Loopholes and principles are not easy bedfellows

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The ill-starred romance between Farage and Musk didn’t last long, which presumably means that the enormous donation which had been mooted might not arrive after all. It turns out that a mega-rich man actually expects something in return for his patronage. Who’d have thought it? In this case, the expectation was slavish support for his views on issues of the day (including the immediate release of a convicted criminal) however unfounded in mere facts and evidence those views might be. It leaves Farage with a difficult choice – stay in post and beg for money elsewhere, or make way for his Musk-anointed successor. Farage is claiming that he would “never sell out my principles”, but telling us that he won’t sell something he has never possessed doesn’t actually tell us a lot about his next moves.

The real debate about political funding should be examining the mysterious process of transubstantiation, during which profit generated elsewhere and then funnelled through a UK-based company magically becomes British money and therefore a legitimate source of political donations in a state which theoretically only allows such donations from UK sources. Interestingly, it only becomes British money for the purposes of political donations, and apparently doesn’t also become liable for UK taxes. As I say, it is truly a mysterious process. It’s a loophole, of course, and one which a party committed to eliminating sleaze and dubious funding might be seeking to close, particularly if the sums are so large as to completely tip the scales. However, a party which happily accepts a large donation from a company registered in a tax haven will inevitably find itself more than a little compromised on the issue. Dodgy funding is only an issue when other parties benefit from it, it would seem. In the meantime, all is well as long as ‘no rules are broken’, the only basis on which most politicians seem to consider the issue of morality, rather ignoring the fact that it is they who make the rules in the first place. Those who deliberately leave loopholes in rules from which they can benefit themselves can’t really complain if someone else uses the same loopholes.