Political donations are poison to our democracy – but there’s an easy antidote to that | George Monbiot

As revelations about Reform UK’s donors emerge, it’s clear that increasingly complex forms of patronage can’t be regulated effectively. We need a clean sweep How do we know whether political funding is corrupt? Mostly, we don’t. A plutocrat delivers a sack of cash to a political party. A few weeks later, it announces a policy that happens to favour the donor’s business. Are the events linked? We might suspect it; we cannot prove it. But the suspicion itself is corrosive and demoralising. The ...

By George Monbiot