On a wet morning in late November 2019, two weeks before Boris Johnson won his “stonking” majority in the British general election, I filed into an overcrowded room on the first floor of a cream-coloured 19th-century mansion in the wealthiest corner of London’s West End. The Institute for Government, one of Britain’s most respected independent think tanks, was hosting a lunchtime panel discussion on the subject: ‘Can we trust our electoral system?’
The lugubrious title was apt. The election campaign had already witnessed an unprecedented surge in dirty tricks, with social media the key staging ground. The Conservatives were promoting a website pretending to be the Labour manifesto. Partisans had bought up countless ‘dark ads’ on Facebook. A few days earlier, the Tories had shamelessly rebranded their Twitter account as a fact-checking site during a debate between Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn. Ten days later, senior party advisors would spread the rumour that an aide had been punched by a Labour supporter outside a hospital in Leeds where a sick child had been photographed on the floor. The falsehood would blaze across the Internet long after it was debunked.
Roughly four dozen people had given up their lunch hour that damp day in London to hear about the state of British democracy. It wasn’t pretty. Every one of the five panellists on stage at the Institute for Government, ranging from academics and policy wonks to the chair of the Electoral Commission, warned that the country’s democratic process was failing.
The biggest source of disinformation “is the governing party, and they are the ones charged with changing the law”, said Will Moy, chief executive of Full Fact, an independent fact-checking website that vainly tried to hold politicians to account during the election campaign. Irish transparency campaigner Liz Carolan – whom I had first met while writing about online misinformation during Ireland’s 2018 abortion referendum – warned that Britain’s hidebound electoral system was ripe for foreign interference. She singled out a potential post-Brexit border poll on Irish unity as a particular concern.
The Electoral Commission’s Sir John Holmes, a former career diplomat, was the most circumspect speaker. But even he noted that Britain’s “electoral laws are fundamentally unfit for purpose”. Shell companies, he said, could donate to British political parties; a maximum fine of £20,000 was insufficient deterrent for bad behaviour; campaign spending needed to be disclosed in real time, not after the fact.
As we have seen throughout this book, the rules of the democratic game are not fit for purpose. It is increasingly difficult for voters to evaluate the accuracy of the information they receive. In Britain, laws designed to prevent elections being bought have been rendered obsolete when huge sums can be spent outside regulated periods, or by super Pac-style campaign surrogates. Politicians wilfully spread disinformation. We are being targeted online in ways that we cannot fully understand, partly because campaigns and tech platforms have to disclose so little about how money is spent. Far from taking back control, law-makers have largely outsourced decisions about the integrity of democracy to the CEOs of large American technology companies.
All this has happened with minimal public protest, or even acknowledgement. The dire warnings from the Institute for Government were barely covered in the press, lost in the pre-election scrum of rolling news. Few in power seem particularly concerned that the electoral system can’t be trusted. But they should be. As political theorist Martin Moore told the lunchtime audience in west London: “Our entire democratic system needs to be rewritten for the digital age.”
A few months earlier, I had interviewed Moore for this book. One of Britain’s sharpest writers on how tech is changing democracy, he has documented how unaccountable corporate monopolies have taken over key functions of government. The Chinese state has developed a social credit system that aims to monitor and evaluate citizens’ behaviour in real time. In America, most schoolchildren use Google’s education apps, which can track everything from how many times they go to the bathroom to how long they spend on specific exercises.1 (And, of course, Google collects all the data.)
Moore told me that if democracy is to survive in an age of surveillance capitalism, two very different things need to change: the laws that govern politics, and how we conceive of democracy itself.
“Our regulations need to be updated for the digital age,” he said. “But electoral laws are not the only thing. We need to rethink how we do liberal democracy. We need to ask what kind of democracy we want to live in. Do we want six massive US platforms dominating the public sphere? How do we want people to engage in politics? We need to think about all that. But we’re not.”
*
As I write this, at the start of January 2020, it is difficult to be upbeat about the prospect that Britain’s electoral system will be reformed – much less that democracy itself can be imagined anew. In his first Queen’s Speech, delivered a week after his general election victory, Boris Johnson promised to tackle social media abuse and to set up a commission on restoring trust in democracy. One of the prime minister’s few concrete proposals for electoral reform was the introduction of mandatory photographic identification for all British voters.
If Johnson genuinely wanted to strengthen British democracy, he was picking a strange issue to start with. Of the 44.4 million ballots cast in 2017, there were just 28 allegations of voter impersonation, of which only one resulted in a conviction. Forcing American voters to carry photographic ID has been found to lower turnout among minorities, to the benefit of the Republican Party.2 The Electoral Reform Society said it was “dismayed” by Prime Minister Johnson’s proposals which “would make it harder for millions of citizens to exercise their democratic rights.”
The voter ID announcement chimed with a cynical, populist general election campaign. The policy was trumpeted by outriders on the right and earned a few quick headlines. But already Britain’s political conversation had moved on. There were few post-mortems about the dismal campaign, little talk of how electoral laws had failed and how misinformation had run wild. It was almost as if the dirtiest British election in living memory had never happened.
What the Conservatives did better than anyone else in 2019 was to actively stoke the growing frustration with politics and politicians among many British voters. Unlike the Brexit referendum’s promise to “take back control”, Johnson’s winning campaign promised to make politics go away. Get Brexit Done. No more politicians squabbling on voters’ television screens. As Adam Ramsay pointed out, Johnson profited from a culture of mistrust in politics that his party had itself helped cultivate.3 One analysis found that almost 90 per cent of a sample of Conservative Facebook adverts posted before the general election contained misleading information.4 The Tories were not alone. Hundreds of targeted Liberal Democrat adverts featured dubious graphics that wildly overstated their chances of “winning here”. Fact-checkers also found a number of Labour ads misleading.
No wonder many voters don’t trust politicians when so few lawmakers seem to care about protecting democracy. Only a handful of British parliamentarians spoke up when it turned out that the most important political campaign in living memory, Vote Leave, broke the law. Imagine the response if something similar happened in, say, a European neighbour. Would the British political class shrug their shoulders then too, or would they ask why a Western democracy was allowing its electoral system to be undermined and debased? Surely the Telegraph would at least run a couple of editorials bemoaning Europe’s venal elites.
As this book has documented, it is extraordinarily easy to funnel dark money into British politics. You and I can do it, right now. First, we declare ourselves an unincorporated association, just like Richard Cook’s Constitutional Research Council or the pro-Brexit European Research Group. (Don’t worry, we don’t actually have to register anywhere or say where our money comes from.)
Then we can start giving money to British politicians. What if our funders are offshore? That’s no problem, either. As long as our backers can vote in the UK, they can route money through the opaque financial world that orbits the City of London.
Maybe there is a specific issue we are particularly interested in, say an obscure business regulation that we would like to see changed after Brexit. We could lobby politicians. But why stop there? We could also fund a think tank that doesn’t declare its donors to produce a report on our specialist subject. Friendly journalists and grifters would talk up our interest in newspaper columns and on broadcast shows. A junior government minister might even take an interest. We could buy adverts on Facebook to support politicians and parties sympathetic to our concerns.
All of this is perfectly legal. And, if we do inadvertently break any rules, the fines are so low that we can write them off as the cost of doing business.
*
British politics, of course, is not alone in becoming increasingly Americanised. The global nexus of dark money and political disinformation that we have seen is part of an escalating war against the basic tenets of democracy. Nationalists and xenophobes from Italy to Hungary have tapped into international circuits of influence and money. Such electoral manipulation has become transnational, and global.
In early 2020, new documents reportedly revealed that the scale of the Cambridge Analytica operation was far greater than previously estimated, stretching to 68 countries around the world.5 Former Cambridge Analytica employee Brittany Kaiser claimed that emails showed major Trump donors discussing ways to obscure the source of their donations through different financial vehicles. The same dark money machinery had, she said, been deployed in other countries that Cambridge Analytica worked in, including the UK. Electoral interference is likely to get worse, not better.
So how will we respond to the growing crisis of dark money and disinformation? Will we all sit back and mutely watch it unfold, complaining bitterly on social media but struggling, atomised, to find avenues to channel our anger productively?
There are plenty of reasons to be gloomy. Donald Trump, Boris Johnson and many others have learned that waging war on truth pays political dividends. Established media outlets are easily manipulated. Falsehoods spread rapidly across hyper-partisan websites. Targeted advertising and social platform algorithms aimed at maximising ‘likes’ and engagement have split the electorate into myriad fragments, undermining the very idea of a national political conversation.
Vastly richer, and more powerful, than many nation states, big tech platforms have little motivation to change their behaviour. Debates around the role of tech in democracy are often dominated by lobbyists and professional contrarians who sophistically decry almost every proposed reform as an attack on free speech.
But there are also reasons to be, if not quite cheerful, then at least hopeful.
Anger at the intrusive role of tech companies in our everyday lives is growing. In September 2019, activists with loudhailers and hi-vis jackets targeted Palantir, a data-mining defence contractor co-founded by a controversial Trump-supporting tech billionaire.6 Two months later, roughly 200 Google employees and their supporters demonstrated outside of their own company’s San Francisco offices after the tech giant dismissed two employees – ironically, for organising protests against the tech giant’s own behaviour including its work on a project to build a censored search engine for China and cloud services for the fossil fuel industry.7 And after the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke in 2018, a group of ‘Raging Grannies’ demonstrated outside Facebook’s sprawling, Frank Gehry-designed head office in Silicon Valley, declaring that “privacy should be the default setting”. Whereas once the primary focus of privacy campaigners was on state surveillance, the role of private tech companies in our lives has become a political issue in ways that would have been unimaginable a decade ago.
But it’s not enough. Almost every one of us willingly carries a device that allows us to be tracked, traced and, quite easily, identified: a smartphone. The companies that gather all this data say that people give consent and that their information is secure and anonymous. This is patently untrue. In late 2019, the New York Times showed how a single file of smartphone location data could be used to trace more than 12 million Americans as they moved through major US cities. Smartphone data is routinely paired with other sources of information, such as mobile advertising IDs, to create the detailed profiles needed to target adverts. “The data can change hands in almost real time, so fast that your location could be transferred from your smartphone to the app’s servers and exported to third parties in milliseconds,” the New York Times journalists wrote. “This is how, for example, you might see an ad for a new car some time after walking through a dealership.”
This byzantine system – all perfectly legal, of course – was built for a single purpose: to sell advertising.8 But the possibilities of using such data for targeted political messaging are already being realised. (Some states have gone much further. Chinese authorities use smartphone tech to track down and target dissidents.)
The impact of technology and dark money on democracy is belatedly edging up the political agenda. Elizabeth Warren made taking money out of American politics a central plank of her bid for the 2020 Democratic nomination.9 Warren vowed to ban lobbyists from donating to, or fundraising for, candidates, and to end the bipartisan practice of giving plum ambassadorial posts around the world to big donors.*
Warren also proposed banning donations from foreign businesses and making it illegal for corporate political action committees (Pacs) to donate to federal election candidates. Super Pacs would be forced to declare their donors in full, and individual contribution limits would be reduced.†
Many of Warren’s measures could be easily adapted and introduced in the UK. Others are needed, too. The most obvious is dramatically increasing the maximum fines for breaking political finance rules. The false distinction in electoral law between online and offline political advertising – which allows campaigns to send digital adverts without even an imprint – must end. Digital spending should be accounted for transparently, and voters should be able to see how they are being targeted by political campaigns.
The role of money in British politics also has to change. A ban on donations from individuals who are not domiciled in the UK and who are non-resident for tax purposes would go some way to stemming the flow of dark money, as would preventing the use of shell companies to hide the true source of donations. Offshore firms – such as that used by Arron Banks to bankroll his Brexit campaigns – should be barred from making political contributions.
Political parties could be forced to publish the names of significant donors that also attend private party events. This would end the secrecy of elite donation clubs like the Conservatives’ Leader’s Group and give us better information about which donors have access to the highest levels of British government.
The surest way to reduce the power of money in politics is to replace a handful of super-rich donors with large numbers of smaller contributions. If the maximum donation was, say, £10,000 a year, political parties would be forced to rely on a far wider, and more inclusive, donor base. That, of course, would leave many parties with an income shortfall. One way around that could be for the state to step in and match-fund small donations, say below £250. The scheme could even be paid for by a much-needed tax on the tech giants. Another option to encourage political participation is to make the cost of party membership tax deductible.
The stick needs to be used as well as the carrot. Think tanks such as the Institute of Economic Affairs should be forced to declare their donors, and Britain’s ineffective, diaphanous lobbying register completely overhauled. Any system where corporates can plough anonymous money into putative research institutes that influence public debate, and a consultant such as Shanker Singham can meet government ministers multiple times without having to register as a lobbyist, is hardly fit for purpose.
Even finding out how registered lobbyists operate is almost impossible, given the poverty of much of the transparency data that comes out of the British government. We had to go all the way to the courts just to get hold of the European Research Group’s taxpayer-funded briefings. Lobbyists should have to declare far more about what conversations they are having, and with whom. Proper sanctions need to be introduced for breaking the rules or not complying, including bans on future meetings with public officials as well as monetary fines.
A dramatic alternative to the dysfunctional status quo is suggested by the title of political commentator Paul Evans’s Swiftian provocation Save Democracy – Abolish Voting. Instead of trudging to polling stations every few years, Evans proposes putting the whole world of MPs, lobbyists, think tanks, even the civil service, under public ownership. Every voter would be given a “universal basic income for democracy” – Evans envisages £20 a month – that they can spend only on supporting different aspects of the political process. A fan of the IEA? Well, give them a tenner. Want to see reform of housing legislation? Put your money into a white paper on affordable rents. Politics would become a constant marketplace of ideas.
Rather than trying to ban dark money and clandestine influence, Evans suggest that it can be side-stepped altogether. “Our elected representatives would be a lot more transparent in their dealings. They’d do their job properly, and not be spoon-fed by lobbyists and opaquely funded political think-tanks. They’d probably be more interested in what voters’ concerns are and less worried about what newspaper editors and the peer group that haunts the political village thinks.”
It’s a radical proposal – and for that reason alone, there is little chance of a basic income for democracy any time soon. But even if lawmakers did actually heed calls for some measure of electoral reform – say, by introducing new regulations on political funding and lobbying – it is unlikely to be sufficient to rebuild trust in British democracy. There are a number of reasons for this. Firstly, as we have seen time and again, the watchdogs charged with overseeing democracy are often easily outmanoeuvred by both wealthy corporations and small-time players willing to bend the rules until they break, safe in the knowledge that they are about as likely to face prosecution as win the lottery. Under-resourced and institutionally risk-adverse, these regulators are more like paper tigers than attack dogs.
And they could become even less effective in years to come; many on the right of British politics have long been calling for a “bonfire of the regulators”. Twice in as many weeks in the wake of the Conservatives’ general election win in December 2019, Theresa May’s former special advisor Nick Timothy wrote in his weekly Telegraph column that the Electoral Commission should be disbanded. And what would replace it? Nothing, apparently.
A second, and related, issue is that even if politicians do introduce new electoral legislation overseen by robust regulators, it is practically impossible for even the most cutting-edge law-making to keep pace with technology and the global networks out to exploit it. Legislation is slow-moving, considered and deliberative. Meanwhile, outside of Parliament, tech companies and lobbyists move swiftly and with little care for the putative rules of engagement. Like a game of whack-a-mole, whenever one loophole is closed, another quickly opens up.
The third, and biggest, obstacle to meaningful democratic reform is the political class itself. As long as politicians think that disinformation wins elections, dirty habits are unlikely to change. Not only are the fines for breaking the rules of our democracy meagre; funding politics through anonymous donations and spreading disinformation seems to come at little political or reputational cost. In 2019, the Conservatives faced no electoral comeback for ‘shit-posting’ on social media, lying with impunity and banning ministers from appearing on some public broadcasters. Until politicians are incentivised – by much stronger public demands – to overhaul the system, they won’t.
Occasional protests outside the headquarters of tech giants hint at growing frustrations, but where are the mass movements needed to push dark money and disinformation from a niche concern to the top of the political agenda? If proven law-breaking – as in the Brexit referendum – and obvious electoral manipulation is not enough to make us all stand up and take notice, what would be? And even if public anger at the crisis in democracy did catch fire, could a different system be built that is genuinely free, open and transparent? Or are we already too late?
*
After the Second World War, a widely shared consensus pervaded across most Western liberal democracies. Mindful of the communist enemy that needed to be kept at bay, both left and right broadly agreed on high taxes, heavy regulation and a generous welfare state that, on some level, demonstrated its respect for social cohesion and solidarity.
The breakdown of this post-war consensus began in the mid-1970s, and was exacerbated by the end of the Cold War. Since the fall of the Eastern Bloc, the drive to revert to a more ruthless market fundamentalism and a minimal state has been increasingly strong, promoted, of course, by the numerous libertarian think tanks documented in this book. Taxes should be lowered. State assets should be privatised. In the process, the assumptions about democracy, ethics and human rights absorbed by the West’s educated middle class can much more easily be undermined, and the institutions that underpin those attitudes weakened.
The effective destruction of trade unions, and the decline of the industries that made them possible, has also hugely frayed the bonds tying workers to historic labour parties and led to the well-documented crisis of social democracy. In Britain, Labour’s ‘red wall’ was crumbling long before Isaac Levido instructed Tory MPs to repeat “get Brexit done” as if it was a Buddhist mantra. While the established Western political consensus slowly crumbled, huge spaces opened up through which the old right-wing press and the new social media attack vehicles were able to advance.
These huge political shifts have coincided with a revolution in digital communication. A handful of corporations, most of which did not even exist when the Berlin Wall fell, have amassed unparalleled influence over politicians and the economy. Almost 90 per cent of all Internet searches go through Google.10 Between them, Facebook, Google and Amazon account for nearly 70 per cent of all digital ad spending.11 The scions of Big Tech are plugged into the highest levels of power. Ahead of the 2020 presidential election, Mark Zuckerberg met privately with Donald Trump. No details of their discussion were released.
Silicon Valley titans are the modern-day equivalent of the Gilded Age’s steel magnates, railroad tycoons and oil monopolists. Back then, the power of a tiny number of super-rich men such as John D. Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan and William H. “the public be damned” Vanderbilt12 was eventually checked only by growing public agitation for regulation to curb their excesses.‡ Out of the backlash came the Federal Trade Commission which broke up coercive monopolies and introduced laws against reducing competition. The question now is whether the unbridled power of today’s digital ‘robber barons’ can be similarly tamed.
Facebook and others, unsurprisingly, have insisted that concerns about the effect of tech monopolies on democracy are overstated. Zuckerberg’s platform has introduced changes aimed at limiting the spread of disinformation. Doubtless Facebook will launch more initiatives. But promises have been made before and have failed to deliver.
Meanwhile, digital influence campaigns are already migrating to other platforms. During the 2018 Brazilian general election, companies supporting far-right candidate Jair Bolsonaro spent millions of dollars on WhatsApp messages.13 Widely circulated false reports accused Bolsonaro’s left-wing rival of, among other things, handing out baby bottles with penis-shaped tops at schools to combat homophobia. The following year, in India, legions of online trolls spread fake WhatsApp stories in support of Narendra Modi to hundreds of millions of voters.
The misuse of technology poses an existential threat to democracy. So what can be done to curb these digital excesses? For a start, companies who deal in information and personal data could be seriously policed and penalised for cybersecurity or data protection failures – to the same extent that financial institutions in most Western states are for money laundering, for example.
Legislation already exists in many countries. The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) includes substantial safeguards against data misuse, including fines of up to 4 per cent of a company’s turnover (for tech platforms with multi-billion-dollar revenues that’s a lot of money). But in its first year in operation, European regulators only issued around £100 million in fines. Hardly a stinging deterrent for companies with market caps measured in the hundreds of billions.
Some have proposed breaking up Facebook, Google and other tech behemoths. Yet while dismantling the modern-day equivalent of the railroad monopolies might help, it’s not clear how such a move would stem the flow of disinformation, especially on the closed groups and anonymous forums from which armies of online trolls are feeding a populist surge across the world.
There have been other proposals. GDPR laws could be used to check the worst abuses of a sprawling online advertising technology industry that shares huge amounts of personal data with companies across the Internet. Tim Berners-Lee, the founder of the World Wide Web, has warned of a “digital dystopia” if disinformation and invasion of privacy are not stopped. In 2019, dozens of tech companies including Facebook and Google signed Berners-Lee’s ‘Contract for the Web’ calling for a safe, free and open Internet.
But self-regulation will only ever go so far. When Facebook ignored Berners-Lee’s request to cease running targeted political adverts in the 2019 UK general election, one British columnist understandably dismissed the contract as a PR opportunity “for the megalomaniacs who will carry on doing their worst”.14
Others are attempting to bypass the tech monopolies by building an open, decentralised cloud to host the next generation of software and services. Whether or not any of these ideas come to fruition, their emergence attests to the depth of concerns about the overweening influence of a handful of tech conglomerates – and speaks to the scale of the ambition needed to tackle them.
The power of Big Tech is not the only pressing concern. Liberal democracy cannot function without trust, and people across the Western world are increasingly disenchanted with democracy. Over two-thirds of older Americans believe it is essential to live in a democracy; among millennials, less than one-third do.15 In Britain, support for democracy has fallen sharply over the last decade. More than half of the respondents to a 2019 study agreed that “Britain needs a strong ruler willing to break the rules”.16
The crisis in British democracy has been accompanied by a crisis in the British state itself. The UK is an increasingly disunited kingdom. Scottish independence and even Irish unification are distinct possibilities in the coming years. The ongoing inability of Westminster’s political system to even understand these nationalist movements – the union barely featured during the 2019 general election campaign, beyond bromides – attests to deeper structural failings.
All the while, the institutions and interests which shape the British state remain fundamentally unreformed. The City of London is the epicentre of a global network of financial secrecy – and reputation laundering – that no prime minister has ever seriously tried to rein in. Foreign magnates and British elites can funnel their money offshore with ease. Despite his ‘one nation’ rhetoric, Boris Johnson is particularly close to the oligarch set. The day after his landslide election win in December 2019, Johnson attended a champagne-and-caviar Christmas party in London hosted by Alexander Lebedev and his son Evgeny. The former was once a senior KGB officer; the latter owns the Independent, the Evening Standard and a little-watched London TV channel. Not exactly ‘Workington man’.
There seems little prospect, either, of reorienting Britain’s lop-sided first-past-the-post electoral system. It is hardly a coincidence that political polarisation has been so acute in the UK and America, two countries united by a voting system that punishes consensus-building and vastly over-rewards winners. No wonder Viktor Orbán looked to the ‘Westminster model’ when he decided to gerrymander Hungary’s electoral system to his advantage.
Ironically, the communications revolution that has so imperilled the very idea of democracy could provide the means to transform how democracy is done. The constraints on how we participate in public life are fast disappearing. The challenge is to create a more responsive version of the public sphere for the digital age, one which is not controlled by giant tech companies and which, unlike the sham ‘digital democracy’ preached by Five Star and the Brexit Party, is genuinely participative.
Like the climate, democracy is fast reaching a tipping point. If the opportunity for change is not seized, the worst aspects of the present malaise – disinformation, dark money and spiralling polarisation – could well push us beyond a point of no return.
It is not too late. I am still an optimist, just as I was as a teenager growing up in rural Ireland two decades ago. Democracy faces many perils, but there is still time to act. We can build better systems, we can imagine more democratic forms of politics, and conversation. But we should be in no doubt about the urgency and scale of the challenge.
* In 2018, Donald Trump appointed Gordon Sondland as America’s man in Brussels. A self-made hotel magnate, Sondland was a diplomatic neophyte with little experience of the European Union, but he was a major Republican donor who gave $1 million to the president’s inaugural committee. Sondland was later at the centre of the Trump impeachment inquiry after the ambassador said that he was following the president’s orders when he pressured Ukraine to conduct investigations into Trump’s political rivals.
† Embarrassingly for Warren, in November 2019 a dark money group bought an advert in support of her candidacy in the influential Des Moines Register ahead of the crucial Iowa Caucus. The funders of the ad, which boasted that “Warren doesn’t take corporate or super Pac money”, were not disclosed. The Warren campaign asked the people behind it to stop.
‡ In 1912, three-quarters of Americans voted for presidential candidates who pledged to limit corporate power. The establishment Republican candidate, William Taft, finished a distant third.