AIBU? Billionaires donating £72 million to Reform

So it does seem odd, they were ok accepting a large donation from the Cayman Islands but as soon as Reform get a huge donation, they are very eager to enforce the rules. It just looks a bit er…. Odd.

If a cap gets applied it’ll need to be consistent, some would back Labour no matter what they do re the unions but hopefully they’d be outnumbered by the other parties who would be severely curtailed. Whilst Labour alone would carve out millions.

Totally agree. The average person who supports them are most likely to be shafted by reform!

To take your question in good faith, the first thing to say is plenty of people - including plenty of Labour supporters - were up in arms about money being donated from a hedge fund registered in the Cayman Islands.

But even so, £4 million is a lot less than £72 million. The £72 million is completely unprecented in the history of our democracy. There is also a difference in that the Cayman Islands donation came via a registered corporate hedge fund entity. Reform's latest mega-donations come from wealthy individual entrepreneurs - who made thieir money in an unregulated industry whose name we can't even type, because it's deemed so likely to be spam.

Partly because of public anxiety over big money donations (I shared a link somewhere else on the thread about this) - like the one from the Cayman Islands - there was an independent review, led by a former civil servant. Labour - with cross party support - have put that review's reccomendation of a £100,000 annual cap on foreign-based donors into action. Despite Reform's victim complex, these rules apply equally to all political parties - as will the retrospective date of March 2026, because that is when the Rycroft report was published, giving all political parties fair warning - that is in line with the Rees Rules (the consitutional guidelines for how the UK should introduce retrospective legislation to counter tax avoidance etc).

If Reform's argument is genuinely that 'everyone else takes big money, we just take more of it from less regulated sources' then I really don't think that helps thier anti-establishment, party of the people image.

But as far as I'm concerned, enormous donations are wrong and bad for our democracy - whichever party they go to, and I'd like to see all donations capped somewhere around £1 million (or even lower).

But they didn’t do it.

They are doing it now because Reforms got more money than them.

I am a strong believer that in life sometimes doing nothing is the best option. And you would be surprised how often that is effective.

😂

I mean warren buffet is a billionaire and he does a lot of good for charity. Bill gates set up the Gates foundation. Are you saying people automatically become evil when they’re a billionaire? Is it like when their bank account ticks over to 1 billion or is it a gradual process? 😃

I think £95 million in total from Delo & Harbourne to Reform UK (guarantors of the private limited company are Yusuf & Farage)

£72 million was just this weekend.

plus £5 million for Farage personally.
and £10 million to the Brexit party.

It's just jealousy that someone has more money than them

That’s what I was thinking. Not all billionaires are evil. Not all those living in poverty are good. Maybe if we encouraged billionaires to do more good with their money instead of spending it on stupid stuff like space flights etc, the world would be a much nicer place.

Was anyone up in arms when the pharma company that makes puberty blockers gave money to the Lib Dems?

Yes. It seems MPs are very selective on what they are outraged about.

Yes the Lib Dems defended that as Labour do union millions.

Quite. Make of that what you will.
I have since read that it's being suggested there is an clause written into ECHR law that stops an act done in good faith and following the current rules being retrospectively classed as unlawful. Who knows.

Lord Sainsbury has donated millions to Labour over the years. Something like 12 million quid. We were okay with it then though… because it wasn’t Reform…

Edited for terrible maths

Maybe they are hoping the UK will stop going to shit 🤔

Space exploration is cool

It is just sickening that so few have so much, and it is terrible to watch the destruction of all the values I knew that defined the western world. Democracy, justice, law, fairness, equality, basic decency. It’s all dead. Everything has been sold. We have all been sold.

We still live in a democracy. What's so wrong about the UK?

It is up for sale. Brexit was a prime example of just how much money matters now, how much of modern policy choices it buys. So is the whole trans rights / male activist debacle. You think these billionaires are offering philanthropy and improved lives along the lines of the Victorian Rowntree family or Carnegie?

Britain a democracy? How many other policies of the last 30 years have we been given a real choice about? Even under its own rules, it’s classed as a minimal democracy. Every 5 years a choice of red and blue ties offering very similar policies gets put to a multiply-Gerry mandered electorate. We have no local democracy worth the name, no choices, and most of us are now just serfs. We are losing rights, especially if we’re female.

We are a parliamentary democracy

We are up for sale to anyone who offers money. Have you not heard any of the complaints from MPs themselves about how ineffective Parliament is?

I think people should be free to donate to reform. As you are feeling to donate to labour, the green, the lib dems or the Tories.

Free to donate billions in exchange for laws that favour their interests?

I can hardly equal the donation of billions. Hell I can remember when the - original -Green Party, the ones who were interested in the environment rather than Palestinians and misogyny, sent me a letter complaining that I was not doing my bit because I couldn’t afford a regular donation of £50 a month! At the time I couldn’t have spared £5 a month, thanks to the shift to the rentier economy and being a bit younger than the baby boomers who sent the letter.

((Which is how that party became the corrupted mess it is now. Ditto, the rest of the slow degradation of this entire country, with all the family silver sold off to foreigners.))

Therefore I have no power at all, unequal to that wielded by the billionaires, thus demonstrating the undermined principles at the heart of democracy - equality, law, justice.

I’ll remind you that the British Empire called itself a democracy too, and that it was ‘the mother of all Parliaments’ . Sure, all those serf miners had just as much right to influence the British Parliament as Lord Salisbury or whatever. They had rights to gather too and not be cut down in the street at Peterloo.