How ‘mega-donors’ are buying political influence... and your algorithm

0:02Harriet Harman: Sky News, the full story first.

0:12Ruth Davidson: We're being completely deceived. It is quite frightening that, isn't it?

0:20Harriet Harman: It seems like we are such a world away from where 950 quid can bring down a political leader.

0:30£50 ,000 would have been a big donation. Now it's£1 million,£2 million,£5 million, we've even seen£10 million donations.

0:41Harriet Harman: Hello and welcome to Electoral Dysfunction with me, Ruth Davidson. And me, Harriet Harman. And we are still in the midst of summer recess, so we are once again taking this opportunity to do something just a little bit different. We want to pick up on one of the biggest topics that's been rumbling on over the past year. You find yourself caught in a row over the huge amount of freebies you've accepted while leader of the opposition,£107 ,000, far more than any other MP.

1:11Ruth Davidson: Any gift or donation to a politician has to be declared. Everything I've had has been declared. And sitting behind the numbers, there's some human explanations. You know, I think what he wants to do really is to try and help us get onto a level playing field with the trade union funded Labour Party and a Conservative Party where there seems to be a remarkable correlation, I can't think why, between donations and membership of the House of Lords. There is a risk now of hostile foreign states seeking to funnel money into British elections in order to influence the decisions that the British people make about who governs them.

1:55Harriet Harman: Reform's Treasury spokesperson, Robert Jendrick, has defended Nigel Farage over allegations that he failed to declare benefits provided by a convicted criminal.

2:05Ruth Davidson: In regards to donations to the party, people keep asking me, do you think the money should be kept? I have been very clear that yes, I do think so. It's actually, it would be odd to give somebody£10 million if you thought that they were doing something bad.

2:22Harriet Harman: Yes, it's all about the money, the wonga, the moolah, the donations, the gifts, the whatever you want to call it. Today, we're going to do a bit of a deep dive into where political parties get their money from, how that affects all of us due to influence of money on policy. And we'll ask whether the rules need a bit of an update.

2:40Ruth Davidson: And we'll be looking at how the changes that have been happening have changed the landscape here on money and politics. What's the influence of tech? And to help us out with all of this, we've recruited two excellent guests to examine, as you said, Ruth, how big money is trying to buy influence and access to government decision making. So we'll be speaking to Peter Gagan, investigative journalist and author of Democracy for Sale, Dark Money and Dirty Politics. And also here is former Attorney General Dominic Grieve, who's looked into all this in some detail.

3:14Harriet Harman: But before we bring you the chaps, Harriet, you are just the bastion of integrity and font of all knowledge on this programme, to the point where I think regular listeners will have heard that you once remortgaged your own house rather than take donations to run to be deputy leader of the Labour Party. You were also the mother of the House, so you were the longest serving MP for a period of time. So you've seen the great swathes of how politics has changed in this country. And I'm just interested to hear how much of an issue you think this is right now and how much of a changing issue you think it is.

3:47Ruth Davidson: Well, I think it's all about trust in politics and people are entitled to have a politics, a government, a democracy that they can believe in and that they can believe that they run as the voters. I've been involved in these issues for a long time because of being in Parliament for a long time and also having chaired the Standards and Privileges Committee, which is about the rules, which include rules about money in the House of Commons. but actually I remortgaged my house to finance my campaign in the election to be deputy leader of the Labour Party not because I thought it was a cleaner way of funding my election campaign but because I didn't seem to be able to raise any donations because I was the absolute outsider and everybody thought I was going to lose but actually I did win after all I would say I was a bastion of integrity, I would say, as like chief nerd of looking at all these rules, because I believe they're not just technical, they're really important for our democracy.

4:48Harriet Harman: The nerds always triumph, because it's always when it comes to parliament and it comes to politics, it's the people who understand what it is that you can do within the rules that end up all these sort of swaggering kind of braggadocio types that just think that you can go and do and say what they like. It's the nerds that catch them out every single time. But I've talked before on this pod about how being a politician is like not one job. When you're a deputy leader like you or the leader of a party in Scotland or Wales or Northern Ireland, like fundraising is part of it. And I hated fundraising.

5:19Harriet Harman: Like I absolutely hated it. I hated going into a room of very rich, usually men, and having to ask them to give me stuff so I could do things. And even though I wasn't asking them to give it to me, I was asking them to give it to the party so the party could do things. Like there's just that Presbyterian Scotland side of me. I absolutely hated it. But I have to say, I don't think I'm alone in that. I think there's lots of people that struggle with that in politics. And I have seen it made flesh because I have seen, I think possibly, the worst person I've ever seen do this, which was Theresa May.

5:53Harriet Harman: And quite often to sort of get the kind of donations and stuff in, you'll have like a small private dinner where you've got, I don't know, 12 or 15 people around the table and they give a check for their seat at the table and they can speak to the prime minister or the leader of the opposition or cabinet minister or whatever. And they expect from that dinner to have, you know, a bit of flash of ankle of what we're going to do next or how we're going to take on the other guys or what the plans are for the election. And they feel like they're getting a view behind the curtain. And I have literally seen Theresa May sit at one of these dinners that I was at and she can't do small talk.

6:27Harriet Harman: And she doesn't, it's like she can't play the game, like she physically can't. She can't do the bon ami, she can't do the, oh, and let me tell you how we're going to take on Labour and blah, blah, blah. She can't do it. And I think every single person left that dinner knowing less about Conservative plans for the future than more. It was painful to watch. I have a lot of love for Theresa May and I think that history is going to be kind to her because she's clearly a really principled woman that worked hard. But my God, that was not a skill in her wheelhouse.

6:56Ruth Davidson: Well, money and politics is a very vexed issue. But I think if you step back, it's that our political system is based on political parties. And to run a political party costs money. You've got to build your membership. You've got to engage with your membership. You've got to campaign in elections. You've got to campaign between elections. You've got to have finance to develop your policies and all that costs money. And for the most part, in this country, that has been done by private money, not by state. In some countries, actually public money pays for parties. But here we've said no party should be independent of public funding.

7:36Ruth Davidson: And actually, they should raise their money themselves. And therefore, the question is how they can raise money, which is not dirty money, not corrupt money, not secret money, not too much money. They can actually raise money in a way which enables them to do their important job in our democracy, but doesn't become a reason for that trust and confidence in our democracy to be undermined. So that's why. And also, there's a lot of rules about this. Mostly party fundraising is done by volunteers. Most party members are just ordinary people at local party level. You've got a treasurer who's trying to raise money.

8:14Ruth Davidson: And there's all these rules about stopping money laundering and cryptocurrency and transparency. And actually, what you've got is somebody who's a volunteer who's not a qualified accountant trying to get money. And so you've got to distinguish between, you know, the bad guys who are trying to undermine the system and people who might make mistakes at local level.

8:34Harriet Harman: If we're just talking about the money here, the sort of size of it, just as a kind of rule of thumb for people, if you think in an election campaign, how much stuff comes through your door and how many leaflets come through your door, even still, the current cost of a first-class stamp in the United Kingdom is£1.80. And the average size of a constituency is just over 73 ,000. So although you do deals with the Royal Mail, so they'll deliver stuff like unstamped, but if you're still thinking of how much it costs even for postage, it runs into the tens and then hundreds of thousands and then into the millions on a national scale really, really quickly.

9:11Harriet Harman: It adds up. I mean, the money we're talking about here for a general election campaign is enormous, isn't it, Harriet?

9:17Ruth Davidson: It is. And also there's paying for Facebook ads and things like that. But I think people have seen how much money is poured into politics in America. And this sense that the more big money comes in, especially as if it's from, you know, crypto billionaires or tech behemoths, the more that money comes in by hugely wealthy individuals, the more it undermines the power of the ordinary person at the ballot box. And the other thing is that nobody really wants to see a situation where it's a fight between the parties. If it's the rules that are going to apply to all parties, then really all parties need to agree them.

9:59Ruth Davidson: It shouldn't be partisan. And therefore, it's something where everybody's got to get round the table. It can't be just the government saying, I'm going to decide these are the rules, because then everybody will say, well, actually, you've decided rules that suit your own party. There's got to be a consensus built on that.

10:14Harriet Harman: Well, look, you know, how clean our politics is affects absolutely everybody in the country. So as always, we'd love to hear from you. We'd love to know what you think. You can send us your thoughts via the burner phone. That's 07934 200 444. Or if you're an insider, you have access to the members forum, which will be linked to your show description.

10:34Ruth Davidson: And if you're not yet an insider, but would like access to ad-free listening, a bonus episode every single week and more, you can find details of how to subscribe in the description. We would absolutely love to have you in the club.

10:52Harriet Harman: Right, let's get to it. We're joined now by the investigative journalist, Peter Gagin, who quite literally wrote the book on this back in 2020 when he published Democracy for Sale, Dark Money and Dirty Politics. Welcome to the pod, Peter. Thank you very much, Admiris. I'm delighted to be here. We're going to squeeze you like a citrus fruit for every drip of knowledge you can give us, but we're going to start with a little bit of an introduction to the topic because there's probably a few people listening who've actually never really thought about how politics in this country is funded and how campaigns work and how policy kind of provision and introduction happens.

11:30Harriet Harman: So can you just give us just a little bit of an explainer about sort of how it basically works in this country right now? So effectively, British politics runs on, we run on private money, and I mean that in the widest sense. So political parties rely predominantly on donations to run themselves. The more successful parties, they do get some sort of subvention, what's called short money and other types of money that come from the public purse to run offices and things like that. So if you become an MP, if you become an MSP, as you were with, you will get a subvention to run your office. But in broadly speaking, we rely, our politics runs on private money.

12:05Most of that money, historically, it was basically split in a two-party system, Conservative Labour. Labour are predominantly reliant on money from the unions, the Conservatives are predominantly money on private capital, effectively, captains of industry, etc. Increasingly, actually, parties are really reliant on money from private individuals. The amount of union funding has gone down and effectively our politics are increasingly based on donations and increasingly larger donations. That's been the one big trend. In the last 20 years, the amount of money in our politics has gone up a lot. 2025 general election is about£50 million.

12:37Last general election, 2024, about£123 million. Even allowing for inflation, that's a big increase. But also we're seeing people giving bigger amounts of money. When I first started doing work in this area about 10 years ago, £50 ,000 would have been a big donation. You could become a member of, say, the Conservative Leaders Group, or if you gave£50 ,000, you're a big donor. Now it's£1 million,£2 million,£5 million. And we've even seen£10 million donations.

13:00Harriet Harman: That escalation of money, I mean, does that erode public trust? And is it kind of equal? Are all the parties at it or is it one party or another? Well, there's a couple of things going on. And the first question in terms of is one party at or other? What effectively happens in politics is an arms race. Once one party starts raising large amounts of money, other parties start to move in sync. One of the things that we've done, the last Conservative government did, was really increase the spending limits at election time, which sounds a bit geeky, but they really matter because you have to be able to spend the money.

13:32And what we do in Britain and our politics is, and people find this surprising, on a standard election cycle with five years, for four of those years, there are no spending limits and there's no declarations of spending. It's only in a general election year that there's spending limits and there's only a general election year to declare our spending. So there's a ceiling in how much you can spend during a general election, but that's gone up a lot. And the other thing that's happened as well is because we're seeing the rise of these, what you might call super donors or mega donors. So I think in 2023, about two thirds of all the money raised, private donations in the UK, came from just 19 people, 19 very wealthy people.

14:08So we're seeing a real concentration of wealth that's happening in our politics. So that's what I mean about an arms race. If you think that the other party is going to raise 20 million pounds, well, you're going to want to try and raise 25 million. So there's a sense in which you're going to want to try and outspend them. It's a chicken and egg situation, but the more money we allow people to spend, the more we're going to see it. And crucially as well, we don't have any caps on political donations in the UK.

14:31Ruth Davidson: I was going to ask about that. I mean, you've talked about the massive increase in the amount of money that's coming into political parties and the concentration of that being in the hands of just a very few donors. And you've mentioned the fact that there's a cap on spending at election time. Do you think there should be a cap on how much one individual donor can give? One way of framing that question, I think, is exactly that. How do we feel about having that amount of concentration? One person being able to effectively buy a lot more access than somebody else. Sir Philip Roycroft, the former civil servant, senior civil servant, he was commissioned on the back of the Nathan Gill, former reform leader in Wales, who was sentenced to about 10 years in prison for taking money to repeat pro-Russian talking points in the European Parliament.

15:16On the back of that, Keir Starmer announced that they were going to have an inquiry into foreign interference in British politics. So Philip Rycroft looked into this and in full disclosure, I spoke to him as part of this process too. And he recommended£100 ,000 cap on donations from Britons who are abroad. That's been accepted. So Parliament, that's going to be part of the representation of Bill. So we're going to have a cap on people abroad who can vote. That feels to me like a reasonable principle. I think there's actually a fair principle there. If someone who can vote in a British election but lives abroad, if they can give£100 ,000, that feels to me like a reasonable principle to be adopted across the political system.

15:50But now cap on donations?

15:51Ruth Davidson: but no cap on donations for people who live in this country. What do you think about that? I actually don't necessarily think it's particularly fair. I don't know why we think it's OK for very rich people who live in the UK to have outside influence, but not those who don't live in the UK. I think we should cap political donations because otherwise I think we're going to see this arms race get even more extreme because we have the evidence in front of us, really. Like reform, 75 % of reforms only come from just three people. They're particularly extreme reforms. Concentration of funding is really extreme.

16:21But you can see similarities in other parties too. The trend is generally towards this much more concentration. And I think a cap would force parties to kind of move away from that and try and think of other ways of trying to raise money.

16:32Ruth Davidson: I agree with you. I think there should be a cap on political donations and I think that should be part of a wider package.

16:38Harriet Harman: So can I ask, does the person or the party that spends the most money always win the election? And is that because they spend the most money, if it is? Or is it because they raise the most money because people already know they're going to win or they're in the lead and people like to back a winner? It's a really good question. And there's quite a bit of academic research on this, both in the US and in the UK. And actually, research in the US is slightly different to research in the UK in terms of its findings. The research in the UK actually does suggest that basically more money does equal more political success.

17:09There is a kind of causation correlation questionnaire, like successful parties tend to bring in more money. So if you look at the last general election, 2024, one of the reasons why the Conservatives raised the spending limits is because in 2019, Boris Johnson raised so much money they couldn't spend it all. In the short campaign running up to the general election Boris Johnson raised more than£40 million which is a huge amount of money huge record. By the time 2024 rocks up the Tories are quite clearly not going to do very well they're going to go out of power. They raised about a tenth of that.

17:38There was a huge fall away in donations frankly because everyone could see where things were going. So money does tend to flow to those who are going to do well. But at the same time especially it's got two things especially for incumbents money is very important, but also it has a strange left-right split. Money is more effective on the right than it is on the left. Partly that's because you still, even though Labour has big donors, big money is always kind of on the right. And that's kind of makes slightly sense. People who want lower taxes are more likely to be wealthy or more likely to get money to parties that do that.

18:12You see that in the US, you see that in the UK, and you see it in other jurisdictions in which there isn't caps on spending. But by and large, money does make a big difference.

18:20Harriet Harman: OK, so I guess there's a question here as well about when you talk about people funding political parties and then what you get for that funding, is the problem in your mind, is it the access and the influence or is it the transparency? What's really striking is just that if you look at the data and the details, actually we're seeing way more money now coming from corporate vehicles, from companies. and that's increased. It's trebled at the last three elections. But that, for example, that's not money coming from FTSE 500 companies. Not a single one of those is from a FTSE 500 company. They all don't give money to politics anymore since we've had transparency for the last 20 years.

18:58So we've had electoral transparency. So big companies don't want to be seen doing that. What companies increasingly are actually are just vehicles for individuals that add a layer of opacity. So an individual will use a company that they own. So for example, Frank Hester, the Tory donor, who gave over£15 million. All of his money, or pretty much all of it, came through a thing called the Phoenix Partnership, which is a company he owns. It's all there in black and white, but it makes it that bit harder for people to see. And so it kind of adds that layer of opacity into the funding process.

19:27Harriet Harman: So Peter, we've been talking really about almost the kind of history of how the parties have grown up and what traditional funding looks like. Things have changed massively in the last 15 years in terms of this is all money that we've been talking about that is raised, that goes to a political party that they then spend on leaflets and adverts and all that sort of stuff. Really kind of analogue campaigning. What we've seen in recent years is not just the kind of rise of digital campaigning, but we've also seen the rise of unregulated online stuff and that it doesn't actually even come from political parties.

20:00Harriet Harman: It can come from other interest groups. It can come from foreign countries. It can come from bot farms. How has that changed UK politics? It's an absolutely massive, massive change. Even from when I I wrote my last book in 2020, we knew that these things were happening online. But now it's both much, much deeper. It's much more extensive. It's much harder to track. And there's much less transparency because the big tech companies who effectively, this all happens on big tech platforms. It happens on the internet. It feels like it happens in the ether. It happens in a space that is kind of beyond party politics, but no one can control.

20:37But it's worth remembering these are platforms owned by companies, often big Silicon Valley companies. After 2016, after Trump election, Facebook was under pressure and it came out and brought out this thing called the ad library. So if you put political ads on Facebook, you have to give details. You have to say how much you spent, etc. That now is the only, and it's actually got a lot worse, but it's the only part of any bit of transparency really we get about ad spending or how any of this works. It was a bit easier to track five or six years ago because they were mainly on Facebook and you see their spending and you could at least start to find them.

21:07Now it's really, really hard to see. The API on Twitter, that was locked down quite a while ago. The API is effectively the source code that you can see and you can interact with. So you can see how things, so the work you might have seen in 2016 after the Trump election showing this kind of swarm of digital disinformation, all of that work is almost impossible to do now. Loads of these academic bodies have effectively had to shutter or find new ways of working because you can't even, we can't even trace what's happening. But also, so Nigel Farage has currently been investigated by the Standards Commission.

21:40The big, kind of the big blind on that is the five million pounds from Christopher Harbour and this big cryptocurrency billionaire who's given, you know, is now the biggest donor in British political history. He's given over 20 million pounds. But also part of that is a revelation in the Sunday Times that George Cottrell, posh George, had paid for social media and kind of online campaigners to work for Nigel Farage ahead of the 2024 general election. Farage says no rules were broken. The commissioner's looking into it. But the reason I'm bringing that up is that's really hard to see. So these people, Nigel Farage is, what you can see is that Nigel Farage went from being quite popular online, but not particularly interesting, not that interesting, to these slick videos, these reels, a TikTok star, this huge sense in which you can put a massive amount of firepower behind someone in ways that are really, really hard to see.

22:29And I think that's the piece that, like, you know, at the very least, we need to start trying to answer that question. I don't have easy answers to that. I'd love to tell you I did. But this is becoming a huge part because you can see how the narrative changes due to what's happening on social media. And the ability to set a narrative, especially during a general election campaign, is absolutely critical. So money can be spent there. It can be spent... We saw, actually, some analysis done about the unrest in Belfast. A lot of that activity, especially the more violent activity was coming from accounts that weren't in the UK.

23:01So it's very clear that it's possible to influence our politics. And actually the Trump administration in the US has said that they do want to. So in some respects, the quiet part has already been said out loud. But online, I think, is a space in which it's proliferating in ways that we can't see.

23:16Harriet Harman: So, you know, just to keep ourselves legally in the right here, it's worth saying that a spokesperson for reform has said that Mr Farage has always been clear that this was a personal, unconditional gift and no rules were broken. And that's in relation to the Harbourn£5 million donation.

23:32Ruth Davidson: Also, lawyers for George Cottrell have said he, and I quote, categorically disputes allegations and assertions made by the Sunday Times investigation. But this is another example, isn't it, what you were talking about, Peter, of the enormous influence tech companies have. Is there any sign that they would be willing to cooperate with regulation to make this more transparent so that people can see actually what's happening here? Or is it another case of where they're going to resist and it's going to have to be done despite them, not with their cooperation? They will resist, I think it's fair to say.

24:09One of the striking features of not a British politics, but American politics over the last 10 years is the extent of which Silicon Valley has become very close to the Trump administration and the MAGA movement. You saw it at the last inauguration, Mark Zuckerberg from Meta, Jeff Bezos from Amazon. Obviously, Elon Musk was brought in to run Doge. In some respects, it's harder now to do something than it was five years ago for that very reason, Harry. I think far from looking to be transparent on this, actually many of the people running tech platforms have their own political agenda to their pushing.

24:41Harriet Harman: Do you know what I found really interesting is with what's happening in Iran, there's been a couple of kind of blackouts of the internet there. And then when you see when that happens, there's companies that kind of monitor what goes on in cyberspace. And in my part of the world, there was a big story that blew up that around 4 % of pro-Scottish independence sites went down on companies like Twitter and platforms like that. So 4 % doesn't sound like much, but we're talking way over a thousand. We're talking over 200 million views of stuff that they put out over the last few years. And like, I just can't get my head around somebody in Iran wants to talk about what's going on in Govan or Monifieth or something like that.

25:24Harriet Harman: Like, it just seems mad. Like, it seems genuinely mad.

25:28Ruth Davidson: I find that so chilling. The idea is that we think we're reading a genuine opinion, showing us what people are thinking somewhere in Scotland. And actually, it's completely fake and we're being completely deceived. It is quite frightening, that, isn't it, the impact that it can have? It is. I think it can have a huge electoral impact. I think this is the thing, and we haven't really tested this as a general election. I have concerns about what that looks like. I think it's, you know, what can sometimes feel a bit is that we either have, like, tech companies won't do anything, so what can we do?

25:59But, like, there is, if you talk to people at places like Demos and others who've been doing a lot of work on this, you know, epistemic security, like, thinking about the election process as a kind of a massive security issue, something that we need to be really, really guarded around. There's a lot that needs to be done around that. If you talk to experts like I do, they will tell you that there's a real risk there. You could imagine if we had some huge story breaks the night before a general election, by the time kind of old journalism adage that the lie is halfway around the world before the truth is at the time to put its boots on, that becomes far more significant in a context like that.

26:33And I think we've been quite remiss to not think about that, And I think, frankly, that politics is something that, in the same way that, like, you know, the police don't like, say, to get involved with policing donations. Questions about donations never really end up in anything criminal and very rarely even end up with a regulatory infringement. And it's one of these things because people don't like getting involved. Even our Electoral Commission really was set up to run elections, really. That's what its job is. And more and more it's been forced to kind of deal with stuff like misinformation, deal with stuff like political donations.

27:03stuff that it's inherently political and brings brings with it all manner of difficulties and i think we need you know there's a real need to kind of go okay right this stuff is really serious what

27:13Harriet Harman: are we going to do with it peter i was a journalist before i was a politician before i got elected to the scottish parliament and one of the last kind of big political stories i worked on was a huge financial scandal in the scottish parliament that required the sort of stepping down of the Labour Party leader, Wendy Alexander, because in her leadership election, she took£950 from a man who was based in Jersey. And she got into trouble for that because he wasn't based as a UK voter. And the reason that her team had taken the money was because he had given, he was a long time political donor, but he'd always given from his UK based company.

27:49And it

27:49Harriet Harman: felt like a big thing at the time. Like, you know, the parliament put a sanction on her, said that she'd done wrong. There was no intent. They could see there was no intent. But because it would be wrong, she fell on her sword and she left as a point of honour because the rules had been broken. And it just seems tiny now. Like it seems like we are such a world away from where 950 quid can bring down a political leader because it's across a tiny stretch of water from the UK to Jersey. And it just seems like the forces now that are sort of surrounding the island and surrounding our politics are so big that we just need to rethink from the very beginning, how do we protect what it is that we value?

28:29Harriet Harman: And if we value our elections, if we value our democracy, if we value how we run ourselves as a nation, we have to start again and look at the big forces, not just the kind of little rules that we've always dealt with in the past. I think what you're saying, I would very much agree. I'm often struck that things that would have prompted a resignation, ministerial resignation, whatever, 20 years ago, don't now. I think we can all see that. And again, it's that change in sums of money as well. And I think it also shows how kind of insubstantial the old, like it's, you know, we often hear of what Peter Hennessy called the good chaps theory of government.

29:04We're all going to be good chaps. That's how we run in Britain. No one goes too far. We don't break the rules. And if you do, you fall on your sword, etc. That to me really feels like it's totally gone out the window. And the kind of like, I'm really struck that almost everything that we have in terms of rules is really conventions. We talk a lot about the Standards Commissioner. These are not particularly powerful bodies in terms of what they can actually do. The most they can do is issue a suspension from the House that then requires people locally to sign a petition. It's quite a long process to even get another by-election, some of these things.

29:37But we don't really treat them seriously. I was really struck that Michael Cohn, Donald Trump's fixer, he broke election law in the US and he ended up in prison. In the UK, up until very recently, the maximum fine for breaking election laws,£20 ,000. You know, if you're in a situation where you're taking tens of millions of donations, a£20 ,000 fine, which is the maximum for breaking the rules, it's, as people said to me at the time, it's just the cost of doing business. And even when you increase the fines, you can still pay your way out of these things. We don't, I think, treat them with the seriousness that they deserve.

30:11And what you end up with, we've ended up with a place, our election laws are really complicated as well. it they're really really complicated so people do break them inadvertently as well over quite small things or and so you end up at a place where it's quite hard to separate out so we end up with a lot of scandals and it kind of goes back to where i started around about private donations as well because we run on private donations politicians would always be in the place where they're sitting next to private donors at clubs at dinners at all the rest of it which kind of builds in conflicts of interest into the system builds in scandal and actually then builds in lack of trust because people think that, you know, quote unquote, we've all heard this, they're all the same.

30:49They're all in it together. They're all doing the same thing. So I think it's quite a destructive circle that we've kind of got ourselves stuck in on this.

30:56Harriet Harman: Well, look, Peter, thank you so much for joining us, giving us like a really big run up there in terms of how we've got to where we are. In the next part of the show, we're going to be joined by the former Attorney General, Dominic Grieve, who's written a report about what he thinks should happen next.

31:16Harriet Harman: Shaq here. What's it like to buy a car from Carvana 100 % online and get it delivered to your door? Let me tell you. Your car is here, Mr. Shaq. Thank you, Mr. Carvana guy. Can't wait to take it for a spin. Only the best for you, Mr. Shaq. Hey, have you always been so big, tall, and handsome? Not always. I was 6 '10 once. Seven days to love it or return it, Mr. Shaq. Not that I would. You never do. No, I never do. So buy your car today on Carvana. Delivery fees may apply. See our seven-day return policy at caravana.com.

32:14Ruth Davidson: to bonus content. You'll also get access to a host of new ways to interact directly with Beth, Ruth, Harriet, Jess and us, the team behind the pod. Terms and conditions apply. You can only become an insider if you're over the age of 18 and live in the UK. Subscription auto-renews at the regular price unless cancelled via my account. Cancel any time effective at the end of the billing period. Okay, that's enough from me. Back to the pod.

32:41Harriet Harman: Well we are back and we've been joined by the former Attorney General who's the former Tory MP Dominic Grieve who has very kindly joined us all the way from his holiday in France so welcome to you Dominic thank you very much for making time for us I'm assuming if you're cutting into your scuba diving and all your other exploits you're cycling everything that you're doing over there in France that it's because you are just massive fans of the podcast I am a massive fan of this podcast. It's great fun and always interesting to listen to. I mean, there was only one correct answer to that, of course, but thank you.

33:13Ruth Davidson: Well, that's great to hear. And the reason we've invited Dominic onto this pod, you led the UK Governance Project. You chaired this cross-party inquiry, which looked into and made recommendations about changes that you felt was needed to be made to political funding in the UK. The project was wider than just party funding. We were trying to look at how do we improve standards and ethics in politics? And was there a way in which we could nudge the system in the right direction? So this was quite an ambitious scheme. And on party funding, we decided to be quite conservative with a small c. But the first thing was that we thought that it was absolutely indispensable that unincorporated associations, any gifts from unincorporated associations should identify who the donors were for that.

34:02Ruth Davidson: Can I just cut in there and ask you just to remind everybody what an unincorporated association is? What sort of organisation are we talking about? An unincorporated association is exactly what it says. It is a group of people who get together and form what I suppose might be best described as a club and say, we are allowable donors and we would like to make donations to a particular political party. And there's nothing wrong in that, except that it muddles or makes the transparency of the origin of the donations much more opaque. So there is a significant risk if you do not have a proper regulatory framework that you are going to end up with unincorporated associations making donations, some of which will come from individuals who themselves may actually be handing over money that comes from a prohibited source, particularly foreign donations.

34:55Harriet Harman: So are you saying rather than how we've traditionally thought of donations, so either a company or an individual gives money to a political party and if it's above the threshold you declare it, if it's not above the threshold you don't, that there's these sort of groupings of people that put into a pot. The pot then gives to the individual or the association or the party and therefore it's almost like a kind of shell core in that it's harder to find out who it is. Exactly. And that therefore there are significant risks that it can be abused for the purpose of funding. In exactly the same way, I mean, the other example is, for example, during the referendum campaign in 2016, we now know that VoteLeave transferred money to BeLeave so that they could avoid the ceiling limits on expenditure.

35:49In fact, notwithstanding the fact that the money was being spent on the same thing, they were fined for that.

35:55Ruth Davidson: So you're recommending more powers and more teeth for the enforcement done by the Electoral Commission and for it to be on a more independent basis. You want more transparency so people can track where the funds are coming from, so that things are on a much more transparent footing about the money that's going into politics and political parties. What sort of reception have you had from the government? Do you think Andy Burnham is going to be acting on this and making the changes? As you'll be aware, the Starmer government introduced some legislation which goes in response to one or two of these issues.

36:37Personally, I don't think that the government's proposals have gone far enough. And quite frankly, I was surprised with the Starmer government. I thought that this was an extraordinarily easy hit after all the problems that the Conservative predecessors had had. to come along to the House and say, look, I've got a real renewal package here of not just about party funding, but also about all the other things that could be done to improve public confidence in the integrity of our political processes. And he never did it. Or rather, he did one or two bits, but in such a sort of quiet way that nobody ever noticed.

37:15And I was hoping that the total package, not just the party funding, but the rest of it would be of interest. You see, all these things are linked together. Just to give an example, there's a very strong sense at the moment that appointments to the House of Lords are often made on the basis that people have simply given large amounts of money to political parties. One of our recommendations is that essentially HOLAC, the House of Lords Appointments Commission, really would have a veto over appointments. And I know of quite a few people whose only basis on which they've made any contribution to our national life is the amount of money they've given to a political party.

37:51They haven't done very much once they got into the House of Lords, just as in the same way for political honours. I think there's a strong argument that political honours should simply be abolished.

38:00Harriet Harman: I just point out to our listeners that although Harriet and I have given plenty of sweat equity in terms of the time we've put into our political parties and the effort we put into our political parties, I'm pretty sure I speak for both of us where I say it wasn't the money that we put into the political parties, which is why we sit in the House of Lords. But you were a very long-serving attorney general, which is kind of the chief law officer for England and Wales to the government. You also chaired the Intelligence and Security Committee, which often does its work in plain sight, but often looks at things that can't be put in plain sight.

38:30Harriet Harman: But you do look at the influence of foreign actors and agents. You're kind of a kind of super being in this space. The question I've always had is I always assumed that British politics was pretty clean. And having been involved for it for a long time, I look at some of my erstwhile colleagues in my own party and in other parties and think, you know, you're not a Manchurian candidate. You know, you're not taking a ruble. You're not you're not working for some other people. You're not you're frankly not smart enough to be a double agent. So so, you know, how dirty can we be? And I'm kind of keen to see what your view is on how clean or dirty or strong or vulnerable UK politics in the whole, not just party political funding and campaigns, is from being manipulated and abused.

39:16I think our politics are remarkably clean and 100 % clean politics, probably unachievable. But I also think that we've become complacent precisely because in the post-Second World War period, societal changes, pressures and some regulation, which was introduced, tended to make our politics cleaner. And I think as a consequence, we're failing to note some of the things that have been going on. Firstly, political parties have become increasingly dependent on very large donations from individuals, whereas historically, parties were more dependent on mass membership, which was a different thing. So I think we've ignored that.

40:01I think we've also ignored, and here, talking with my hat on as past chair of the Intelligence and Security Committee, I think the evidence is overwhelming that other states have malevolent intentions to the United Kingdom, have sought to exploit opportunities for influencing UK politics through the presence of their nationals in this country, because they themselves, as malevolent states, can apply pressure on those individuals to dance to their own tunes. And that was the point which we made very clearly in our report on Russia when we brought it out, that Russia sees its expatriates living in Britain, unless they happen to be refugees from Putin's regime, as being agents of influence in the United Kingdom.

40:45And there are other countries that are trying to do this, perhaps slightly more subtly. We've seen examples with China as well. And I think we need to be alive to that. It's never going to disappear completely. And let's face it, it's probably been around from the beginning of time. Louis XIV gave bribes to Charles II to alter his foreign policy. He helped bankroll Charles II's government. So this isn't new, but I think we live in an age where there is a degree of complacency about, because we think the institutions and structures are all right, but in fact, these things can't continue to happen or might not happen again.

41:20So I do think we ought to be doing a lot more to clean up our politics, particularly because I say, one of the problems we now have is that historically, British political institutions were held in high regard by the public. And it's gone, not necessarily over sleaze, But it's gone over a variety of things, ranging from disappointment that politics is not delivering for people what they wanted, to things like MPs' expenses, to stories about undue influence and the way in which the honours system operates to reward people who have done things favours for politicians, to all the issues around lobbying and the way in which ministers may end up getting very nice jobs after they leave ministerial office with organisations with which they may previously have had built links when they were in ministerial office themselves.

42:12All that could be very nicely tidied up without putting undue pressure on MPs. And indeed, one of the things in our report was that actually MPs are left and even ministers, in my experience, very much to fend for themselves on ethical issues. When I took office as Attorney General, I remember there was a whole discussion about how my shareholdings should be handled. And I was quite surprised to learn that there was no system in place in the Cabinet Office whatsoever, except on sort of ad hoc, oh, well, we might do it this way or we might do it that way to deal with it. I was actually slightly shocked.

42:55I thought there would be some tried and tested system which would resolve that. And in fact, in many cases, it doesn't happen. So one of my successes, I remember, was criticised because her sister had some shareholdings in farming at a time when she was the agricultural minister and her father was a farmer. I mean, I just thought this was quite extraordinary. And we ought really to have systems in place that help MPs and ministers of the crown do their jobs without getting pilloried for making perfectly reasonable decisions with the consent of the cabinet office for the handling of their own private finances.

43:35Ruth Davidson: So are you basically saying that there's kind of three reasons why your report, which is incredibly authoritative, ought to be really on the front for government at the moment? One, which is because of the undermining of trust in politics, in our democracy and in our government. Secondly, because of what foreign states are up to, particularly Putin in Russia or China. And thirdly, because of what tech's doing with crypto. Is that broadly the situation that we need the rules to be updated and strengthened to build public trust to guard against foreign actors and to deal with the prevalence of crypto and tech?

44:16Yes, and also really providing public reassurance that there is a framework set up by statute for an independent body like the Electoral Commission to regulate this in a way that commands public confidence. I have to say that the last government did not distinguish itself by removing the independence of the Electoral Commission and, I don't mean Starmer, the last Conservative government, and saying that strategic direction could be provided by government. That struck me as a very much a step in the wrong direction.

44:50Harriet Harman: As it happens, at the very moment that we're speaking, the Electoral Commission is advertising for one of its commissioners. So somebody to sit on the board for£500 a day if anybody's interested. And I'm looking at the job spec for it. And it shows me absolutely no indication that there's going to be much change happening to it, Dominic. And certainly not anything as radical as a high court judge in charge, powers to prosecute,£500 ,000 fine. It does sound as if politics has evolved faster. Is it fair to say it's just not keeping up with how modern society, modern politics is evolving? I think it's possible to run rings around it.

45:27And it's also possible, I think we've seen examples of this, for people to just ignore the rules and get away with it. So Andy Burnham does strike me as having a real opportunity here because he's come in saying he wants to change public mood as well as economic growth and all the other things which are going to prove to be very difficult. But he wants to change the public mood. Well, I would have thought the first area to change the public mood is to say, we will give you the reassurance that our politics are being conducted on a different basis. and I think that's much more important than many of the other proposals like elected House of Lords or all these I'm not saying these are invalid arguments but they are complex whereas actually I think that the package of reform we proposed in this report is quite simple to implement if you've got the will to do it.

46:20Ruth Davidson: And he's also said as well as wanting people to be able to have trust and confidence in their politics. He's also said that he wants to work in partnership, in collaboration and build consensus. So this is a real test of that, isn't it, as to whether or not he can get Kemi Badenoch on board, the Lib Dems, Ed Davey, and whether he can get Nigel Farage on board. And I hope they'll all pitch in on this. Well, I would be delighted, in a sense, having produced this and then two years having passed and only a little bit of tinkering around the edges having happened. I wasn't saying I was giving up hope.

46:55If there is a renewed interest on the Prime Minister's part to take this forward, then I'm very happy to speak to Kemi and all the others again.

47:04Ruth Davidson: Well, I think there's an opportunity with a new Prime Minister, and far be it from me to suggest what you should do, Dominic, but I think you should be dusting off this report, resubmitting it to Andy Burnham, Kemi Baden-Ock and the other party leaders and saying, right, let's get on with this.

47:19Harriet Harman: I was going to say, take Lou Haig for a pint because she seems to be running Andy Burnham's what he's doing. So that's your way in there. Well, you've given me a job for the autumn. I will get on with it.

47:30Ruth Davidson: But good luck with it.

47:31Harriet Harman: Dominic, thank you so much for that. Really, really interesting stuff. The idea that there's something sitting there that could work, that could make a difference. We'll let you get back to the scuba diving and cycling, but thank you for taking a bit of time away from your holiday to speak to us today. It's a pleasure. Thank you very much. Thank you, Dominic. Thank you. That's all from us today, but I'll be back on Tuesday with Jess Phillips for an insider show. So if you'd like to hear that, the link to subscribe is in the show notes.

47:56Ruth Davidson: And do tell us what you thought of today's episode. If you're an insider, you can access the members forum via the link in the show notes. And the burner phone is still in action. That's 07934 200 444. But for now, goodbye. Goodbye.

48:18Harriet Harman: Shack here. What's it like to buy a car from Carvana 100 % online and get it delivered to your door? Let me tell you. Your car is here, Mr. Shack. Thank you, Mr. Carvana guy. Can't wait to take it for a spin. Only the best for you, Mr. Shack. Hey, have you always been so big, tall, and handsome? Not always. I was 6 '10 once. Seven days to love it or return it, Mr. Shack. Not that I would. You never do. No, I never do. So buy your car today on Carvana. Delivery fees may apply. See our 7-day return policy at Carbano.com.