Andy Burnham has already made a mistake that will cost him his premiership: he lost his nerve over political donations | George Monbiot

Damn the electorate. They’re so impatient. No sooner do they get a new leader than they want another one. Those ingrates are *already* starting to grumble about Andy Burnham. Maybe the country is becoming ungovernable. Perhaps it’s social media. Or a consumerist culture, always picking the next shiny thing. Perhaps we’re addicted to drama. As we’re on our sixth prime minister in 10 years, and as similar levels of discontent surface in many other countries, these claims are recited across the media. What’s wrong with us?

Yet our disgruntlement is entirely rational. We give up so quickly on our prime ministers because they give up so quickly on us. Though it may involve different issues, it is always the same betrayal: the public interest is sacrificed for the sake of a tiny number of immensely wealthy people. And it tends to happen almost immediately.

The latest example, which has triggered both fury and grim resignation, is Burnham’s backtracking on his intention to cap political donations. It was hardly a radical policy: he proposed that no person would be able to give more than £500,000 to a political party in one year. That would still have granted the very wealthy disproportionate influence over our politics. I have long believed that the only fair system is one in which there should be no private donations at all beyond a standard, fixed membership fee. Otherwise voters will always take second place to money. But at the moment there is no cap, which ensures that billionaires can buy political parties and their platforms. So a £500,000 maximum, pathetic as it is, is at least a start. In a subsequent pledge, Burnham suggested that it could gradually be lowered.

Now, we are told, even this high cap has been abandoned: the representation of the people bill will concentrate instead on introducing Keir Starmer’s risible proposals, which are intended to limit donations sent from abroad but not from within the UK: as if billionaire donors and their wealth managers have no expertise in transferring money from one account to another. The loopholes are designed in.

Burnham’s buckling on this issue is not a small matter. It cuts to the quick of what this country is and how it works. It has immense implications for democracy, for policy formation and for every other aspect of civic life. What it means is that the ultra-rich will continue to own our politics and our country. Succumb to the power of money and you will find yourself, like Starmer, tongue-tied and immobilised, unable to rise to any challenge that requires a confrontation with oligarchic might. In other words, get this wrong and every other wrong thing follows.

The official reason for Burnham’s U-turn is that trade unions objected: they have long channelled large sums into the Labour party. I doubt this is the real explanation; most of the donations Burnham received for his leadership campaign came from large private donors. Almost half was supplied by Lord Sainsbury, who was also a major funder of the Starmer project. Union money scarcely featured.

But even if Burnham *has* retreated from his promise for the sake of the unions, I believe trade union funding is also problematic. It ensures that sectoral interests are elevated above the general interest. For example, Labour governments know they can safely bash benefit recipients, who aren’t unionised, while they tread very carefully – far too carefully in my view – around the interests of oil workers. And if the unions believe that an uncapped system works for them, they are deluded. They can never match the spending power of billionaires, whose interests in most cases are diametrically opposed to those of their members.

The power of the ultra-rich is now manifest in every policy governments do adopt and the policies they don’t. We see it in the new protest laws and their applications, which become more absurd by the week. Labelling protesters “terrorists” is part of a long-running programme to ensure that no one dares protest about anything any more. This programme has been rolled out across the world, through model legislation drawn up by junktanks funded by some of the richest people on Earth. Just as it did in the 18th century, an ever more extreme defence of property keeps pace with a growing concentration of wealth.

We see it in the way that datacentres have been labelled “critical national infrastructure”, enabling the government to bypass the usual planning process and impose them on communities, regardless of their impacts on local people’s quality of life, on water resources, energy supply and climate breakdown. Again, similar measures are being imposed in other countries at the behest of the same billionaire-funded groups. The role of governments appears to have been reduced to nodding them through.

We see it in the Burnham government’s insistence this summer, in the midst of shattering droughts, heatwaves and fires, on launching a consultation that proposes radically curtailing the transition to electric vehicles. I believe there is only one possible explanation for this policy: lobbying by corporations and their shareholders. Their interests appear to outweigh those of the living planet and its 8 billion people.

If our country and many others are becoming ungovernable, it is not because of the people. It is because the ultra-rich have smashed the system. The electorate and the MPs who might seek to represent us pull the political levers, but nothing happens. They might replace the leader, but the new one promptly repeats the “mistakes” that caused the eviction of the old one. It makes you wonder: what threat do the oligarchs present that outweighs even the threat of losing power?

Whatever the reason may be, disillusionment is an inevitable result of such betrayals. I think most people want stability. I think most people want to be able to trust their governments. We don’t like in-built obsolescence in our leaders any more than like it in our phones. I don’t want to see Burnham go the way of Starmer. But I know he will succeed only if he defends the public interest against the power of money. So what’s stopping him?

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George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist