This afternoon peers will debate the second reading of the representation of the people bill. If you hear a loud bang echo around the Lords chamber, it will be the sound of the stable door being shut after the horse has bolted. At the end of 2024 the Sunday Times carried a report saying that Elon Musk was considering donating $100m to Reform UK.
It made a good headline, but the idea seemed so preposterous that no one at Westminster really took it very seriously. Musk is not a British citizen, and so it would have been illegal for him to have given the money directly anyway; he would have had to have donated via UK companies. Musk is now backing Restore Britain.
But of course there are British billionaires who support Reform UK too. Some Labour MPs (including Andy Burnham himself, at one point) have always been in favour of capping the amount individuals can give to political parties, and there is a bill going through parliament on elections law that could be used to legislate for this. But the main unions were not in favour, because they worried the law could be extended to outlaw union donations to the Labour party, and over the summer No 10 let it be known Burnham was not in favour of a cap.
As Kiran Stacey reported in his story at the time: Those close to the process say capping donations is not a priority for Burnham and not a subject over which it would be worth triggering a fight with Labour’s biggest backers. At that point, the idea that Reform UK might get donations worth almost as much as $100m probably seemed a bit fanciful. The news that Reform UK has received £72m from Ben Delo and Christopher Harborne, two cryptocurrency billionaires, could have a transformative effect on British politics.
It has certainly revived the debate about whether the government should legislate for a cap. Today union leaders are all at the TUC conference in Brighton, and peers are debating the representation of the people bill. Reform UK insists it will be able to keep the money.
But ministers are hinting that the party could be forced to pay the money back. In March this year (when Delo and Harborne were assumed to be living abroad) the government announced that Britons living abroad would only be able to donate £100,000 a year and that, although the law had yet to be passed, it would be apply retrospectively from the date of the announcement, 25 March. What if donors scuttled back quickly?
Extract — continue reading at the source.
