I – like many others – am deeply concerned about the ability of a small handful of extraordinarily rich donors who often don’t pay tax in the UK to acquire vast influence over our politics. Curtailing the influence of big money in politics feels like a principle that the supporters of all political parties should be able to get behind.
The two donations that have prompted concern are by far the two largest donations ever made to a political party in British political history. Taken together, the £72 million being donated by just two people is greater than the total amount spent by all the main political parties during the 2024 general election.
Elections should be won on the strength of ideas, arguments, and policies — not on the size of the bank balances of a tiny number of the wealthiest people or by who can spend the most, bombarding voters with social media adverts day-in day-out. I do not believe that two extraordinarily wealthy individuals should be able to exercise such a disproportionate influence over our political system.
Nigel Farage is claiming neither of these men want anything in return for these huge donations. But it can hardly be a coincidence that Reform – which has almost no developed policy or even official spokespeople in key areas like defence or health – has an extensive set of policies and even a fully drafted law to cut taxes and deregulate the cryptocurrency industry where both of these men made their billions. No single individual or industry should be able to buy their way into a political party like that, and it is laughable for Reform to be claiming these men want nothing in return for such unprecedented sums of money.
My concern is further heightened by the fact that we know one of these donors also gave Nigel Farage a personal ‘gift’ of £5 million — a donation that Mr Farage sought to hide from the public and which is now the subject of a Parliamentary Standards investigation. And that is of course in addition to the fact that Reform’s former Welsh leader is currently in prison for accepting Russian bribes, and the ongoing police investigation into Reform UK’s apparent attempts to break laws preventing foreigners from donating to UK political parties.
The government was already legislating for a cap on donations of £100,000 per year for British citizens living abroad to any political party, which will be backdated to the date that policy was announced. The draft Bill has already passed the House of Commons and is currently being debated in the House of Lords. It is possible that cap will make both these donations ineligible when the legislation is in place. However, I want to be clear that if that is the case the money will not be ‘confiscated’ as some have been claiming; Reform will just have to return it to the donors.
But I do think the government should go further and introduce a cap on individual donations, because I do not want our politics to go down the same road as America, where elections are often decided by who can raise the most money and hundreds of millions of dollars are spent for even the smallest of localised election campaigns. We need a level playing field when it comes to political campaigns, so that voters can make informed choices and have confidence that political parties are acting in their best interests and not in the interests of obscenely rich people; people who in this case don’t (or at least didn’t) even live in this country.
And while I appreciate Reform supporters may not agree with me on this due to their political allegiances, I am sure that if the shoe was on the other foot and it was Labour accepting £72 million in donations from just two overseas billionaires, they would agree with me that that was not an acceptable state of affairs for the health of our democracy and would be calling for something to be done about it.