Two cryptocurrency billionaires have poured £72m into Reform UK in just 24 hours, giving Nigel Farage’s party the two largest individual donations ever made to a British political party.
Christopher Harborne donated £36m, matching a payment from fellow billionaire Ben Delo. Reform says the windfall will fund around 400 campaign managers in target constituencies and put the party on an “election footing”.
This is what political power looks like under capitalism. The worker gets one vote. The billionaire gets one vote and the ability to build an electoral machine, employ hundreds of organisers and flood targeted constituencies with propaganda. Liberal democracy formally counts everyone equally at the ballot box while the vast inequality outside the polling station determines who has the resources to shape what happens inside it.
Farage said he was “honoured and humbled” by the payments. He later claimed that Delo and Harborne “know that we are the only party that can turn the country around and win the next general election – thanks to their generosity, we are now able to fight that election on a level playing field”.
A party receiving £72m from two individuals is an unusual definition of a level playing field. Reform isn’t being raised to the same level as ordinary people. It’s being equipped to compete with the other political machines through which different sections of the ruling class pursue their interests.
The donations come while the Metropolitan police is conducting an inquiry into Reform’s finances. Farage is also facing a parliamentary standards investigation concerning a separate £5m gift from Harborne, made before Farage was elected as an MP in 2024. Reform and Farage deny any wrongdoing, and neither investigation by itself establishes that an offence took place.
Harborne insists that he expects nothing in return for his money:
“There will be a lot of media speculation regarding this donation. So what do I expect in return for my donations? Nothing. No peerage, no policy change, just a party that is ready for government.
“I have already accumulated enough wealth for the rest of my life. I am committed to putting that to work for Britain and humanity as a whole. I want the same as everyone else in Britain: for my children and grandchildren to have the chance to live happy and productive lives here and be rewarded for their hard work.
“At the next general election, people will have to vote for the party that they think will best get that done and I’m making a donation very clearly to the party that I believe will do so.”
Whether Harborne has requested a particular policy in exchange misses the broader point. Capitalists don’t need to hand politicians a shopping list for their money to exercise class power. A billionaire can support the party whose programme, personnel and political direction already correspond most closely to the kind of society they want. The donation then strengthens that party’s ability to manufacture consent and turn those shared interests into state policy.
The £72m isn’t merely buying posters. It buys organisation: paid staff, data, advertising, offices and a permanent presence in hundreds of constituencies. Reform’s reactionary politics can redirect real anger produced by declining living standards away from capitalist ownership and towards migrants and other sections of the working class. Billionaire money gives that operation an enormous material advantage.
The international backgrounds of the donors also expose the class content beneath Reform’s nationalism. Harborne is a citizen of both the UK and Thailand, while Delo recently returned to Britain from Hong Kong. Capital moves across borders to accumulate wealth, then wraps itself in the national flag when it intervenes in politics. Its international mobility is treated as natural; workers crossing those same borders are turned into convenient enemies.
Reform says both donations comply with electoral law. Its spokesperson said: “All donations to Reform UK comply strictly with Electoral Commission rules and UK law. Both men are British citizens who are fully entitled to support political change in their own country, despite the establishment’s desperate attempts to silence opposition.”
But the central issue isn’t simply whether the payments are legal. The law is part of the capitalist political order and permits rich individuals to turn private wealth into organised political power. Calling that a democratic right conceals the enormous difference between a worker contributing a few pounds and a billionaire transferring £36m.
Labour chair Bridget Phillipson said Farage couldn’t “buy his way out of the sleaze and scandal he and Reform UK are drowning in – or the multiple police investigations that are ongoing into Reform’s dodgy finances”. Yet Labour remains divided over imposing an annual cap on donations, even though the new proposal would exclude its trade-union funding from the cap.
Labour MP Stella Creasy proposed a £100,000 annual limit on most domestic donations, attracting support from 60 MPs, but the amendment wasn’t put to a vote. Green deputy leader Rachel Millward accused prime minister Andy Burnham of “flip flopping” after trade unions warned that a cap could restrict their ability to fund Labour.
This has allowed billionaire donations and trade-union funds to be presented as equivalent problems. They aren’t. A billionaire donation concentrates the accumulated wealth of one member of the capitalist class into a political intervention. Union funding pools contributions made by large numbers of workers through collective organisations. However compromised the Labour leadership and trade-union bureaucracy may be, the collective political activity of organised labour has a completely different class character from a tycoon spending part of a personal fortune.
Transparency International UK’s Duncan Hames said: “At this rate just two people could end up buying our democracy before the next election.” Spotlight on Corruption similarly warned of the “Americanisation of our politics”.
But billionaire power isn’t an American disease infecting an otherwise healthy British democracy. It grows from capitalism itself. Whoever owns society’s concentrated wealth will possess enormous political power, whether it’s exercised through donations, media ownership, lobbying, investment decisions or the threat of moving capital elsewhere.
Donation caps might restrict one particularly naked way of converting wealth into electoral influence, but they don’t remove the source of that influence. The deeper scandal is that two people can possess £72m to spend on building a political machine while millions of workers have no comparable control over the wealth their labour produces.
The money flooding into Reform hasn’t corrupted a class-neutral political system. It has made the class character of that system harder to hide.
Picture released by Parliament under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported licence
