Ministers 'Determined to Tackle Mega-Donors' as Reform Cries Foul
Debating the elections bill, minister Florence Eshalomi said a new team was “working at pace to find a solution” on capping UK political donations, beyond the £100,000 annual cap already planned for overseas British donors. Stella Creasy, backed by more than sixty MPs, pushed an immediate £500,000 cap: “Obscene wealth is increasingly dictating who is heard.” Reform’s Danny Kruger called the bill “a flagrantly partisan attempt to kneecap Reform UK” — whose backer Christopher Harborne gave £9m last year, the largest donation ever by a living person.
Britain has run for a century on the polite fiction that party funding is a private matter with public disclosure, and the fiction is collapsing under single cheques larger than most parties’ annual budgets. Mr Kruger’s complaint is not paranoid — a cap would bite hardest on the party most dependent on a handful of enormous donors — but that is an argument about incidence, not principle, and the principle now has sixty-plus MPs and a minister “working at pace” behind it. The unions’ historic resistance to caps gives the government its own conflict to manage. What converts taskforces into statute is usually scandal, and with the Met already examining Reform’s pre-election payments, the scandal may arrive on schedule. Watch the taskforce’s terms of reference — and whose donations they exempt.