Can MPs be bribed? This question is central to whether the left should change its tactics.

I say this for the simple reason that demonstrations and marches just don't work. Protestors have been on the streets for weeks campaigning against the genocide in Gaza. And they've had as much influence upon government as climate change protestors, campaigners for a second EU referendum, or protestors against the 2003 Iraq war. Just because you are right doesn't mean you're effective.

Which isn't to say such tactics are wholly useless. Protests can at least draw public attention to an issue, and more extreme protestors such as Extinction Rebellion can help legitimate more moderate ones by shifting the Overton window - the so-called radical flank effect. They also show that we are not a free country - though the benefit of this is mitigated by the fact that few people actually care about freedom.

And of course, not everything needs to done for instrumental reasons. As Robert Nozick pointed out in The Nature of Rationality, there are some things we do - even costly ones - to symbolize who we are*. This, however, runs into the objection made by Richard Sennett in The Fall of Public Man: political action does not have to consist in the revelation of individual personality, especially if this occurs to the neglect of the mobilization of power and interests.

Perhaps because of that neglect, the efficacy of protests is limited.

By contrast, many people have achieved their aims through other methods. Water companies didn't go on marches demanding the right to pollute seas and rivers; private equity companies didn't demonstrate for the right to rip off tax-payers; oil companies didn't march for the right to burn the planet; and bankers haven't been marching for deregulation. But here we are.

Hence the question: should the left adopt the tactics that do actually work, rather than believe instinctively that the response to any grievance, however legitimate, must be street protest?

By these tactics I am not of course referring to rational persuasion; no serious person believes this has much direct influence. Instead, I mean behind the scenes "lobbying"?

The thing about this is that the sums involved are small. Peter Geoghegan reports that a payment of just £5000 to David Lammy won a donor a £20,000 a year part-time job with him, plus the chance to catch his ear. Declassified claim that pro-Israel lobbyists have donated over £300,000 to Labour ministers. And the Good Law Project estimates that Wes Streeting has been getting almost £10,000 a month from private health companies.

The left should be able to easily beat this. Organizers claim that the last six anti-Gazan war demos have all had over 100,000 participants. If these had instead chipped in £10 a time (in many cases less than they spent on the bus fare to Westminster) it would have raised over £6m. That swamps the size of any "Israel lobby".

The same's strue of other issues. There should be more than 1000 opponents of subcontracting in the NHS able to chip in more than £10 a month to buy Streeting's favour.

In principle, then, the left should be able to simply outbid its opponents. Which poses the question: why doesn't it?

It used to: in the 20th century trades unions funded MPs. Their decline, however, means that other actors have acquired a dominant position in the market.

The obvious reason why the left doesn't challenge this monopoly is that it they simply believe it is wrong to bribe MPs.

This, however, raises an old question in moral philosophy: how to behave when others act wrongly? In that famous thought experiment (pdf), if a murderer asks you where his potential victim is hiding, are you obliged to tell the truth? Many would say no. Similarly whilst it is usually wrong to kill, many think it permissible to do so in self-defence: pacifists don't get justice. By the same token, although MPs would not take bribes in a first-best world, in our fallen world it might be better for us to bribe them too, to level the playing field**.

Yes, strict Kantians should think it wrong to bribe MPs even when others are doing so. But I'm not sure how many people could hold this view consistently with their other principles, such as, say, support for Ukraine.

Another objection to us bribing MPs is that it's only cheap to buy MPs now because it's a buyers' market. If we were all to do so, we'd start a bidding war, an arms race.

Again, I don't think is objection is decisive. For one thing, if MPs were better remunerated their quality might - eventually - improve. And for another, to the extent that the rich are more likely to win a bidding war they are also more likely to suffer a winner's curse as they over-pay for favours. Which is a form of wealth redistribution.

A better objection might be that lobbyists aren't in fact bribing MPs so much as rewarding them for doing what they otherwise would. Granted, Humbert Wolfe's ditty about journalists applies to MPs:

You cannot hope to bribe or twist,
thank God! the British journalist.
But, seeing what the man will do
unbribed, there's no occasion to.

Why are MPs like this? Perhaps, for many of them, the money isn't the thing. Adam Smith famously wrote:

The great mob of mankind are the admirers and worshippers, and, what may seem more extraordinary, most frequently the disinterested admirers and worshippers, of wealth and greatness.

MPs, I suspect, are part of this mob. One of the things that differentiates them from us is ambition - not merely or even mainly for money, but for glamour and status. And hobnobbing with CEOs and billionaires' lackeys offers this to a much greater extent than would doing so with the representatives of people who think that, on balance, genocide might not be very nice. Money changes hands only so that the rich can show proof of funds.

If this is the case, then collective bribes to MPs would be no more effective than demonstrations and protests.
Worse still, it suggests that the obvious answer - to take money out of politics by having much tougher rules against lobbying and on whom MPs can meet - might not be terribly effective, because MPs would defer to the rich and powerful anyway, being the disinterested admirers and worshippers, of wealth and power.

Which brings me (finally!) to the point. Too many people think of politics through the question "what would I do if I were in charge?" when in fact the question should be: "how do we acquire power?" And let's face it, it's not obvious that the left has good answers to this question.

* Yes, there is a nice irony in citing Nozick to defend left-wing protestors.

** There's an analogy here with the economic theory of the second-best; price controls might be inefficient in an optimal economy, but they can actually increase efficiency when there is monopoly power. The right thing to do in an imperfect world isn't the same as the right thing in a perfect one.