Chapter 8: Democracy & MoneyFlying machines to Gotland; Hard Right’s Strategic Guidance Committee; How to win; Selling spectacles and vote gathering; Hard Right arithmetic; Promises, media science and social psychology; Direct bribery; Price of a transferred vote; Money for Old Votes Party; Turning Green Ladies into Blue Meanies; Budgeting for a rotten borough; Fingers in tills and guns in ribs; Conservative Party and Euromoney; Economic Treachery does not violate Swedish Official Secrets Act; True Dark Blue Believers
Let’s jump on a plane at Bromma Airport, leave Stockholm and return with our Piper Cherokee to Gotland. Half an hour later we are back once again in another world.Let us join for a moment a small radical group of the Conservative Party’s hard right as they set about the task of devising a winning strategy for Hard Right policies and political representation ‘to break the historic mould’ on the Island of Gotland.
No lovers of Democracy, representational or otherwise, these gentlemen. And few doubts that their cause is noble enough to justify any means. They intend to play the game to win. And they do not intend to have anybody asking questions afterwards about how they did it.
They will have noted, first of all, that to deal yourself into the mass electioneering business game you need to poll nationwide about two hundred thousand votes. That is what is needed to get your party into the Swedish National Parliament, give or take a few thousand dependent upon the election turnout and the proportion of the population under eighteen years of age.
These votes have to be picked up one at a time just as the purveyors of spectacles are obliged to peddle their particular modern brand of snake oil one at a time. But Representative Democracy works for them rather like the retail chain of opticians shops work for the spectacles entrepreneur.
In Gotland, not only the Conservatives, but also the Liberals, the Socialists, the Greens and the Christian Democrats are wasting their votes. The problem, therefore, is simply a matter of persuading the Liberals and the Greens to vote for the Conservatives. That would give them ten thousand votes. And ten thousand votes would enable the Conservative Party candidate to replace the Farmers Party candidate in the Swedish National Parliament in Stockholm.
This exercise has nothing to do with ideas or policies, not at this stage, it is a simple matter of arithmetic, market share and theoretical models with such sophisticated words as propensity and disaggregation.
Traditionally the next step is then to craft promises which effect this shift. Then you add safety factors to your strategy structure and deploy your faithful to construct it in time for the next election. There are some efficiency gains to be made from the application of media science and the findings of social psychologists, but goodness what an amateurish way to run a country!
The practical men of action have a much better plan. If we are to buy influence, they argue, let us put our money down on the table and get on with it. If we are going to bribe people to sell us their vote, let us get on with it and let people know we will buy their vote. We know what we need to do to put the country back on its feet. Why beat around the bush talking, talking, talking instead of getting on with it. The question is quite simple. What is the price? Once we know that, we can get on with the job of agreeing who is going to put up the money and how he is going to be paid back!
We have now witnessed the founding of The Money for Old Votes (Mov) Party. Now let us start work on the Business Plan for its Gotland Branch.
Everybody has their price. So what does it cost to turn a Green Lady into a Blue Meanie? Throw out a scenario. 2801 Liberals to turn and 2437 Greens. A few idealists, but with a budget of a few million pounds, we could offer them five thousand kronor each. That compares with the hundred thousand we have to invest in each work station promised in the days before The New Realism, so looks cheap at the price. OK. We will work on that basis.
One Member of Parliament from a Rotten Borough will cost us five million pounds, allowing for our own fees. With something on the side for The Heavy Mob, that’s a working figure of ten million pounds for each rotten borough member of parliament…five thousand votes bought gives ten thousand votes for us…so that means twenty rotten boroughs and we are into parliament…that is a quarter of a billion…no problem there…good…go ahead on that basis.
Now of course the Swedish Conservative Party would never be party to such a conspiracy. Bribing voters would be quite unthinkable. But its EuroMoney financial backers would be sympathetic to its sensitivities. And, unlike the British, the Swedes are not introducing Official Secrets Acts with new categories of traitors specially targeted at those who would use the power of money to overthrow the state. Business is Business.
Besides, they would argue, it is in Sweden’s best interests to join our EuroMegamachine even though they cannot possibly understand the need for such a military and financial organization to protect them in such an uncertain world. Freedom fighters are after all only declared as such after they have freed the people. Some day the Swedes will see what true patriots we were to allow their children to have the honour of fighting for Europe. Democracy! Opium of the Masses!
Unlikely? Improbable? Never heard of such a thing? Then you have not read history.