exposed as a cynical elite-backed project with a dark financial underbelly. Farage hasn’t secured the benefit of the doubt because he hasn’t done anything to earn anyone’s trust.

Will he slip out of this one? It won’t be easy. Farage’s ludicrous forthcoming race against Count Binface and 32 other candidates in Clacton could see him booted from Parliament. While that’s perhaps unlikely, he could very well face another, more challenging by-election down the road if the Parliamentary Standards probe finds wrongdoing.

The allegations are beginning to look increasingly difficult for Reform to contain, and it's a fair bet we're still only scratching the surface. But perhaps it’s unwise to doubt right-wing populists’ uncanny ability to flip the narrative and dodge consequences.

I have watched this movie before in the States. This load-bearing tweet from 2016 should make us think twice before counting Farage out.

There is a growing sense in Britain that the table is tilted – that politics happens somewhere above our heads, and rarely in our interests. Poll after poll shows public trust in politics languishing at historic lows. Most Britons now believe politicians rarely or never tell the truth.

This "integrity gap" (to borrow a phrase from Clive Lewis MP) – the widening gulf between what governments promise and what people experience – is corroding the implicit contract at the heart of democracy. Our system of government rests on the shared belief that institutions exist to serve the people. That those entrusted with power must be accountable to us.

In recent decades, politics has become increasingly shaped by incentives that reward winning over honesty. Ambitious ladder-climbers have bent the truth, solicited deep-pocketed donors and corporate lobbyists, and played the ‘Dark Arts’ spin game in order to get ahead. All the while, people in this country are frustrated about their rising bills and their stagnant wages.

Into this profound crisis of confidence comes the Hillsborough Law, officially the Public Office (Accountability) Bill. Promised in Labour’s 2024 manifesto, it faced repeated delays and the Government sought to add carve-outs for intelligence services, prompting a massive backlash from campaigners. Just before Andy Burnham – a long-time proponent of the Law – took the helm of the nation, it passed the Commons intact and sans carve-outs.

So what is it? The law is first and foremost a response to one of Britain’s greatest injustices: the decades-long struggle by the families of the 97 Liverpool supporters who died at Hillsborough to uncover the truth about an egregious crowd control failure and the subsequent official cover-up. But its legacy may reach far beyond Hillsborough itself.

The Law as passed establishes a new expectation that those who exercise public power – from ministers and MPs to civil servants, police officers and public authorities – owe the public a duty of honesty and candour. Rather than entrusting ethical governance to “good chaps,” it creates a legal obligation in defined contexts, with new offences for seriously misleading the public.

So this legislation is designed with the full apparatus of the state in mind. Notably, after much back-and-forth, that now includes Britain’s intelligence services as well. Campaigners warned that blanket national security carve-outs – that time-tested "trust us, it’s classified” excuse – serve as a convenient shield to deny accountability. They won that fight in the Commons.

Coming down the pipeline is a historic constitutional shift. An implicit recognition that we can’t simply rely on our leaders to behave ethically, that there are systemic incentives towards manipulation and deception, and that we need binding rules to ensure we’ve got a fair political playing field.

I see it almost as a legislative bridge across that integrity gap, a way to pull our politicians and public officials back towards reality. An acknowledgement that citizens must matter in a real democracy, that their right to the truth now outweighs any official instincts for self-preservation.

So yes, this will change the default setting of British public life. It will shift the balance of power back towards citizens in a significant victory for democratic accountability and fairness. Well done to all who campaigned for it.

But there’s never just one silver bullet, is there? Our democratic crisis is so deeply embedded, our loss of trust so profound, that no singular piece of legislation is going to wash it all away.

The Hillsborough Law is a landmark reform, but it cannot be the end of Britain’s democratic renewal. If we’re to chart a better course forward, this should mark the beginning of a different philosophy of government: one that accepts integrity cannot be left to convention or the goodwill of those in power. It has to be built into the rules themselves.

The same principle should now be applied elsewhere. People will struggle to believe politics serves them while political finance remains opaque, corporate lobbying continues to operate in the shadows, and our voting system leaves millions feeling their voice carries less weight than others. These are all different manifestations of the same integrity gap.

If Andy Burnham truly wants to rebuild trust in our democracy, the Hillsborough Law should become the first chapter in a much broader programme of constitutional reform. One that shines more light on money and influence in politics, strengthens democratic accountability, and ensures every citizen has an equal voice in shaping the country’s future.

The reality is that the public’s loss of trust was always justified. They lost faith in a system that failed them. The only way to restore it is to build institutions that consistently behave in ways that earn it.

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.”