The real reason people don’t like Elon Musk funding Reform

The meeting between Nigel Farage, the property developer Nick Candy and Elon Musk has triggered an all-too-predictable apoplectic fit among media commentators. 

Are we proud, democracy-loving Britons just going to stand by and watch as American billionaires and the radical right buy out our politics? Are we going to let hedge-funders and the real-estate tycoons gut British institutions for gain, privatise our beloved NHS, and finally execute the great neoliberal scheme to enrich the very few at the expense of the very many? 

It’s almost as if, by posting a picture of himself, his new money-man Candy and the world’s richest man, Farage was trying to annoy his opponents. Heaven forbid. The Guardian wants to tighten up our electoral laws so that Elon Musk will not be able to fund Reform. ‘Look, I think British politics is asleep about this,’ says Lewis Goodall, on Newsnight, who likes to start his sentences by saying ‘look’. ‘We’re seeing populist forces, particularly on the populist right, doing extremely well throughout Europe.