2 private donations of £36m each to one political party - is this the future of democracy in a world at the mercy of tech bros?

Pandora’s box has been opened, I’m afraid.

So Unions donate to Labour because they believe Labour will support the interests of their workers and businesses donate to the Tories because they believe that the Tories will support the interests of businesses. What interests do you think those big donors want Reform to support?

There goes underestimation again, and we know how that plays out.

The same reason other parties get donations.

Always has been by the lobbying system, big business or the unions

Empty threats as Reform won't be in power anytime soon.

Why do you think these donors have been so generous to Reform?

Nigel Farage has threatened to cut off Labour’s union funding if Reform UK wins the next general election.

In an increasingly bitter row over party funding, Mr Farage hit out at calls from trade unions to limit individual donations while creating a separate set of rules for them.

Writing for The Telegraph, he said neither of Reform’s main donors – the cryptocurrency billionaires Ben Delo and Christopher Harborne – had asked for or would receive anything in return for the £36m donations they had both pledged to his party.

“If anyone is giving money to do political bidding, it’s the trade unions,” he said. “So I would just warn the Labour Party here and now: If you try and ban our donors, we in government would certainly ban funding from the trade unions.
“I don’t want to go down that route. But it is something we would be prepared to do.”

Very true. Awful lot and their demise can't come soon enough.

If I had a spare 36m quid, I can think of few better ways to disburse it, than in the pursuit of kicking out this shower of shit government.

Your naivety is touching.

Why do they need to want anything?

They are massive donations, the like of which have never been seen before in British politics. Even the Sainsbury
donation to the Tories was a 3rd of the size.

The donors are not giving that money out of the goodness of their heart (neither do the Unions nor the businesses who have always supported the Tories). So, what do these huge donors want? How does their support align with the aims and membership of Reform?

No one is in any doubt what the Unions want, nor the business supporters of the Tories. But what does these huge donors to Reform want?

Spot on.

I don’t say that the two Reform donations are illegitimate but had vanilla onshore donors made them, Labour would still be bleating about the size of individual sums etc. It’s what Labour do, so desperate are they to cling on.

I have a feeling this make backfire on them.

The cap should also apply to donations from businesses and other organisations too, then. That would really level the playing field.

Not really if you look at it practically. Both the Conservatives and Labour have decades of spending on party infrastructure for example. Its very hard for a new party to build up the same ability to run a party and compete in an election without similar investment. The Conservatives and Labour can quite happily draw the red line now on donations and still have the party infrastructure. No other new party could say the same.

I don't think parties should receive these vast sums. But if they are capped they should be capped for everyone. Including the unions. And it would still be unfair to new parties. Bit of a Hobsons Choice unfortunately.

If the unions want a cap they can except it on them too.

People can pay Labour directly outside that.

I think the whole point of a union is power through collective action? Its just that decisions and policy are made by the union barons with the collective power of the threat of withholding funds and the threat of strikes at their disposal.

How is it gerrymandering when every party is subject to the same rules?

Exactly.

I think the unelected unions can do an immense amount of harm to the national interest by the power they wield to push special interests. A union baron is an extremely powerful individual and is getting more power under Labour.

Ironic isn't when the approved person brought themselves a peerage!

Which was going to be paid incrementally in the same way Labour receives funds, but for Labour's attempts at preventing a new party from levelling the playing field by gerrymandering the donor system. While refusing to cap donations from the unions who are their own biggest donors.

@Greyrock79 I think donations, loans and gifts need to be openly declared. I think that there is probably a compelling argument for capping the amounts, but I haven't fully considered the mechanics of how that would work.

At the moment, I think that clarity on who is making the donations is working largely as it should be. As long as people are under no illusion as to where the financial support base for a political party lies and who their financial backers are and therefore the interests that they are likely to represent, then we all know where we stand.

I'm hoping that what is being exposed (albeit painfully slowly) is that Farage and Reform have NOT been clear up to now. I think that they are so power hungry that they are pretending to be "for the people / anti-establishment / for the man in the pub / for the under-privileged and ignored Clacton electorate / for true Brits and similar" when actually nothing could be further from the truth.

It is so, so telling that the only defence anyone seems to have of these obscenely large donations is “other parties do it too”, when in fact no other party have ever had donations of this size over a single weekend. It is unprecedented.

And whichever party it was receiving this amount of money in one go - I think most of the electorate would be equally up in arms, I certainly would be.

It really, really isn’t a party political opinion to believe that enormous donations from extremely wealthy private individuals is bad for your democracy. Many people think it’s especially bad when that money comes from people who until very recently didn’t even live in this country. Many people also think it’s especially bad when that money comes from an industry so unregulated that we can’t even type the word for fear of setting off the spam filters.

No one who cares about our democracy should want to see it corrupted by big money in the way America’s politics has been.

Following your logic, Reform should be permitted to have a core donor group, too, surely? Perhaps I missed it, but I didn’t see Labour getting quite so worked up over the Tories level of donations.

As to what Reform stands for, I think they are simply the monster to Labour’s Frankenstein.