Is changing donation laws for Reform retrospectively unfair or politically justified?

Hansard record of the debate

https://hansard.parliament.uk/lords/2026-09-14/debates/4A1F14B8-14F4-40E0-A345-C488E8FA8C58/RepresentationOfThePeopleBill

It isn’t a fallacy. James Orr said as much in the C4 covert film.

You do ask a lot for someone not working for you ;

No I cannot do this. But there’s probably a record of the HoL debate you can access.

They are only at the debating stage, you’ll need to watch the process and see what they try to add.

OK. I'm aware that some peers proposed new legislation that would cap future donations at a certain limit. It's a perfectly reasonable discussion to have, and one for which there is substantial public support. However, I'm not aware of any peers that have proposed applying such a cap retrospectively?

Can you clarify which peers are suggesting that a cap on UK donors should be applied retrospectively, and what evidence there is to suggest that these proposals have been adopted as official government policy?

Besides it’s not that hard to get info though via the HoL debate and comments from Labour. So what you said is quite close to various statements.

MN threads are full of assumptions - check it out.

OK, thanks for confirming that you're just making assumptions about what they might do.

Hiya Pointy - you ok mate?

All good?

Or call it what it is: conspiracy bollocks.

The HoL debate is around what to introduce next. A lot of the debate was promoted by the donations.

Where do they explicitly state anything? They are masters of deliberate opacity, and the u-turn.

Call it a hunch.

Where have they explicitly stated that they will try to block it if the donors meet the criteria? Can you provide a link? Or are you just making assumptions?

As to your last para, we all know that Labour would still try to block it. Those 14 years in the wilderness really did make them all bitter and twisted.

You also have to ask yourself why, if they are allegedly so popular and considered to be the change we need, why they are entirely unable to raise any significant funding from the grass roots supporters?

This was the fallacy I addressed.

Yes as things stand. It could change.

Personally, yes, I do agree. But that is not the really the point.

As a matter of principle, I don't think it is advisable for any country to sanction major interference in its democratic processes from people who are not even resident in that country.

Personally, I do also have concerns about large donations from inside the UK enabling wealthy individuals to buy access or influence, but that is a separate debate. And as it does not seem likely that we will be bringing in state funding for political parties any time soon, that is perhaps a debate that won't be resolved any time soon.

As things stand, if Harbourne and Delo move back to the UK and satisfy any qualifying period, then there will be nothing to stop them donating to any political party in exactly the same way as other UK-bases donors.

There you go. It won’t necessarily do much. You’ve agreed here.

Well, indeed. There are different kinds of intelligence, I guess. My comment was based on the pp's earlier statements about how brilliant he was. But I agree, I don't rate his judgement much.

FWIW, I don't think any amount of money will be enough to persuade the British electorate, en masse, to support a far right party like Reform. There are clearly those who believe that it could make a substantial difference. Only time will tell.

Ben Delo may be intelligent, but he is also supporting a party whose leadership cheered on a violent assault on a woman. Nice guy. 🙄

@EasternStandard Fair enough. I agree - in that I don’t think it’ll help Reform, at all. I think it will only strengthen the tactical vote against them. But I’m not against these unprecedentedly high donations because they help Reform - I’m against them because I think this kind of big money is a corrupting force in our democracy.

And I do think if ever there was a case for following the Rees Rules and legislating in a similar way to the way tax loopholes are closed, it’s this: and if Delo has only come back to live in this country recently, in order to get ahead of this legislation then that clearly proves the point.

If we don’t backdate to close the loophole , what’s to stop - for example - a big rush of Russian money to prop up George Galloway, or whoever before the legislation passes? I don’t think it’s party political - I think it is right & pragmatic.

As you've said, Ben Delo is an intelligent guy. He obviously believes that the money will make a substantial difference, otherwise he would presumably have given it to another cause such as maths education or autism charities or whatever, which could have done so much with this money.

Whether he believes that the difference that his money will make will be greater success at the ballot box or more in terms of his own influence with the Reform party leadership, or perhaps a combination of both, I presume that he expects it to have some sort of impact and not merely be wasted.

Yes it’s at amendment stage.

I do think we have a system heavily rigged towards two main parties and it makes it very hard for anything new.

I also agree with Times guy on retrospective laws.

I don’t see it’s a given the money will help Reform, it could put people off and that’s fine. In a democracy people can say it’s not for them.

I must’ve misread you then, sorry, because I thought you seemed to be suggesting the bill being debated in the lords right now might include a blanket cap on corporate entities and/ or Trade Unions.

That’s legislation to be fully debated in future - if the Lords amend it heavily it’ll have to come back to the commons.

Aside from whataboutery, I still don’t see what it has to do with these unprecedentedly high donations from individual billionaires. Do you genuinely feel comfortable with two billionaires donating this amount of money? Because if so, fair enough - but that really is a minority view.

Unions are not required to support Labour. Many are currently affiliated to the Labour Party and there is a long history of this, but they are democratically governed organisations, and their members could follow a constitutional process to disaffiliate from Labour if they so wished. And indeed, some have done so.

Similarly, having disaffiliated, the membership of any given union could decide, through appropriate constitutional processes, to support Reform and/or any other political party which they deemed would best deliver in the interests of their members.

You might not like the fact that many unions choose to support Labour, or you might not believe that unions should be permitted to donate at all, but surely you can see that there is a substantive difference between the relatively modest collective donations from these UK-based democratically governed institutions which represent millions of ordinary UK workers and the much larger individual donations from very wealthy people who are not even resident in the UK?

But this doesn’t in any way disprove the point that the same rules will apply to everyone.