Politics has always been about rich people and their money. Once it was courtiers fashioning themselves into camps to ensure they had the king’s ear.

Then the powerful divided themselves into groups like industrialists and landowners so they could force policy to suit their interests.

Democracy is a lovely theory - the best of all possible terrible theories - but lift the bonnet to inspect the engine and you see the same mechanisms as before: rich people manipulating politics so it works for them, not us.

That’s why political donations exist. They buy parties and politicians. That means rich people buy policy. They buy the laws under which we live.

Now, if you believe that equates to the mechanics of a fully-functioning democracy, I’ve a bridge to sell you.

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We’ve just experienced the desperate embarrassment of Donald Trump’s trashy celebrations for America’s 250th birthday.

At heart, though, the American revolution was about rich men - the founding fathers and the class they represented - protecting their interests.

America’s revolutionaries wanted the freedom to make themselves rich. If they’d been chasing freedom for freedom’s sake, then the not so minor matters of slavery and the genocide of indigenous people rather gets in the way of that high-falutin notion.

Indeed, America today is the great example of how money rots democracy. American politics has all the best checks and balances, or so we were told.

The only problem is those checks and balances collapse in the........

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