Democracy for Sale: Dark Money and Dirty Politics

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The integrity and trustworthiness of elections is a fundamental requirement for a functioning democracy. Antiquated electoral laws are broken with impunity, secretive lobbying is bending our politics out of shape and Silicon Valley tech giants collude in selling out democracy. These cookies help provide information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc. And it has been able to do this in what has turned out to be a regulatory vacuum – with laws, penalties and overseeing authorities that are no longer fit for purpose.

Peter Geoghegan shows how antiquated electoral laws are broken with impunity, how secretive lobbying bends our politics out of shape, and how Silicon Valley tech giants have colluded in selling out democracy. Democracy for Sale is the story of how money, vested interests and digital skulduggery are eroding trust in democracy - and a powerful account of what must be done about it. These threats to democracy have, for decades, been visible to anyone disposed to look for them’: Boris Johnson in 2019. Hotjar sets this cookie to know whether a user is included in the data sampling defined by the site's pageview limit.

And if that’s true, the key question for us at this moment in history is: how might our current system fail? We are experiencing delays with deliveries to many countries, but in most cases local services have now resumed. The existential threat to liberal democracy comes from the fact that those who have successfully exploited some inadequacies of the current regulatory system – who include Boris Johnson and his current wingman, Cummings – have absolutely no incentive to fix the system from which they have benefited.

Some of the data that are collected include the number of visitors, their source, and the pages they visit anonymously. One of the most striking points the political philosopher David Runciman made in his seminal book How Democracy Ends was that democracies don’t fail backwards: they fail forward. Remarkable’ Observer, Book of the Week Democracy is in crisis, and unaccountable and untraceable flows of money are helping to destroy it. That’s why those who see in the current difficulties of liberal democracies the stirrings of past monsters – Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, to name just three – are always looking in the wrong place. Facebook sets this cookie to show relevant advertisements to users by tracking user behaviour across the web, on sites that have Facebook pixel or Facebook social plugin.ACT Contact / FAQ About Events / Videos Merch / Subs Sign in/up Democracy For Sale : Dark Money and Dirty Politics Geoghegan, Peter More by this author. Praise for Democracy for Sale: ‘Thorough, gripping and vitally important’ Oliver Bullough‘A brilliant description of the dark underbelly of modern democracy. Instead, the referendum and its aftermath have revealed something far more fundamental and systemic. Publication dates are subject to change (although this is an extremely uncommon occurrence overall).

Praise for Democracy for Sale: ‘Thorough, gripping and vitally important’ Oliver Bullough’A brilliant description of the dark underbelly of modern democracy. For example, Lawrence Lessig’s Republic, Lost and Jane Mayer’s Dark Money explained how a clique of billionaires has shaped and perverted American politics. One of the most depressing parts of this narrative is the bland indifference of most mainstream UK media to these scandalous events. Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, Jair Bolsonaro and populists in many other countries are the beneficiaries. The first is the massive concentration of corporate power and private wealth that’s been under way since the 1970s, together with a corresponding increase in inequality, social exclusion and polarisation in most western societies; the second is the astonishing penetration of “dark money” into democratic politics; and the third is the revolutionary transformation of the information ecosystem in which democratic politics is conducted – a transformation that has rendered the laws that supposedly regulated elections entirely irrelevant to modern conditions.He starts with the Brexit referendum and the various kinds of unsavoury practices that took place during that doomed plebiscite – from the various illegalities of Vote Leave, through Arron Banks’s lavish expenditure to the astonishing tale of the dark money funnelled through the Ulster DUP and a loophole in Northern Ireland’s electoral law. We use Google Analytics to see what pages are most visited, and where in the world visitors are visiting from. This is a story of ideology and finance – of how the long-term Hayekian, neoliberal project has played out on these shores. Politicians lie gleefully, making wild claims that can be shared instantly with millions of people on social media. He shows how antiquated electoral laws are broken with impunity, how secretive lobbying bends our politics out of shape, and how Silicon Valley tech giants have colluded in selling out democracy.

The _ga cookie, installed by Google Analytics, calculates visitor, session and campaign data and also keeps track of site usage for the site's analytics report. For more details, please consult the latest information provided by Royal Mail's International Incident Bulletin. The combination of unaccountable, unreported dark money and its use to create targeted (and contradictory) political messages for individuals and groups means that we have no way of knowing how free and fair our elections have become.Peter Geoghegan is a diligent, brilliant guide through a shadowy world of dark money and digital disinformation stretching from Westminster to Washington, and far beyond. The final part of the book deals with the transformation of our information ecosystem: the ways in which the automated targeted-advertising machines of social media platforms have been weaponised by rightwing actors to deliver precisely calibrated messages to voters, in ways that are completely opaque to the general public, as well as to regulators. Payments made using National Book Tokens are processed by National Book Tokens Ltd, and you can read their Terms and Conditions here. Peter Geoghegan is a diligent, brilliant guide through the shadowy world of dark money and digital disinformation stretching from Westminster to Washington, and far beyond.