Save the UK from corruption

Nick Cohen delves into the history of past political donations as he argues that the UK must do all it can not to be plunged into the brazen corruption of Donald Trump's crooked White House.

The controversial gift of £1 million to the Labour Party by former Formula One boss Bernie Ecclestone produced an exception to a tobacco-advertising ban for Formula One. Uniquely among Western democracies, Britain also lets money purchase a seat in the legislature through peerages; the odds that such honours were coincidental were once put at winning the lottery jackpot five times running. Because big money in politics was never cleaned up, Cohen says, we now live in an age of extreme wealth in which sums that are rounding errors to crypto billionaires can buy an entire party.

CRYPTO-SLEAZE & REFORM

Nick says there is rightly deep concern over the unprecedented funds being showered on Reform by shadowy foreign-based: Christopher Harborne a main investor in the Tether stablecoin firm, has recently pledged £36 million, on top of an earlier £5 million personal gift to Farage, and earlier donations to Reform totalling £12million. The total amount to Reform and Farage would total a staggering £53 million! The Harborne £36 million is being matched by another crypto-billionaire, Ben Delo, co-founder and former chief executive of BitMEX. Delo pleaded guilty in 2023 to U.S. anti-corruption charges over failed anti-money-laundering controls and was later pardoned by Donald Trump. Farage, whom Nick Cohen calls Trump’s acolyte, then lobbies the Bank of England against a digital pound that would compete with his patrons’ products and presses for capital-gains-tax cuts on crypto. Both Harborne and Delo have indicated they will move back to the UK so their huge donations can be valid, and legally made under current UK electoral law.

Labour, despite a huge Commons majority, is not closing the loophole that currently allows foreign based donors to move to the UK in order to make a donation because it too lives off big money. An insider account of the 2024 campaign records Angela Rayner’s proposed ban on foreign donations being pulled after Labour’s then-biggest donor, Lord Ali, objected. Nick finds a mere foreign-donor ban inadequate anyway: money has no smell, and a gift from Thailand or Hong Kong does not become virtuous if the donor moves to Britain. He wants a hard cap on donations regardless of source—even if that hurts trade unions—plus more public funding of parties, building on existing Short Money. If a Labour government will not do that, he asks, what is the point of it?

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