Almost all the Conservative Party's money comes from private donors
and lots of it comes from the super wealthy
Here at openDemocracy we revealed recently that the Conservative Party
gets over £130 million from this tiny group
of donors called The Leaders Group So what do they get for their money?
Well we don't actually know because when they have their meetings which are every
quarter with the Prime Minister and his cabinet ministers we're not told what's
discussed, we don't even know when they're meeting or who is going there.
The leaders Group is worth at least £50 billion pounds, that's 50 billion!
Just a small group.
About 60 members of The Leaders Group feature in The Sunday Times Rich List,
That's the kind of list of the biggest and richest people in Britain.
People like Sir Henry Keswick who's worth over £6 billion.
People like Lord Stanley Fink, Paul Ruddock, super billionaire hedge fund people.
That's a real theme of The Leaders Group,
a lot of these people are involved in hedge funds and in the City of London.
They're people who make lot of money and make it out of money very quickly.
We don't know what they're doing in our politics,
we don't know what they're talking about with our politicians and we have no transparency.
what's really kind of concerning in some ways
is that when political parties are completely bankrolled by small groups
that are interested in very niche areas it begs questions about well could
decisions be made that are not in the interests of the rest of the population
but in the interests of a small group of people and I think that's a real concern
when our politics is bankrolled by such a small number of super wealthy individuals.
The reason people give money to political parties is to get close to politicians
to be able to talk to politicians to talk about the things that interest them,
to lobby politicians. It's striking that some of the biggest donors
in British politics, particularly the biggest donors to the Conservative Party,
are involved in oil and fossil fuels industries
People like Ian Taylor, who's the head of Vitol which is the world's largest oil trading company.
Ian Taylor's not the only one, there's people like the head of Pterofac
which is another big oil company which has been a major Tory donor.
We've seen a lot of other people who are involved in fossil fuels,
and very few who actually involved in renewables,
giving money to the Conservative Party.
They're people who are really trying to keep the industry as it is
and to make money off it as it.
A number of the Conservative Party's biggest donors have been
involved with what can only be called unsavoury regimes around the world.
A number of senior Tory donors have business interest in Bahrain,
have worked with the Bahraini government, this is a government that has killed people
who've protested in favour of human rights and we know that the British government
has lobbied the Bahraini government on behalf of some of its donors as well.
One of the kind of most curious aspects of The Leaders Group is
just how many people who give money to the Conservative Party have got honours.
We discovered that almost one fifth of leading conservative donors received knighthoods,
peerages and other types of honours. Statistically, as one statistician told us,
it's the same likelihood of the same person winning the lottery five times over.
If people are getting honours from the political system that they're giving money to
that begs a lot of questions about cronyism, about using the systems
that are supposed to be there to reward the very best citizens in the land.
People like Boris Johnson, they're the people that are standing up against the establishment
but when you look at it these guys really are the establishment.
Boris Johnson, even outside of his background,
if you look at the kind of donations, the amount of money that Boris Johnson pulls in.
He's received over a million pounds of political donations in 12 months.
That's an unprecedented sum really for an individual in modern British politics.
You look at the kind of world that these people are in, it's not the world of ordinary Voters
and their money doesn't come from ordinary voters.
They talk about being "men of the people" but actually the money that bankrolls them
comes from the super rich and the super wealthy.
It doesn't come from the man in the street.
Ahead of this General Election Boris Johnson said he wanted
to raise around £30 million. This money is probably going into more and more
disinformation than we've ever seen in politics before.
We've seen that throughout this campaign.
We're seeing a lot of online groups spending money in strange ways.
We've seen the Conservative Party rebrand its Twitter account
as a fact checking account, setting up a fake Labour manifesto website
This is what this money is funding at the moment.
It's funding a kind of unprecedented amount of disinformation in our politics
I think that's really concerning because we won't know how this money is spent
until after the election but we do know that the huge amounts of money, millions,
are going into political funding from private individuals and they're buying
things that we can see at the moment
and the idea is to try and sway the General Election.
The work that people like us at openDemocracy and Double Down News do
is so important because it's trying to bring transparency and openness to this
world that is run largely by very wealthy individuals who often
don't want you to know what's happening.
do help and support as much as you can.
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