Democracy for sale?
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 8 September 2020
⏱️ 18 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Journalist Peter Geoghegan describes the many ways in which private money is corrupting democratic politics, encouraging chaos and fuelling public cynicism.
In an extended interview with the BBC's Ed Butler, the Irish author and broadcaster explains a Brexit campaign advert that he happened to come across in a local newspaper while visiting the city of Sunderland in the north of England led him to investigate where the money funding the Leave campaign was coming from. It led him to explore how business and political interests - often from foreign countries - were able over decades to shift the political discourse in Western liberal democracies in their favour.
(Picture: US flag made out of one dollar bills; Credit: Matt Anderson Photography/Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello there, I'm Ed Butler and welcome to Business Daily from the BBC. Coming up, is it time |
| 0:06.3 | we took seriously the threat of money undermining and distorting modern democracy? The role of money |
| 0:13.8 | and its influence in politics, I think adds to that sense that voters don't trust our politicians. |
| 0:19.1 | They don't trust the political system. And fundamentally, |
| 0:21.1 | then, they will end up not trusting democracy itself. A leading journalist and author on the subject |
| 0:26.0 | tells us why and how we need to protect democracy from the corrosion of secret money and not so |
| 0:33.0 | secret cynicism about it. Business Daily from the BBC. |
| 0:44.3 | For the last few years, there seems to have been growing public concern about the role of money in politics. It's apparently sinister influence. Politicians occasionally make promises |
| 0:49.4 | to tackle it. Many times I said we would drain the swamp and that's exactly what we're doing right now. |
| 0:56.7 | We're draining the swamp. |
| 1:02.3 | Yeah, except most ordinary voters don't believe that the swamp is getting any less swampy. |
| 1:08.4 | Let's be honest. |
| 1:09.3 | Quite the contrary, it seems. |
| 1:10.4 | A number of books have been |
| 1:11.5 | written in recent years with titles like How Democracy Ends, Republic Lost, Democracy Hacked. Well, |
| 1:18.4 | today on BIS Daily, we're examining a new exploration, a major and beautifully crafted book, |
| 1:23.6 | I should say, it's an investigation by the Irish journalist and writer Peter Gagan. |
| 1:28.1 | He's focusing mostly on the US and the UK, arguing that the corrosive relationship between |
| 1:33.0 | politicians and their donors is more elaborate and systemic than even journalists have seemed to |
| 1:39.1 | realise. The book is called Democracy for Sale. This book began in a way I would never have expected. |
| 1:45.4 | Back in 2016, I was a reporter working for the Irish Times, |
| 1:49.0 | and I was in the north-east of England in a town called Sunderland, |
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