Johann Hari

Every political party is a jangling coalition of interest groups and ideas and paymasters, all rubbing against each other under one umbrella: think of it as the Rihanna principle. These coalitions shift over time: some groups get shunted out into the rain; others get to huddle at the middle, snug and smug. Under David Cameron, the Conservative coalition has subtly shifted. Two groups who have long held sway in the party now have a firmer hold on the umbrella than ever before – and if the Tories win power in just a few weeks' time, these largely unnoticed shifts will affect all our lives.

The financial services industry – you remember: the people who just crashed the global economy – have almost always been part of the Tory tent. They regularly poured funds into the party throughout the 20th century, and hyperventilated with pleasure at the Thatcher revolution, wobbling only when Tony Blair created New Labour. But the hot dish of City cash was always one food group among many for the Tories. They have never been their biggest provider of funds – until now.

According to the Financial Times, donations from the financial sector have "quadrupled" on David Cameron's watch to an unprecedented proportion of the party's income. The City has given Cameron £16m since 2006, compared to just £3.7m under the previous three leaders combined.

It was decades of lobbying and donations from the City that pushed politicians to deregulate almost everything the financial services industry indulged in. Previously impossible scams – from sub-prime mortgages to credit default swaps – became scattered through the system. The resulting economic implosion can be seen in every shuttered window on your high street.

The sector is now fighting a rearguard action against reregulation – using the same tactics and the same arguments. Boris Johnson, the most senior elected Conservative in Britain, has shown the Tory MO: he took large wodges of City cash and told the British people to stop "whingeing" and succumbing to "neo-socialist claptrap". Given a choice between City spin and the facts, he chose the corporate propaganda every time. For example, he claimed the puny 50 per cent top rate of tax would drive 9,000 City workers to Switzerland: in fact, the rate of workers leaving has fallen by 9 per cent. He even still says sub-prime mortgages were a good thing.

So it's highly significant that Cameron is choosing to fund his run for the premiership with City money, even inhaling funds from hedge funds that engaged in short-selling the collapsing share price of Bradford and Bingley. While he assures the public that he will slap "tough regulations" on this sector, privately he is eager to woo them. Speaking recently to the heads of Goldman Sachs, Barclays and an array of hedge funds, he assured them that protecting the City was in his blood, saying: "My father was a stockbroker, my grandfather was a stockbroker, my great-grandfather was a stockbroker." They cheered.

Cameron claims that he is not affected in any way by the money, but his donors put it differently. Andrew Perloff, of the property speculators Panther Securities, says: "It's a foot in the door. There is definitely an advantage ... because they know you're a supporter."

Cameron's biggest paymaster of all is Michael Ashcroft, a man who became a billionaire in the financial services sector. He has a base in the tax haven of Belize. He has been made deputy chairman of the party, accompanies William Hague on visits to foreign leaders, and is paying for marginal constituencies to be carpet-bombed with Tory election materials. Yet he won't even tell us if he is domiciled in Britain, or pays taxes here.

The attempts to get the Tory frontbench to explain whether their election campaign is being funded through the fruits of tax avoidance have become like a Monty Python sketch. The Information Commissioner has ruled that the party is being "evasive and obfuscatory" – a neat euphemism for dishonest.

The City of London is providing the fuel that the Tory party runs on, and these hard-headed businessmen will expect a return on their political investments. They clearly believe Cameron will be significantly softer on regulating them than even Labour's pitiful efforts. The result? We will all be left more vulnerable to 2008 redux. Can you afford to risk another crash and another bailout?

At the same time, a very different force is swelling within the Tory ranks – with an agenda of their own. Evangelical Christian fundamentalists have preferred the Conservatives to the other parties for a very long time – but it is only now that their relative weight within the party is swelling so rapidly that one panicked Tory MP recently told the FT (in a separate story): "They're taking over the party."

As the Conservative Party has shed its mass membership – like every other party – even a relatively small number of people with a determined agenda can become dominant. So evangelicals have been signing up as Cameron's Militant Tendency. Where the Tories have held open primaries to select its candidates, they pack the meetings to secure one of their own. Candidates are increasingly frightened to take on their agenda. A ConservativeHome poll of candidates selected to fight marginal seats for the Party found that large majorities want to curtail a woman's right to choose an abortion, and say it's OK to discriminate against gay couples who want to provide a home for an orphan.

While David Cameron has defied the evangelicals on a few issues – to his credit, he supports civil partnerships, for example – he is poised to deliver them the biggest gift they will have received in generations. He will provide state funding for any group of parents who want to set up a school and can attract pupils. We know from Sweden – where this idea was taken from – that one sector is always waiting with the willpower and the organisation and the disgust with the existing schools system: religious fundamentalists.

As the National Secular Society has shown, Cameron's proposals will cause an explosion in fundamentalist schools. This will, over time, subtly alter the shape of Britain. Far more kids will be taught that abortion is evil, homosexuality is sinful, and evolution didn't happen. (Gay kids are 10 per cent more likely to be attacked in faith schools, a Stonewall study found.) And the horrible effects caused by New Labour's expansion of faith schools will get even worse.

More children will be segregated according to their parent's religion: the kids of Christians packed off to one school, Jews to another, Muslims to another still. They won't get to know each other at the most formative ages, when prejudices can be wiped out so easily. After the 2001 race riots in Oldham, David Ritchie – chair of the investigation – warned that faith schools were one of the biggest factors "contributing institutionally to divisions within the town."

Now Cameron is clearing the way for even more, in the most blessedly irreligious country on earth. When I interviewed him recently, he angrily said criticisms of faith schools were "a load of tosh". It's as if he looks at Northern Ireland's segregated school system, and thinks it is an inspiration, rather than a disgrace.

A small twist in a political party's composition can swirl its national policies. It's time we paid attention to the unsavoury groups who are beaming as David Cameron choruses: "Now that it's raining more than ever/ Know that we'll still have each other/ You can stand under my umbrella- ella -ella...

David Cameron made his own face the apex of the Conservative Party’s first burst of electioneering. He stared out across Britain’s high streets and motorway overpasses with a giant airbrushed glower of concern, while the word ‘Conservative’ was tucked away on the posters in small letters, like a slightly embarrassing smell. There’s a reason for this: the reality of the Conservative Party today severely punctures Cameron’s central pitch – and he knows it.

Since he became leader, he has been telling us “the Conservative Party has changed”. But is it true? Let’s start with the issue that Cameron said was “terrific evidence” of a “different Conservative Party” – global warming. Until 2005, he had never mentioned the subject, except to mock wind farms as “giant bird-blenders” and to demand “a massive road-building programme” in defiance of all environmental sense. But then he abruptly announced he was the true champion of this cause and people should “vote blue to go green.” The influential website ConservativeHome thought the New Cameron didn’t speak for the Party, so last month they commissioned a poll of the candidates selected to fight the most winnable Tory seats. They were asked to rank nineteen issues facing Britain in order of importance – and global warming came at the very bottom. The soon-to-be Conservative MPs think radically altering the chemical composition of the atmosphere is less important than imprisoning even more people and reclaiming powers from Scotland.

But even this is misleading. The party doesn’t just accord a low priority to deal with this problem – most actively deny it exists. The Spectator’s political editor, James Forsyth, reports: “At Tory country-house gatherings, global warming scepticism has replaced Europe as the issue of the day.” Tim Montgomerie, the head of ConservativeHome and physical embodiment of the Tory id, says: “I’m confident the sceptics are going to win. It’s for Cameron to decide how he’s going to get out of this – he’s lost the battle already.” This has only grown over the past month, when a handful of the tens of thousands of scientists working on this issue have been shown to have made a few mistakes. The massed ranks of the Tory party have seized on this as “proof” that releasing massive amounts of warming gases into the atmosphere won’t cause the planet to get warmer. The true message is: vote blue, screw green.

How about opposing the stale old prejudices the Party used to marinate itself in? In his mid-twenties Cameron went on a week long “jolly” to white supremacist South Africa, breaking sanctions against the regime, paid for by a shadowy pro-Aparthied lobbying group. But he says he regrets that and the party now abhors racism. There’s a fascinating insight into whether this is true in the new book ‘True Blue: Strange Tales From A Tory Nation.’ For the past three years, the journalists Chris Horne and David Matthews have volunteered for the Conservative Party, to uncover what its activists really think. Matthews is a warm, charismatic – and black.

Everywhere he went, he was treated with suspicion and contempt. Horne writes: “The proportion of people who gave him a wide berth was around three quarters, and it was hard to escape the conclusion that this was because he was black…. The Tories we met seemed fantastically uncomfortable around David.” Even in the most liberal Tory surroundings, like inner London, there was a “constant, almost knee-jerk mild racism,” where they felt the need to obsessively talk about immigration and race in disparaging ways in his presence. At a typical Tory dinner they attended, according to the book, Cecil Parkinson said of Africa: “God decided to create the most beautiful continent on earth – wide rivers, fertile land, and every kind of natural resource you can think of. An angel said to God – if you make a place like that then it will completely dominate the earth. And God said – wait until you see the people I am going to put in it.” The assembled party members loved it, and said they missed good old Ian Smith, the last white supremacist ruler of Rhodesia.

When they were campaigning against the Liberal Democrat Susan Kramer, they were repeatedly told to emphasize she was an “outsider” and a “foreigner.” Horne asked what it meant, and he was told: “She’s a Jewess, but we aren’t allowed to say that… So all we can say is that she got off the train from Hungary.”

Everywhere they went, the Party’s candidates and members said Cameron’s claims to have reformed are mere spin to win the election. For example, Ian Oakley, who was selected to be Tory candidate for Watford, bragged: “Last year it was all green this, and all green that… all that bollocks. People just want lots and lots and lots of cheap petrol. And we are going to give it to them.” He then boasted that he planned to make many trips to Israel where he would take a machine gun and a flame-thrower to destroy Palestinian villages. (He was later forced to resign, ove an unrelated matter.) Yes, there are some nutters in every party, but Horne and Matthews found similar reservoirs of prejudice everywhere they looked in Conservatism.

Indeed, any minor attempt to put meat on Cameron’s professed agenda is being met with projectile vomiting from the guts of the party. When Joanne Cash – a pregnant woman – was imposed on the constituency of Westminster North, there was a rebellion by the local party that forced Cash to resign. They said she wouldn’t be able to have a child and work at the same time. The local party agent Jonathan Fraser-Howells was reported as having commented: "It makes me sick seeing pregnant stomachs around", though he denies saying this. Cash was only reinstated with great effort, after the Cameroons realised what a biting PR disaster it was.

Next week, I’ll look at how two other forces – cash from the City, and evangelical Christians – are also distorting the Party’s agenda.

Of course, you might say that none of this matters. Cameron is the leader, and he is sincerely committed to a modernized agenda. But there’s two flaws with this argument. Cameron can tuck away the Tory Party on a poster, but he can’t tuck them away in parliament: they will be the source of his power. A leader can’t defy this Party’s core instincts for long, especially when he has (at best) a small majority. Every barking-right backbencher will have to be wooed and soothed and fed red meat to get legislation through. Cameron will be accountable to deeply retrograde forces – and they will demand policies that worsen poverty or global warming or prejudice.

Even more importantly, Cameron’s commitment to this agenda is shaky and superficial anyway. Remember: his reaction to the Great Crash was to tell the City “we must not let the left use this as an excuse to wreck an important part of the British and world economy” and to start preaching hardcore Thatcherite slash-and-trash economics. He told the Spectator: “If you want to know if I’m a Tory, ask John Redwood” – the global warming denying, market fundamentalist Vulcan who represents the ugliest fringe of the Major years. When he thought an election was looming, the Tory leader decided to make it a front-of-the-window policy to give a huge tax cut to the richest 3000 estates in Britain – a revelation of his priorities that should cause any claim he is “progressive” to be greeted with belly-laughs.

The evidence suggests that when he is faced with a challenge, Cameron rushes right back up the road to Damascus – into the loving arms of an unreformed right-wing party.

Come along.

Osama Bin Laden’s favourite son, Omar, recently abandoned his father’s cave in favour of spending his time dancing and drooling in the nightclubs of Damascus. The tang of freedom almost always trumps Islamist fanaticism in the end: three million people abandoned the Puritan hell of Taliban Afghanistan for freer countries, while only a few thousand faith-addled fanatics ever travelled the other way. Osama’s vision can’t even inspire his own kids. But Omar Bin Laden says his father is banking on one thing to shore up his flailing, failing cause – and we are giving it to him.

The day George W. Bush was elected, Omar says, “my father was so happy. This is the kind of president he needs — one who will attack and spend money and break [his own] country.” Osama wanted the US and Europe to make his story about the world ring true in every mosque and every mountain-top and every souq. He said our countries were bent on looting Muslim countries of their resources, and any talk of civil liberties or democracy was a hypocritical facade. The jihadis I have interviewed – from London to Gaza to Syria – said their ranks swelled with each new whiff of Bushism as more and more were persuaded. It was like trying to extinguish fire with a blowtorch.

The revelations this week about how the CIA and British authorities handed over a suspected jihadi to torturers in Pakistan may sound at first glance like a hang-over from the Bush years. Barack Obama was elected, in part, to drag us out of this trap – but in practice he is dragging us further in. He is escalating the war in Afghanistan, and has taken the war to another Muslim country. The CIA and hired mercenaries are now operating on Obama’s orders inside Pakistan, where they are sending unarmed drones to drop bombs and sending secret agents to snatch suspects. The casualties are overwhelmingly civilians. We may not have noticed, but the Muslim world has: check out al-Jazeera any night.

Obama ran on an inspiring promise to shut down Bush’s network of kidnappings and secret prisons. He said bluntly: “I do not want to hear this is a new world and we face a new kind of enemy. I know that… but as a parent I can also imagine the terror I would feel if one of my family members were rounded up in the middle of the night and sent to Guantanomo without even getting one chance to ask why they were being held and being able to prove their innocence.” He said it made the US “less safe” because any gain in safety by Gitmo-ing one suspected jihadi – along with dozens of innocents - is wiped out by the huge number of young men tipped over into the vile madness of jihadism by seeing their brothers disappear into a vast military machine where they may never be heard from again. Indeed, following the failed attack in Detroit, Obama pointed out the wannabe-murderer named Guantanomo as the reason he signed up for the Jihad.

Yet a string of recent exposes has shown that Obama is in fact maintaining a battery of secret prisons where people are held without charge indefinitely – and he is even expanding them. The Kabul-based journalist Anand Gopal has written a remarkable expose for the Nation magazine. His story begins in the Afghan village of Zaiwalat at 3.15am on the night of November 19th 2009. A platoon of US soldiers blasted their way into a house in search of Habib ur-Rahman, a young computer programmer and government employee who they had been told by someone, somewhere was a secret Talibanist. His two cousins came out to see what the noise was – and they were shot to death. As the children of the house screamed, Habib was bundled into a helicopter and whisked away. He has never been seen since. His family do not know if he is alive or dead.

This is not an unusual event in Afghanistan today. In this small village of 300 people, some 16 men have been “disappeared” by the US and ten killed in night raids in the past two years. The locals believe people are simply settling old clan feuds by telling the Americans their rivals are jihadists. Habib’s cousin Qarar, who works for the Afghan government, says: “I used to go on TV and argue that people should support the government and the foreigners. But I was wrong. Why should anyone do so?”

Where are all these men vanishing to? Obama ordered the closing of the CIA’s secret prisons, but not those run by Joint Special Operations. They maintain a Bermuda Triangle of jails with the notorious Bagram Air Base at its centre. One of the few outsiders has been into this ex-Soviet air-hangar is the military prosecutor Stuart Couch. He says: “In my view, having visited Guantanomo several times, the Bagram facility made Guantanomo look like a nice hotel. The men did not appear to be able to move around at will, they mostly sat in rows on the floor. It smelled like the monkey house at the zoo.”

We know that at least two innocent young men were tortured to death in Bagram. Der Spiegel has documented how some “inmates were raped with sticks or threatened with anal sex.” The accounts of released prisoners suggest the very worst abuses stopped in the last few years of the Bush administration, and Obama is supposed to have forbidden torture, but it’s hard to tell. We do know Obama has permitted the use of solitary confinement lasting for years – a process that often drives people insane. The International Red Cross has been allowed to visit some of them, but in highly restricted circumstances, and their reports remain confidential. In this darkness, abuse becomes far more likely.

The Obama administration is appealing against US court rulings insisting the detainees have the right to make a legal case against their arbitrary imprisonment. And the White House is insisting they can forcibly snatch anyone they suspect from anywhere in the world – with no legal process – and take them there. Yes: Obama is fighting for the principles behind Guantanomo Bay. The frenzied debate about whether the actual camp in Cuba is closed is a distraction, since he is proposing to simply relocate it to less sunny climes.

Once you vanish into this system, you have no way to get yourself out. The New York lawyer Tina Foster represents three men who were kidnapped by US forces in Thailand, Pakistan and Dubai and bundled to Bagram, where they have been held without charge for seven years now. She tells me there have been “shockingly few improvements” under Obama. “The Bush administration rubbed our faces in it, while Obama’s much smoother. But the reality is still indefinite detention without charge for people who are judged guilty simply by association. It’s contrary to everything we stand for as a country… I know there are children [in there] from personal experience. I have interviewed dozens of children who were detained in Bagram, some as young as ten.”

Today, Bagram is being given a $60m expansion, allowing it to hold five times as many prisoners as Guantanomo Bay currently does. Ghopal reports that the abuse is leaking out to other, more secretive sites across Afghanistan. They are so underground they are known only by the names given to them by released inmates – the Salt Pit, the Prison of Darkness. Obama also asserts his right to hand over the prisoners to countries that commit torture, provided they give a written “assurance” they won’t be “abused” – assurances that have proved worthless in the past. The British lawyer Clive Stafford-Smith estimates there are 18,000 people trapped in these “legal black holes” by the US.

As Obama warned in the distant days of the election campaign, these policies place us all in greater danger. Matthew Alexander, the senior interrogator in Iraq who tracked down Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, says: “I listened time and time again to captured foreign fighters cite Abu Graib and Guantanomo as their main reason for coming to Iraq to fight… We have lost hundreds if not thousands of American lives because of our policy.” The increased risk bleeds out onto the London underground and the nightclubs of Bali. I oppose these policies precisely because I want to be safe, and I loathe jihadism.

President Obama has been tossing aside the calm jihad-draining insights of candidate Obama for a year now. Whenever Obama acts like Bush, listen carefully – you will hear the distant, delighted chuckle of Osama Bin Laden, and the needless stomp of fresh recruits heading his way.

in Central London for the 14 young people who were massacred in Mexico last week in yet another wave of murder caused by the senseless 'war on drugs.' It's being organized by the excellent organisation 'Students for Sensible Drug Policy' and I urge you to attend. To understand why they didn't have to die, and wouldn't if we ended prohibition, check out my articles here. (I'll try to make it to the vigil but I have to do something tedious and inescapable first. Hopefully see you there...)

To read my latest piece for Slate in France, click here.