This month’s £9m donation to Reform UK by cryptocurrency billionaire Richard Harborne is a sign that rich men and their money are breaking into British politics. Of the £85m given to the parties by private donors in 2023, two thirds came from just 19 mega-donors, according to the watchdog organisation Transparency International UK.
Now a number of campaign groups are urging Communities Secretary Steve Reed to go further than Labour intends on party funding when the Government introduces new electoral reforms next year. Transparency International warns that a money-driven “doom loop is slowly destroying our democracy”.
Such gloom may be premature. By comparison, US political expenditure is measured in tens of billions of dollars. Still there is no doubt that the British system is wide open to potential exploitation and distortion – with some powerful people anxious to make their money talk to the rest of us.
In this country there is no upper limit on how much an individual or company can give to a party which it supports. Spending and the pressing need for the funds to stay viable are both creeping up. Our elections are getting more expensive – it is estimated that more cash was spent in 2024 in real terms than at any other election since 1880, the era of rotten boroughs.
The Government is being urged to clean things up as part of the legislation due in 2026 to extend the vote to 16 and 17-year-olds by introducing a cap on the size of donations and stricter checks on where the money comes from. About one pound in every 10 flowing in to party coffers comes from unknown or questionable sources.
Ministers have so far responded weakly to such calls. Passing the buck, Cabinet minister Pat McFadden says cryptocurrency donation is “definitely something that Electoral Commission should be looking into”.
Reform UK’s £9m British record donation is perfectly legal. The donor, aviation and cryptocurrency tycoon Harborne, is a British citizen who lives in Thailand.
There are no plans to cap donations – even though it is years since the Commission on Standards in Public Life called for a ceiling at £10,000. More practically, the Institute for Public Policy Reform recently proposed £100,000. All parties are in need of funds.
Harborne heads the latest top 10 list of political donors, compiled by Donation Watch. Also featured are Reform UK’s Nick Candy, and Reform deputy leader Richard Tice’s Tisun Investments. The Conservatives received a million from computer gaming magnate Jez San. Labour pulled in more than a half a million pounds each from Unite the Union, Usdaw, Unison, GMB and the Co-op. Until Harborne, the largest ever single donation from a living person was £8m by David Sainsbury to the Liberal Democrats in 2019.
Foreign donations have been banned here since 2000, the start of the post-Thatcher era in political ethics. But that does not mean that the rules are watertight. A year ago there was panic following suggestions that Elon Musk was considering a $100m donation to Reform UK. He has since cooled on Nigel Farage and seems more inclined to support Tommy Robinson. Musk is foreign, of course. But nobody doubted at the time that the world’s richest man could find a way to splash the cash if he really wanted.
Even without a donation, Musk’s high-profile meddling in UK affairs, supercharged by his social media platform X, undoubtedly pushed the Government into a national inquiry into grooming gangs. At the height of the controversy he had whipped up, a Survation opinion poll found that a clear majority of the electorate, including Reform UK voters, favoured a donation cap.
Money has always talked more loudly in American politics, as was brought home by the bosses of American’s major tech firms celebrating in the front row of Trump’s second inauguration.
The pace of electioneering is more hectic in the United States, with fundraising a constant necessity. Candidates have primaries to fight and members of Congress face election every two years. There are caps on how much candidates can spend on their campaigns, though at a much higher level than here.
In America the influence of the rich has greatly increased since the Republican-dominated Supreme Court’s “Citizens United” ruling in 2010, allowing corporations and individuals to spend unlimited sums on non-affiliated but openly partisan campaigns. In 2024, political action committees duly spent $16bn dollars, more than double the official campaigns for the presidency and the Congress.
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Ideological influencing on such a scale remains impossible in this country so long as the Electoral Commission is allowed to keep non-party campaigns subject to its rules and regulations. There have been suggestions from the right that the Commission’s grip should be loosened. This is often accompanied by the championing of cryptocurrency and demands for deregulation in general.
There is little doubt that big donations can influence party policy in their favour, or that big donors are more likely than average to end up being awarded in the House of Lords. These worrying trends have certainly contributed to the erosion of public trust in the main parties. Ironically it seems that Reform UK is both well placed to benefit both from that distrust and the freedoms of lots of money in politics.
A new year’s resolution for this Government should be to set aside short-term interests and act firmly now to keep British politics clean of filthy lucre.
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