The Lord Ashcroft affair cuts like the sharp beam of a spotlight through the putrid pretences and hypocrisies of British politics. Here is a man of vast wealth who bought himself a peerage. He is paymaster to the Tory Party — to the tune of many tens of millions of pounds.
He has bought a shaping influence in the affairs of the Tory Party, and thus on the policies of the Tory Government that may emerge from the 2010 General Election.
He is pouring money into key marginal constituencies and thus he is a major force in determining the outcome of the General Election — of which party will govern Britain during the worst economic crisis since the 1930s.
In the election, how many votes will Ashcroft have?
Look at it like this: measured in terms of political power to shape the outcome, how many votes will it take to counter-balance the political weight in British politics which Ashcroft’s wealth gives him? Hundreds of thousands? A million?
The fact that this man, of such weight and influence in British political and social life, is a “non-dom” who does not pay British taxes on most of his wealth adds a savagely pointed irony to this situation, and has triggered intense interest in the affair.
But what if Ashcroft did pay full British taxes on all his income? The tremendous political weight bought by this single rich man would then be reasonable? Good? Acceptable? Democratic?
No, it would not be good, reasonable, or acceptable. Least of all would it be democratic.
Ashcroft is only an extreme case. Notoriously, the US citizen Rupert Murdoch, owner of British media such as the Sun has the power to compel British politicians, Labour no less than Tory, to compete for his favour, to trim and shape their policies to his taste and needs.
Of course, New Labour also has its influential rich donors, some of them also “non-doms”. There is a great deal of hypocrisy in New Labour denunciation of the Tories in the Ashcroft affair. Yet none of New Labour’s rich benefactors come even close to Ashcroft in terms of the sums involved and the direct influence on policy and on the affairs of a major party which they buy.
The money of rich donors to finance Prime Minister Blair’s “office” played a major part in the New Labour-Blair-Brown subversion, and to a large extent, destruction of the old Labour Party.
The issue here is brutally plain. Democracy.
What the Ashcroft affair brings out clearly is how rotten, and how hollow is what passes for democracy in Britain now. And in this Britain is still, all in all, a great deal better than the USA, where candidates and elections are openly bought and sold, without shame or inhibition.
Britain is no longer a democracy, even in the old limited and inadequate bourgeois sense. It is a pluto-democracy.
It is not “government of the people, by the people, for the people”. It is government of the people, by the rich and their bought and paid-for politicians and for the benefit of the rich. This is how you get such absurdities as the vast plundering of the “public purse” to bail out the bankers while leaving them in control and free to award themselves enormous bonuses.
That is the real point of the Ashcroft affair.
Not the least of the crimes of the Blair-Brown-New Labour gang is that they have made the Labour Party part of that political corruption — an outrage against every real democratic principle.