And one by one, they announce their jobs as lobbyists.

It’s perhaps the most blatant case of legalised corruption in Washington: the revolving door through which America’s elected officials and high-level appointees cash out to become millionaire lobbyists or consultants for special interests who are seeking to game the very system those same public officials helped create.

This year has seen the usual cashouts — a handful of members, almost immediately after leaving office, announcing their new jobs at lobbying firms. Former Representative Dave Reichert (Republican), was chairman of the Trade subcommittee on the tax-writing Ways & Means Committee. His term ended on 3 January. Already, he has joined a lobbying firm where he will be “advising the firm’s clients on trade issues”.

Akin Gump, a lobbying giant, announced three days after the 115^th Congress ended that it was hiring former Representatives Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Lamar Smith. The firm bragged that Ros-Lehtinen was the first woman to chair the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and she asserted that she would “absolutely” be lobbying for foreign governments. From shaping America’s foreign policy to lobbying our government on behalf of foreign governments — it’s the American Dream!

Plenty of others will follow their lead. If things proceed as they have in most recent years, then about half of the 100 departing House members and about half of the 10 departing Senators will go into lobbying.

But already 2019 has also witnessed a couple of extraordinary revolving-door moments — extraordinary because the politician didn’t seem to wait to leave office before firing up the lobbying work.

Congresswoman Lynn Jenkins had her lobbying firm already up and running even before she even left Congress. On 20 November — two weeks after Election Day, and six weeks before her term ended, Jenkins posted on Facebook: “I’m pleased to share that I have recently established LJ STRATEGIES, LLC, a consulting firm providing strategic analysis, comprehensive federal and state government relations, political consulting, and association management.”

“Comprehensive federal and state government relations” means lobbying. Of course, Jenkins couldn’t work for LJ Strategies while serving out the end of her term, but the firm bearing her initials was incorporated while she was still voting on and debating spending bills and other measures that could affect her firm’s future clients.

Running the firm while Jenkins was still in Congress was her longtime congressional chief of staff and former campaign manager Pat Leopold. Federal law bars the ex-Congresswoman from lobbying Congress for her first year out of office, but her lobbying partner and former chief of staff has no such restrictions on him. In fact, Leopold is allowed to lobby Jenkins’ successor, Republican Congressman Steve Watkins, whose campaign Leopold managed last year.

Jon Kyl provided the other extraordinary story.

Kyl, a conservative Republican from Arizona, served four terms in the House before winning a Senate seat in 1994. He served three six-year terms in the Senate before retiring after the 2012 election. That’s when he joined the mighty lobbying firm Covington & Burling. After the two-year cooling-off period federal law imposes on ex-Senators, Kyl began lobbying for clients such as weapons giant Raytheon, drugmaker Merck, and brewer Anheuser-Busch.

In September of last year, after the death of Senator. John McCain, Kyl left Covington to return to the Senate, appointed by Arizona Governor Doug Ducey to serve until a 2020 special election. “Mr Ducey’s aides indicated [Kyl] would sever ties to his clients,” the New York Times reported after the appointment.

But Kyl resigned his seat after just a few months, which wasn’t unexpected, and is already back at Covington & Burling. So while Kyl served as a US Senator, his lobbying firm was apparently keeping his lobbying job open for him.

Even in the swampy world of Washington’s revolving door, this was a remarkable conflict of interest: a lobbyist took a leave of absence from lobbying in order to serve briefly as a US Senator.

The defining trait of this year’s big cashout, though, seems to be that there are more retiring Republican politicians than there are lobbying jobs for all of them. “[M]ore than 60 Republicans exited the House this month,” Politico reported mid-January, “and so many of them are considering heading to K Street that not all of them are likely to find work, according to interviews with lobbyists and headhunters.”

Trying to find work is never fun, but former congressmen and Senators having trouble monetising their public service aren’t going to elicit a great deal of sympathy. A vast majority of Americans favour further restrictions on lobbying by ex-members, beyond the current one-year and two-year limits.

A full 86% in a 2017 poll found support for extended no-lobby periods. Pollsters also presented respondents with an argument against such restrictions. They pointed to the risks of the career and said, “If we cut off [the option of lobbying after retirement], it will discourage people from going into government for fear they may end up with highly limited career options.” Only 26% found that argument convincing.

Why is the revolving door corrupting? There are plenty of reasons. For one, consider the incentives it creates. On the simplest level, politicians and their staff have a personal incentive to play nice with industry and with lobbyists.

Jack Abramoff, the notorious convicted lobbyist from last decade, explained how he and his lobbyists would foster relationships with top staffers, taking them to baseball games in their luxury box suites, and other perks. Half of the point was to show off the wealth a lobbyist has. At some point, the lobbyist would say to the staffer: “By the way, if you’re ever looking to leave Congress, give us a call, you’d fit in well at our firm.”

From then on, even though the staffer still officially worked for the Member of Congress — and thus for the people — Abramoff had the staffer doing his bidding.

The knowledge that a lobbying job is waiting for them when they depart alters the behaviour of politicians and their staff—and thus it alters the shape of our laws. The Democrats’ top two legislative accomplishments of the Obama era, for example, were the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) and the Dodd-Frank financial regulation law. Neither was “socialism”, in that neither took any functions (and thus opportunities for profit) away from private corporations. Instead, both laws entangled the private sector and the government in a more intimate embrace — more regulations, more subsidies, more mandates. Both laws also made things much more complex for industry. Finally, both laws left incredible discretion to the executive branch agencies on how to implement them.

If staffers and politicians had crafted the laws solely to maximize their own value on the lobbying and consulting marketplace, they wouldn’t have done it much differently from this.

After these bills became laws, insurers, hospitals, drugmakers, banks, and hedge funds all relied much more on the clout and insight of former lawmakers and their staff. Sure enough, we got the Great Obamacare Cashout and Great Dodd-Frank Cashout of 2010 through 2013.

Chris Dodd, one of Dodd-Frank’s cosponsors, saw his chief counsel Amy Friend cash out a few months after the bill passed. In the words of the firm that hired her, Promontory Financial, Friend joined a firm to help financial-sector clients navigate “the regulatory implementation of the Dodd-Frank, Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010, which, at 2,300 pages, is one of the most complex and wide-ranging overhauls of the financial regulatory framework in decades”.

More complexity, more business-government entanglement, more opportunity for that lucrative post-congressional work.

The Great Cashout of 2019 is barely underway. It will continue through the Spring. Don’t be surprised to see the firms who scoop up top staff and lawmakers brag about these public servants’ role in shaping America’s byzantine regulatory and tax structure.

Reform is unlikely. There are currently a few bills before Congress to extend the current 1-year or 2-year lobbying bans to lifetime bans, and to expand which officials are covered. But nobody really expects Congress to curb its own ability to make a good living — a good living they believe they are guaranteed by the First Amendment, and have earned through their “public service”.

So while the capital region grows richer, government grows more complex, and public distrust in Washington skyrockets, the revolving door continues to spin smoothly: perfectly legal, while perfectly corrupt.

Established back in 1971 as a not-for-profit foundation, and headquartered in Geneva, the World Economic Forum has, as its mission statement, “to improve the state of the world”; it characterises itself as “independent, impartial and not tied to any special interests”.

Right now, though, it feels like that motivation is rather misplaced: wouldn’t it be far more useful for the state of the world to have an organisation that promoted the special interests of the majority of its inhabitants?

In order to talk ‘mission’, every year, about 3,000 participants “from every sphere of influence: business, government, civil society, academia, arts and culture, and media” descend upon Davos “to discuss how to build a better version of globalisation”. Interestingly, equitable participation isn’t a hallmark of that better version. Just one in five participants are women. The best represented regions are the ones with the largest share of global wealth and power, notably; Western Europe, North America and Asia.

The WEF gives no breakdown of the individual, organisational or collective corporate wealth of their participants. But, then, to do so might only highlight the extent of a purpose-defeating disparity. For Davos is where the wealthy and powerful gather to talk about everyone else. And, as Oxfam International’s latest report notes, the top 26 billionaires on the planet have stockpiled riches equal to that of the poorest 3.8 billion people combined. In contrast to the wealth increase for the tip-top of the financial food chain – the number of global billionaires has doubled since the 2008 financial crisis – the wealth of the world’s poorest citizens dropped by 11% last year.

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Indeed, though the snow up in the Alps is bright and sparkly, and the alcohol top-shelf, the economy beyond the ski slopes and fancy chalets is one of gathering clouds. While, last year, attendees were fairly enthusiastic about the global economic outlook and their political fortunes – this year, not so much.

Davos, of course, will maintain the status quo of pomp and circumstance despite the political turmoil surrounding Brexit, the bi-partisan hostility infusing the US government shutdown, the uncertainty of upcoming EU elections, and the looming global economic slowdown. Its tone-deafness, though, will be starker than usual.

World leaders such as the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, Brazil’s new president, Jair Bolsonaro, and the Chinese Vice President, Wang Qishan, will be in attendance, clapping each other on the back. They will hobnob with business luminaries such as Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and JPMorgan Chase & Co. Jaime Dimon, of JPMorgan,  will be there – even though his firm, the largest bank in the US, missed analysts’ fourth quarter earnings expectations and is predicting more trouble for the economy ahead. (It was subsidised by a government bailout, cheap rates courtesy of the Federal Reserve, and lawyers that are adept at settling fraud-related investigation penalties.)

There is, however, a growing list of non-attendees. These include President Trump and, as of last week, mindful of the federal shutdown and how it would look if they were to turn up to the Swiss shindig, the rest of his delegation. Theresa May and the French President, Emmanuel Macron are also mired in problems in their own nations and know that no amount of Davos discussion can solve them.

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It’s all a rather different scenario from last year, when, in his keynote speech, Trump declared: “To be successful, it is not enough to invest in our economy – we must invest in OUR PEOPLE.” He also said: AMERICA IS OPEN FOR BUSINESS AND WE ARE COMPETITIVE ONCE AGAIN.” (Those capitals are courtesy of the WEF’s website transcript of President Trump’s 2018 address.)

These words ring rather hollow today: under Trump’s direction, using a loophole that enabled him to bypass congressional approval under the guise of national security, the White House went on to slap a host of tariffs on US trade partners that has sent the global economy further into a tailspin. In addition, the US government has been shut down for nearly five weeks, as the President and the Democratic party duke it out over a $5.7 billion stalemate regarding a wall between the US and Mexico, shirking responsibility to pay federal workers in the meantime.

But it’s not just America. So much else has become less secure in the world. Last year, Macron delivered an hour-long overture, shaped as an ode to France’s resurrection. It was met by a standing ovation. This year, following the gilets jaunes rebellion in the streets of Paris, his popularity continues to dive.

A year ago, Theresa May was skating on dangerously thin Brexit ice, with people deserting the hall before she’d finished her speech. This year, she’s crashing through it. What point Switzerland?

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Meanwhile, economic growth everywhere is declining. Original European Central Bank forecasts for Eurozone economic growth in 2018 were at 2.4%, but now the World Bank says that growth slowed to 1.9% in 2018 and that it will decline to 1.6% in 2019. We are all dealing with a less certain year ahead.

So at what point will the Davos mob realise that their stated aspirations and world-improving diatribes are nothing more than posturing in the face of their own shortcomings?

Part of the problem is that it’s not only empty posturing. There’s also powerplay afoot. Most of the WEF’s funding flows from the world’s most elite businesses. These multinational corporations can join as members or partners depending on how much they are willing to shell out. Fees range from about £50,000 to £500,000. Most of them include a seat at Davos for the CEO, but there’s an extra fee thrown in for Davos participation.

The companies on that rarefied guestlist have no problem paying exorbitant fees. They include Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, Citigroup, and HSBC holdings – banks which have been recipients of the taxpayer and central bank largesse, despite engaging in such nefarious business practices as money laundering, rigging markets and committing fraud.

But these corporate fees that underwrite the non-business participants, the ones who can’t afford the hefty price for access that include leaders from civil society, the arts, young global leaders, media leaders, and technically, the heads of state and ministers. And it is here that the Davos ethos really does come unstuck: if corporations are paying for public leaders to attend, then the power relationship is clearly skewed in their favour.

If these gilded elites truly wanted to change the world, they might start by realising that the world is rightly sceptical of all that they do. It’s pointless suggesting they might fly economy and sit in the audience while real people discuss the state of their world – but that would be more in line with the stated intentions of Davos. Or at least, it might inject a little more honesty into events and give it a relevance it is so sorely lacking.

In one sense, this reflects an intolerant style of argument that has become ubiquitous in recent years. Rather than engaging generously with an opposing view, the conspiratorial style seeks first to impugn an individual’s motives. ‘I believe X because I am a good person, whereas you believe Y because you are paid to believe it’.

That said, when it comes to think tanks, it does seem reasonable to ask ‘Who funds you?’ – though not in the manner of a Twitter commissar.

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Representatives from organisations such as the Taxpayer’s Alliance (TPA), the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), the Adam Smith Institute, Demos and the IEA regularly feature as talking heads on political discussion programmes.

In a speech to Policy Exchange in October, the Home Secretary Sajid Javid MP said the think tank “has helped us shape policy“. Last year Open Democracy reported that the TPA, the pro-Brexit website Brexit Central and the IEA were holding monthly strategy meetings attended by Conservative MPs.

All of which shows that think tanks wield significant influence in the development of public policy in Britain. And just as politicians must disclose donations, and charity trustees must disclose conflicts of interest, it is legitimate to ask where think tanks get their funding.

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An investigation by The Times last year reported that think tanks are earning millions of pounds from private organisations that hope to wield influence in Whitehall, and often publish reports in areas of interest to their corporate sponsors.

For example, The Times investigation reported that Demos published a paper on the costs to the NHS of untreated ADHD. The paper was funded by Shire Pharmaceuticals, which, according to newspaper, sold £1.7 billion of ADHD medicine in 2016. Similarly, Policy Network published a report on the benefits of autonomous vehicles to the European economy – commissioned by Nissan.

The think tanks featured in The Times investigation defended the independence of their publications and stressed the editorial control they exercise over them. In contrast to the IEA, Demos does declare its donors. And it would be a mistake to assume that think tanks are pushing a particular line simply because they are in the pay of shadowy donors. But soft power – as well as the way it is exercised – matters a great deal in a liberal democracy.

The ability to get a piece of research off the ground often depends on the ability to secure funding for it, and this usually means finding a wealthy sponsor to back it. In other words, you are unlikely to find a wealthy corporate sponsor if you cannot find a topic that piques the interest of a wealthy corporate sponsor. The same applies as a general rule to trade union funding for left-leaning causes: they are hardly likely to hand money over to think tanks that are advocating a more hostile environment for trade unions.

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Murky sources of funding are particularly worrying where think tanks have charitable status – like the IEA and Demos – and so must have a public benefit and remain non-partisan. I am not suggesting here that British think tanks are suspending their critical faculties in order to please their corporate donors, or that they have broken any laws, but funding-driven distortions in research have the power to skew public debate. And ‘lobbying’ on behalf of individuals or small groups is not compatible with charitable status.

The IEA, one of several think tanks that refuses to routinely disclose who its donors are, has fallen foul of the Charity Commission in the past. An undercover report by Unearthed, a wing of Greenpeace, found last year that the IEA had arranged for US donors who had pledged to donate £35,000 to have a private meeting with Brexit minister Steve Baker MP. The IEA denied breaching any laws governing its charitable status.

In addition to this, in December of last year the Charity Commission ordered the IEA to remove a report from its website – Plan A+: Creating a prosperous post-Brexit UK – because it was “not sufficiently balanced and neutral”. In 2018 the Charity Commission also ordered the Legatum Institute Foundation to take down a report – Brexit Inflection Point – from its website. The commission said the report “crossed a clear line” in terms of breaching impartiality rules.

Most think tanks have a very clear agenda, however that is not the problem. In fact, those working for public-facing think tanks rarely try to disguise their ideological position. Nor is there any evidence that donors are giving money to think tanks with guarantees that future research papers will echo their own corporate interests.[1. Then again, it is unlikely corporate sponsors would give any money at all if they believed a think tank would produce findings that undermined those interests]

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The real issue is transparency – the public should have a right to know who funds organisations that wield such influence in public life. Many think tanks are indeed financially transparent, meaning people can draw their own conclusions about their research. However, according to Transparify, which ranks them based on their financial disclosure, several high profile think tanks continue to take money from sources which they choose not to disclose.

This matters when money translates into a form of soft power. Think tanks generate reports that can alter the direction of – some might even say distort – public debate. It doesn’t necessarily invalidate a report on, say, climate change to know that those who financed it have links to the oil industry. But is reasonable that readers are informed about such links.

One of the biggest issues in public life in Britain today is trust. The public lacks trust in politicians, in institutions, and in the way the country is being run. There is also a growing sense that politicians are too close to big business. Transparency in public life is essential to reversing this trend. As part of the democratic process, ‘Who funds you?’ is a vital question.

In December, the National Crime Agency froze a bank account linked to a scheme that laundered billions of pounds out of Azerbaijan, an ex-Soviet republic, having already made the UK property of an Azeri banker’s wife the target of its first ever Unexplained Wealth Order (UWO). That same month, a solicitor was fined £45,000 for trying to help the daughters of Azerbaijan’s president buy luxury property in London, and failing to do the appropriate checks on the origin of their wealth.

By the low standards of law enforcement in the UK, where allegations of laundering the proceeds of grand corruption tend to be greeted with something between a shrug and a grin, this is big. Rumours are rife that other wealthy Azeris are being considered for UWOs of their own, up to and including members of the ruling Aliyev family. If these three steps become the start of a journey into the heart of all Azeri-owned wealth in the UK, it could prove uncomfortable, and not just for lawyers and estate agents.

London and Baku have a close relationship thanks to BP, which opened an office in Azerbaijan within six months of its independence from the Soviet Union. The oil revenue has gradually allowed the Aliyev family – first Heydar, the former head of Azerbaijan’s KGB, and then, following his death in 2003, his son Ilham – to turn the country into a hereditary kleptocracy. Heydar is commemorated by a vast swooping museum in central Baku, designed by Zaha Hadid and set among magnificent fountains. This glorious building houses various bits of ephemera from his life – a train ticket, a school report from the KGB academy, various of his limousines – like the grave goods of a pharaoh.

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Under the rule of the Aliyevs, their friends and relations have become enormously wealthy, and used the global banking system to launder much of their money into the West (as revealed by the “Azerbaijani Laundromat” leak of financial documents). “Azerbaijan’s economy is largely dominated by monopolistic interests,” wrote the US embassy in a 2010 cable released by wikileaks. The cable was part of a series in which American diplomats explained to Washington which families were most powerful in Azerbaijan, and they provide a fascinating insight into a system where bribes, influence, and abuse of power control everything.

This particular cable dealt with the business activities of Emergencies Minister Kamaladdin Heydarov (of “the second most powerful commercial family in Azerbaijan”, according to the State Department officials). The kind of behaviour described in the cable was beginning to get Azerbaijan a bad reputation and it was to improve the country’s image that, in 2008, Heydarov’s two sons Nijat and Tale created a London-based lobby group: The European Azerbaijan Society (TEAS).

TEAS specialised in promoting Azerbaijan, and acted as secretary for the All-Party Parliamentary Group for the country. It flew MPs out to Baku, where it showed them around, and tried to persuade them that the country was a reliable source of energy, the wronged party in its long-running dispute with Armenia, and a generally lovely place for all its citizens.  “Such visits have great effectiveness, because to read about Azerbaijan is one thing, witnessing the development of the country is another thing,” Tale Heydarov boasted at a lobbying conference in Baku in March 2012.

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Jim Sheridan, then the Labour MP for Paisley, accepted a three-day £3,100 trip to Azerbaijan in March 2013, and came back full of praise. “We discovered that the trade unions there enjoyed better relationships and more employment rights than we do here in the UK. Azerbaijan is a young democracy and we are the oldest, yet we are still fighting for employment rights,” he told the House of Commons later that year. (The International Trade Union Confederation is less sanguine, saying that in Azerbaijan many labour rights exist only on paper.)

Over on the Government benches, Mark Field, Tory MP for Westminster and recipient of a five-day £3,500 trip in May 2011, told the Commons in the month after he got back that Azerbaijan “has made tremendous strides forward both politically and economically in recent years. That should be recognised and rewarded.” At the time he was on TEAS’ payroll, as a member of its advisory board.

I asked Heydarov about the source of TEAS’ funding, when I met him on the sidelines of a business forum that TEAS organised in Mayfair. He said the money came from members’ subscriptions, but refused to be drawn on their identities or the amount they contributed. These members have certainly been very generous, whoever they are. TEAS and other Azeri lobbying groups spent more than £70,000 on MPs alone. Most of it went on 23 trips to Azerbaijan, although Slough’s Labour MP Fiona McTaggart received £1,000 of hospitality in Britain, at the Royal Windsor Horse Show, and TEAS even got into publishing.

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When Liam Fox wrote a meditation on globalisation called Rising Tides it failed to trouble either the charts or the reviewers on either side of the Atlantic (sales figures show it has sold just over 3,000 copies in English worldwide), but TEAS bought the Azeri translation rights for an astonishing £11,400, paid in two instalments in 2014, and then flew him to Istanbul to promote it at the cost of another £3,579.94.

One book industry source described this as barely believable: “Azeri rights for something like Malala, or Michelle Obama, or Dan Brown might go for £11,000, but it would need to be a big name. This does not look like a wise investment”.

Of course, the nature of an investment depends on the return you are looking for. If TEAS was seeking friends, rather than profits, perhaps the investment was a wise one, particularly since Fox has risen to be the minister in charge of negotiating our post-Brexit trade deals.

“MPs have a history of accepting funding from Azerbaijan’s lobbyists and keeping quiet about gross and systemic human rights violations, including some now in senior governmental positions,” said Rebecca Vincent, a former US diplomat in Baku and now head of the UK Bureau of Reporters without Borders.

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She was particularly critical about the fact that so few British politicians had supported journalists who have revealed the extent of the wealth of Azerbaijan’s ruling family, and been harassed or jailed as a result. “As the source of the largest foreign direct investment in Azerbaijan, the UK has a responsibility to speak out. As long as our politicians turn a blind eye to this repression, courageous individuals like Mehman Huseynov and Khadija Ismayilova will continue to pay the price.”

This is not to say that TEAS was an organisation packed with ruthless and sinister geniuses, since it was at times almost hilariously incompetent. In 2010, it hired the 1980s two–hit-wonder Smiley Culture to produce propaganda music in the mistaken belief he could persuade Lady Gaga to do the singing, which he could not. This and other pratfalls notwithstanding, the budding scandal over Azeri money in London does raise questions over whether MPs should have been quite so willing to accept the organisation’s money.

Goran Lindblad, a Swedish ex-MEP who worked for TEAS in Brussels, told me his pay cheques came from a Marshall Islands company via Danske Bank’s branch in Tallinn, the same branch that is now at the centre of perhaps the biggest money laundering scandal of all time: the movement of €200 billion through non-resident accounts in 2007-15.

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We have become accustomed to hearing stories of kleptocratic cash pouring into UK property, which is what the NCA is (belatedly) beginning to investigate, but perhaps the scandal will turn out to be not how much dirty cash was spent in Knightsbridge, but how much ended up in Westminster. Because Azerbaijan is not the only country that has sought to buy friends in this way.

Ukrainian oligarch Dymtro Firtash ran a similar lobbying group, as did the Bahraini ruling family. Bashar al-Assad’s father-in-law ran the British Syrian Society, which took MPs to Damascus. Even the Russians tried to get into the game, with a group called the Conservative Friends of Russia, though Kremlin money eventually proved too hot even for our MPs to handle.

There are many urgent issues being ignored by politicians thanks to the Brexit gridlock, but perhaps this is the most important: who exactly has been paying their wages? In a democracy, voters have to know who their elected representatives are working for. Once trust in their integrity has been lost, it will be all but impossible to restore.

That might seem a surprising statement given Russia’s record over the past two and a half decades. I lived in Moscow for several years in the 1990s and return relatively often. Most of my friends have fled, citing physical danger, demoralisation and the impossibility of doing business legitimately in the Mafia state established by Vladimir Putin. So why should we be so worried by a small state in central Europe, with the most impenetrable of languages and little geo-strategic influence? Hungary was last synonymous with the global power when it was allied with Austria in the Austro-Hungarian empire.

The problem with contemporary Hungary is that it represents Europe’s problem. It is at the heart of the continent, geographically and spiritually, and the contagion of its dangerous model is spreading to its neighbours and beyond.

The architect of it all, the Putin mini-me, is Viktor Orbán. The trouble is that he has been elected Prime Minister of Hungary four times now, the last three in succession, as an avowed authoritarian. He is obviously doing something that people, or enough of them, like. Or are impervious to.

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A quick reprise: Orbán shot to prominence in 1989, in the year of revolutions in Central and Eastern Europe, when as a twenty-something firebrand he denounced the Communist government in a speech in Budapest’s Heroes Square. He demanded free elections and the withdrawal of Soviet troops.

Hungary had been the loosest member of the Warsaw Pact and its transition from dictatorship was relatively smooth. The country followed a familiar path of democratisation cum privatisation. The problem was, as with Russia and others in the 1990s, the transformation became synonymous with theft. Those with power and influence – mainly but not exclusively those with connections under the old regime – were the beneficiaries. The ordinary voter, particularly people who had worked in the old smoke stack industries or in the public sector, suffered.

Orbán took office for the first time in 1998 at the helm of his right-wing Fidesz party, becoming at 35 the country’s second youngest leader. Already his modus operandi was becoming apparent. He had little patience for negotiation, seeking to sweep aside parliament and others who stood in his way. His administration was marked by a number of corruption scandals. In spite of the problems, Western governments saw him as a reliable ally. Hungary was joining Nato and the European Union.

They say power corrupts, but in his case, it was the loss of power in 2002 that turned Orbán. He resolved that next time, not only would he need to win, he would need to take control of all the levers. He began working on what his supporters terms a patriotic cohort of entrepreneurs, people on whom he could rely for political muscle and cash; in return they could benefit commercially.

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Hungary developed a Russian-style oligarchic elite. The rise of Fidesz-linked businessmen happened in plain sight.

Orbán developed his concept of “illiberal democracy”, taking on the so-called ‘global elites’, in a precursor to the mindset of Brexit and Trump that would become so seductive later on.

The financial crash of 2007-8 hit Hungary hard. Unemployment shot up, living standards crashed. All around them Hungarians saw European countries, especially those in the south (like Greece) or east (such as Latvia) suffering under the debt burden. This fuelled the already latent mix of resentment and xenophobia. Hungary has traditionally seen itself as encircled.

In April 2010, Orbán swept to power with a stunning victory and the two thirds majority required to enact radical change. He planned, even during the transition, for an assault on the constitution. He needed to go after those who might resist his power grab: first the media, then the judiciary. His strategy was predicated on removing checks and balance and silencing investigations and critical voices.

Over the next five years, he used his party’s dominance to pass more than 1,000 laws, many of them enacted after a few hours debate and often presented by low ranking lawmakers who had not read them, let alone written them. Through legislative sleights of hand and force of will he transformed his country into a political test bed for a 21^st century version of autocracy, combining crony capitalism and far Right rhetoric with a one-party political culture.

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Old school friends, neighbours and football mates (he was obsessed with the sport) made fortunes. The more control he seized, the easier it became to distribute largesse – and to receive loyalty in return. Self-styled entrepreneurs queued up to ‘work’ with him. Except they weren’t particularly entrepreneurial. It was all about state assets, or ‘state capture’ as it came to be known.

Unlike famous Russians such as Roman Abramovich or Oleg Deripaska, their Hungarian equivalents are not household names. Nor do they count their money in billions. For them it tends to be merely hundreds of millions. But as a proportion of national income, it is still not to be sniffed at.

Previously the one person whom Hungarians had heard of was Lajos Simicska. He was at school, military service and university with Orbán. He helped him build up Fidesz, assembling a loyal media empire and a sprawling construction business. Then he got too big for his boots and was kicked out of the inner circle. He is still Hungary’s 11^th richest man, worth £250 million.

Fourteenth on the list, with an estimated wealth of £180 million is Andy Vajna, a Hungarian-American who made some of his fortune as a producer of films like Rambo and Total Recall. He was appointed Hungary’s film commissioner by Orbán in 2011. Among the lucrative state contracts he was awarded were five of seven casino licences.

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The West divided: Populism versus liberalism in the 21st century

By Peter Franklin

Perhaps the most exotic is Lorinc Meszaros, a former gas fitter and mayor of Orbán’s home village of Felcsut (a village where they built a football stadium to accommodate a crowd more than twice the size of its population). Thanks to a number of state contracts, he jumped to number five on the rich list, his wealth soaring five-fold in just one year to £330 million. Asked by reporters how he had grown his business faster than Mark Zuckerberg, he declared: “maybe I’m smarter”.

Hungary has built this system from within the European Union – with EU funds. Some 60% of state contracts, billions of Euro, are funded by the EU. The Corruption Research Centre Budapest, a non-governmental organisation, analysed all public procurement contracts from 2010-16. It found that the aggregate value of contracts won by four Fidesz-linked businessmen (including the prime minister’s son-in-law) was 13 times larger than the size of other contracts. Their total haul came to £1.8 billion. Sometimes contracts are put out to tender; sometimes tenders take place, but competitors know they are going through the motions.

The rot set in a long time ago. Corruption was rife under Communism, when consumer goods were in short supply, it was all about who you knew and who could get hold of what. During the mad-dash liberalisation of the 1990s, the opportunities for self-enrichment increased exponentially, as assets were privatised. From Russia to Ukraine, Moldova to Armenia, they were effectively stolen, as the notional purchase price did not remotely correspond to value.

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Orbán's political jackpot

By Eszter Zalan

The most vocal criticism of cronyism comes, dishearteningly, from the only major opposition force, the far-right Jobbik party. Before and during the last election, it erected billboards across the country. One showed Orbán with three businessmen above a slogan in the typeface from the film Godfather, which read “gangsters”. Another brandished the words: “You work. They steal.”

Hungary has slid down Transparency International’s global legal table. It is now rated as more corrupt than Montenegro – graft was cited by the EU as the main reason why the Montenegrans were told they are not ready for membership.

The founders of the EU never considered the possibility that a member state would go backwards, in terms of politics and probity. It did not create procedures to deal with the new era of populism and cronyism. Viviane Reding, EU Justice Commissioner at the time of Hungary’s accession told the New York Times recently: “We never thought that someone would go the other way.”

Orbán invariably gets away with it. Just occasionally he runs into problems. His labour law passed in December has led to genuine street protests, which he has not been able to dismiss as part of his global elite conspiracy. The anger has come from ordinary men and women who will be required to work compulsory overtime, to compensate for labour force shortages exacerbated by his visceral anti-immigration policies.

One rule for some, one rule for others is, as the wily Orbán will know, a dangerous place for any politician to be. The crony capitalism that is now deeply embedded is facing its first serious test.

Though many democracies around the world have adopted elements of the Westminster system, there’s been little enthusiasm for one of its most prominent features – the House of Lords.

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The ‘Upper House’ of the British Parliament is an anomaly – the product not so much of a long and illustrious history, but of a series of half-finished reforms. It is a botch-job and everyone knows it.

This doesn’t appear to be a problem for other countries. Almost without exception, the mature democracies of the world manage perfectly well with either an elected or no second chamber – and yet the British balk at both options.

We may not love the House of Lords, but we’ve had it for so long that its abolition would feel like an amputation. As for the other option, the creation of hundreds more elected, paid politicians would not be welcomed by a country heartily sick of politics.

The underlying failure on the part of House of Lords reformers is that they don’t have a credible answer to a basic question: What would be the point?

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How developers bought the Tory party

By Brett Christophers

To find a way forward, it is sometimes necessary to look backwards. For most of its history, the purpose of the House of Lords was to represent the nobility – not out of any sense of democratic legitimacy, of course, but because they were powerful. From the point of view of the king and the country, it was preferable to have the barons throwing their weight around in Parliament than on the battlefield.

Perhaps, this should also be the purpose of the House of Lords today. Instead of a glorified quango of the great and the good (or at least people a party leader owed a favour to), the Upper Chamber should be used to formally recognise and safely channel the true powers in the land.

In theory, it is democracy that legitimates authority and confers it upon the elected representatives of the people. In practice, politicians are subject to the influence of lobbyists – the unelected representatives of money and power. So here, offered not entirely without irony, is a modest proposal: let us turn the House of Lords into a House of Lobbyists.

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The reformed House would operate on the basis of proportional representation – i.e. the seats allocated to each corporation would be proportional to the amount of tax it paid to the British state. The most efficient tax avoiders – and I’m especially thinking of you here, tech giants – would therefore pay a very direct political price. If a corporation or industry wanted more seats in the chamber, they’d have to pay more tax. In short, no representation without taxation – and you can’t say fairer than that.

(By the way, while the biggest companies would have one or more seats to their name, smaller enterprises would be allowed to secure seals through their chosen umbrella bodies.)

The allocation of seats would also take into account state aid: various subsidies, grants etc from the state being subtracted from the taxes paid by the recipients to the state. This might require some industries to suffer negative representation – i.e. the appointment of members of the new House to act against their interests.

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How British politics is failing

By Peter Kellner

Every few years, the allocations would be recalculated – with membership of the chamber shifting over time to reflect the changing fortunes of the business world. If, however, a business went bankrupt between recalculations then there would have to be a by-election. Well, more of an auction really: the seat being sold off to the highest bidder.

For every seat allocated to it, a corporation would be entitled to ennoble a lobbyist of its choice – whose title would have to reveal his or her allegiance. Imagine, if you will, an entirely notional scenario in which Barry Scott of TV advertising fame were elevated to the peerage. He would sit in the House of Lobbyists as Lord Scott of Cillit Bang or, perhaps, as Lord Reckitt Benckiser Plc. Thus, if his lordship were to speak in, say, a debate on, say, the regulation of household cleaning products, his interest in the matter would be clear to all concerned. This would be a much more transparent system than the actual House of Lords, where one has to keep track of non-executive directorships and various other interests to understand where lordly loyalties currently lie.

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The reformed upper chamber would have no more powers than the existing of Lords – except one: only members of the House of Lobbyists would be allowed to lobby elected politicians and civil servants. Lobbying by a non-member would be a criminal offence. Naturally, members would be allowed a limited number of ‘parliamentary aides’ to assist them in their lobbying duties, but these would be registered and, of course, paid for by the corporations they represent.

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Who will take on the undeserving rich?

By Deborah Hargreaves

As for meetings between ennobled lobbyists and ministers / senior officials, these would be registered as being either open-door or closed-door. All open-door meetings would be streamed on the internet and a transcript published in Hansard. Closed-door meetings on the other hand would be entirely private; however, the ministers and officials participating in them would be forbidden from subsequently taking a job with the organisations represented on the other side of the table.

As with the by-elections mentioned above, time for meetings in ministerial diaries would be auctioned-off – a much fairer and above board way of allocating this precious resource. The proceeds would, of course, go to straight to the public purse, more than recouping the cost of the complementary tea and biscuits. An officially sanctioned system of ‘cash for questions’ would be another money spinner.

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By now you may be asking yourself whether I’m serious about any of this. The answer, of course, is not very.

The proposals I’ve outlined above would amount to a system of institutionalised influence-peddling at the very heart of our democracy. But how much worse would it be than what we’ve got now?

But when Letwin delivered his final report in the autumn, it was a major disappointment to critics of the property sector. There was seemingly no evidence of hoarding after all. “How can anybody come up with the idea that build-out rates are not slow, and that they are not tied to the monetary return to developers?”, one exasperated observer, a Labour councillor in Leeds, demanded to know. 

If critical observers were deflated, they should not have been surprised. Vigorously lobbied and generously funded by the property sector, the Conservative Party has long shied away from meaningful confrontation with this constituency; if it has occasionally talked the talk, it has invariably declined to walk the walk.

Nowhere is this symbiotic, money-mediated relationship between the Conservatives and the property sector clearer than in regard to the ex-public land that today fills out UK developers’ land banks. Since Margaret Thatcher’s accession to power in 1979, the Tories and the property sector have been the core pillars of what the academic Philip Kivell 30 years ago described as a “coalition of interests” ranged against public landownership that also included private landowners, financial institutions, private industrialists and the growing population of homeowners. 

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Home Truths – Part III: The nine drivers of a broken market

By Liam Halligan

This coalition has in recent decades presided over a profoundly significant and undemocratic phenomenon that has been largely hidden from the public eye. On the one hand, the property sector has channelled money the Conservatives’ way, while repeatedly calling for the government to “release” more public land to the private sector. On the other hand, successive Conservative administrations have succeeded in pressuring public-sector bodies across local and central government alike to give vast amounts of their land to those developers – usually in return for monetary compensation, but sometimes literally as a gift. Public land was sold when New Labour were in power, too, but in nothing like the same volumes.

This is land that was owned by the public, but which the public at large has never consented to relinquish; indeed, it has never been asked. 

Plenty has been written and said over the years about the “revolving door” between the property sector and UK local authorities, and about how this local nexus smooths the planning process, facilitating the granting of permission for what are often deeply contentious developments. But the nexus between the property sector and central government has been equally pernicious, if not more important: the impetus (sometimes compulsion) to dispose of public land has consistently come from Whitehall. This nexus has not been properly investigated. Its workings have eluded critical commentary. 

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Ten vested interests the Tories failed to tackle

By Peter Franklin

Is money the only explanation for the zeal with which governments of the past four decades have pursued land privatisation? Almost certainly not. The trailblazers of such privatisation have believed in it, often passionately. Land, they have maintained, is simply better off in private-sector hands, where it will allegedly be managed more efficiently and – through market mechanisms – allocated more productively.  

But it is scarcely credible that money has not played a significant role. It is unlikely to be a coincidence for example that the two sectors that have long been the biggest buyers of disposed public land and that have therefore benefited most from land privatisation – the property sector and financial institutions – have also long numbered among the Conservative Party’s biggest donors, and in fact have been the very biggest two since 2015, during which time the pace of land privatisation has accelerated. ‘Follow the money’ is ever a reliable adage in the world of politics and policy. 

In 2011 it was revealed that property firms had given over £3 million to the Conservative Party over the previous three years, “including large gifts from companies seeking to develop rural land”. Developers were also paying for access to senior Tories through the Conservative Property Forum, “a club of elite donors which sets up ‘breakfast meetings’ to discuss planning and property issues”. In early 2010, the forum had met with Grant Shapps; a year later, Shapps, by this time the housing minister, launched the government’s flagship programme to release to developers by 2015 enough central government land across England to build up to 100,000 new homes.

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May should set her sights on the crony capitalists

By Liam Halligan

Yes, the country has a housing shortage, and yes, the public sector owned plenty of developable land. But by Shapps’s own admission, the private sector – placed under no comparable obligation to release such land to developers – owned much more. And the idea that large swathes of public-sector land were (and are) sitting idle, being wasted, is simply a myth.

Money, it is clear, talks. 

And it carried on talking. In 2014 it was reported that a property developer that boasted of boosting its profits through land banking had donated in the region of £300,000 to the Conservative Party since 2010. Numerous comparable revelations have followed. In 2018 alone, the Conservatives received at least £1.3m in donations from individuals and companies linked to the property sector.

Part of the reason that the property sector’s lobbying of government has been so effective in precipitating the privatisation of public land is that its money has bought it a seat at the decision-making table. It has increasingly been the property sector itself that advises Whitehall on its strategy vis-à-vis public land. 

The most egregious instance of the fox being ushered into the henhouse concerns the so-called Expert Advisory Panel commissioned in February 2012 to advise the government on delivering new homes through the disposal of “surplus” public-sector sites. The person appointed as chairman of this esteemed panel was Tony Pidgley, founder and chairman of Berkeley Group Holdings, one of the UK’s largest property developers, and, needless to say, a personal Tory party donor. 

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Without new foundations, capitalism will collapse

By Charlotte Pickles

Fast forward to November of the same year and the publication of the Panel’s final report. The report contained three case study examples of “land that has previously been released from the public sector and which has successfully delivered new housing”; the Panel had “considered what lessons can be learned” from these. One, notably, was the Woodberry Down estate in London. There, in the face of community protest, some 2,000 council houses have been demolished, to be replaced eventually by over 4,000 new homes, some for “affordable” rental and some for private purchase. Crucially, upon completion, the land occupied by the private properties will be retained by the site developer. This developer, it turned out, was none other than Berkeley Group. 

How much had Berkeley paid for this land? Nothing. The local authority provided the land “at nil cost”. Little wonder perhaps that by 2014, Berkeley’s profits had surged sufficiently to pay Pidgley (by now the recipient of a CBE for “services to the housing sector”) £23.2m in cash and shares. In any event, Woodberry Down was one of the three “successful” cases from which the Panel – led by Pidgley – had learned lessons about public land disposal and proceeded to advise the Government. 

None of this should be acceptable in a professedly democratic polity. The government should not be taking advice from those with such obvious vested interests. It should have, and use, its own experts. Nor should the government be receiving donations from the same people who advise them. If money continues to pollute the politics of land in the way it currently does, we can only expect undemocratic outcomes to continue to ensue.