...but we shouldn't be surprised that the rich, as they always have done, seek influence through their wealth in the corridors of power.

We are either guilty of wishful thinking or collective amnesia if we think there was some golden age where those with the most voluntarily agreed not to want to rule over us. I suspect somewhere around the first half of the twentieth century and the rise of the Labour movement we might have thought that we had finally reached enlightened democracy of universal suffrage and equal political status. How ironic that it should take the longest "Labour" government in all that time to highlight that the tendency to oligarchy is still alive and well.

The concentration of power in the hands of such a few in government structures is to blame. The few are so much easier to flatter, influence and dominate than the many.

"Why should we be beggars with the ballot in our hands?"

Because we have never resolved the land question and its close relative the monopoly power of the creation of money.