Peter Geoghegan is a diligent, brilliant guide through a shadowy world of dark money and digital disinformation stretching from Westminster to Washington, and far beyond. Praise for Democracy for Sale: ‘Thorough, gripping and vitally important’ Oliver Bullough‘A brilliant description of the dark underbelly of modern democracy. He shows how antiquated electoral laws are broken with impunity, how secretive lobbying bends our politics out of shape, and how Silicon Valley tech giants have colluded in selling out democracy. He investigates politicians, fabulously well-funded partisan think tanks, propagandists who know how to game a rigged system, and the campaigners and regulators valiantly trying to stop them. One of the most striking points the political philosopher David Runciman made in his seminal book How Democracy Ends was that democracies don’t fail backwards: they fail forward.

The first is the massive concentration of corporate power and private wealth that’s been under way since the 1970s, together with a corresponding increase in inequality, social exclusion and polarisation in most western societies; the second is the astonishing penetration of “dark money” into democratic politics; and the third is the revolutionary transformation of the information ecosystem in which democratic politics is conducted – a transformation that has rendered the laws that supposedly regulated elections entirely irrelevant to modern conditions. And if that’s true, the key question for us at this moment in history is: how might our current system fail? Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, Jair Bolsonaro and populists in many other countries are the beneficiaries. For more details, please consult the latest information provided by Royal Mail's International Incident Bulletin.And it has been able to do this in what has turned out to be a regulatory vacuum – with laws, penalties and overseeing authorities that are no longer fit for purpose. Geoghegan investigates politicians, fabulously well-funded partisan think tanks, propagandists who know how to game a rigged system, and the campaigners and regulators valiantly trying to stop them. Remarkable’ Observer, Book of the Week Democracy is in crisis, and unaccountable and untraceable flows of money are helping to destroy it.

Some of the data that are collected include the number of visitors, their source, and the pages they visit anonymously. The existential threat to liberal democracy comes from the fact that those who have successfully exploited some inadequacies of the current regulatory system – who include Boris Johnson and his current wingman, Cummings – have absolutely no incentive to fix the system from which they have benefited.Photograph: Frank Augstein/Pool/Reuters View image in fullscreen ‘These threats to democracy have, for decades, been visible to anyone disposed to look for them’: Boris Johnson in 2019. One of the most depressing parts of this narrative is the bland indifference of most mainstream UK media to these scandalous events.

Instead, the referendum and its aftermath have revealed something far more fundamental and systemic. This title tells the story of how undisclosed donations – ‘dark money’ – have infiltrated British politics, undermining public faith in democracy and fuelling the rise of populism across the West. Democracy for Sale is a diligent, brilliant guide through a shadowy world of dark money and digital disinformation stretching from Westminster to Washington, and far beyond.Politicians lie gleefully, making wild claims that can be shared instantly with millions of people on social media. That’s why those who see in the current difficulties of liberal democracies the stirrings of past monsters – Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, to name just three – are always looking in the wrong place.

We are experiencing delays with deliveries to many countries, but in most cases local services have now resumed.Hotjar sets this cookie to know whether a user is included in the data sampling defined by the site's daily session limit. Antiquated electoral laws are broken with impunity, secretive lobbying is bending our politics out of shape and Silicon Valley tech giants collude in selling out democracy. We use Google Analytics to see what pages are most visited, and where in the world visitors are visiting from.