AND ANOTHER THING
When a billionaire has to come to the rescue of democracy
PAUL JOHNSON
So let us pass on to the point about the use and abuse of wealth in politics. I submit that Sir James Goldsmith, in financing the Referendum Party, far from abusing his wealth, as most very rich men do in the pursuit of selfish pleasure and power, is in fact making a proper and public-spirited use of it. He is quite open. He says he will spend up to £20 million in trying to give the British people the right to a referendum. The money is being spent in an open, straightforward manner, every penny is accounted for and the records are open to public inspection. Moreover, it is Gold- smith's own money. He acquired it openly and legally and he is spending it openly and legally in what he believes to be the public interest.
What a contrast with his opponents! The Eurocrats in Brussels and Strasbourg have the spending annually of £80 million on propaganda in favour of a supranational state. Where does this money come from? From ordinary taxpayers. Have they agreed to its being spent for this purpose? Of course not. They have not even been asked How exactly is it spent? No one knows. No doubt it trickles through, here and there, into the pockets of newspapers and other media outlets, and organisations and indi- viduals who push the supranational cause. One does notice that people and bodies who noisily advocate federalism are never short of cash for gobbling and sluicing in expensive restaurants, lavish freebies, trav- elling, pamphleteering and the like. We can be certain they are not spending their own money. They are spending ours. Again, the Tory Party, which is taking us into a federal Europe by stealth, is financed secretively and flatly refuses to come clean about its sources of revenue. Most of its income comes from socially ambitious businessmen who hand over large sums of their share- holders' money and then — in the fullness of time, of course — are rewarded with knighthoods and peerages and quangos and other baubles. They don't spend their own money either. The Labour Party is only marginally better. At least they are open about federalism. The trade union bosses are clear they want the Social Chapter. But they finance Labour by spending their members' money, usually without asking them. As for the Liberal Democrats — let us not stick our noses into that cesspit.
Rich men can sometimes play a useful role in keeping alive 'our liberal political institutions'. I was first persuaded of this point nearly half a century ago by the late Henry Fairlie who quoted the Crichel Down case. The outrageous behaviour of all-powerful bureaucrats in that instance would never have been exposed had not a courageous landowner had the 'wealth and the willingness to use it in defending an important point of constitutional principle. The modern state is a horribly powerful, insensitive, arrogant and often blind jugger- naut, crushing ordinary men and women beneath its wheels. In Soviet Russia, where private wealth had been abolished, there was no means of halting its progress or even of putting up a spirited resistance so 30 million were murdered. In countries like Britain and America, I find it comfort- ing, when the democratic system falters and power is abused by unscrupulous men who have captured control of parties and gov- ernments, to reflect that private wealth exists and can sometimes be available to redress the balance.
Long live the wealthy amateur who comes to the aid of the res publica! To return to the awful Heath for a second, I recall that he shocked his admissions tutor at Balliol when he said he intended to become 'a professional politician'. The tutor, a don of the old school, had never heard such an expression before. It sound- ed to him rather nasty and very un-English.
`Have you heard this story that were an endangered species.' Alas, there are only too many 'professional politicians' around now. They are precisely the kind of people who control the Euro- pean machine, and they go into politics not from a sense of duty or a desire to serve, but from ambition and greed, not to spend their wealth for the public good, but to acquire it for their own. By contrast, the British political tradition has always been nourished by wealthy amateurs who have used inherited wealth to pursue a lifetime of public service in Westminster and Whitehall. The fact that they were rich has enabled them to be disinterested in their own actions and to curb the self-interest of others. I am thinking of Sir Robert Peel, who inherited a cotton fortune, or W.E. Gladstone, whose wealth came from Liver- pool shipping, or the Marquess of Harting- ton — judged the most honourable public man of his day — or Arthur Balfour (land), or Bonar Law and Baldwin, both rich from the iron trade. All of these men made notable contributions not only to the res publica but to the probity and decency of public life, and they were enabled to do so, in part at least, precisely because they had private means. Without money they proba- bly would not have got to the top, or even into Parliament at all. But that is not an abuse of wealth, it is an admirable and pub- lic-spirited and healthy use of it.
It has also been an old tradition of ours that men should make their fortunes and then seek to enter Parliament, again with the notion of disinterested service which wealth makes possible. Jimmy Goldsmith is very much in this tradition, and good luck to him. I believe that the European Union, as at present led and conducted, is a pro- foundly undemocratic institution, con- trolled by a tiny, self-perpetuating elite of hauts fonctionnaires and corrupt politicians a sort of Venetian oligarchy — who do not care a damn about ordinary people or what they think and want, and who are determined to pursue their power-crazed visions irrespective of law or justice, truth or reason. Naturally they do not want a ref- erendum, anywhere or at any time, because that would mean the people can speak directly, on a specific issue, without their voice being filtered through a political sys- tem the elite can manipulate. So I am delighted that Goldsmith is as rich as Croe- sus and generous enough to provide the people with a chance not just to speak but to shout.
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