Dear John,

The UK’s elections watchdog has now formally urged ([link removed]) Keir Starmer to strengthen campaign finance rules. After Elon Musk floated the idea of a £100 million donation to Reform UK, a conversation is finally beginning in Westminster around the glaring loopholes allowing foreign billionaires to pull strings in our political system.

While Musk is ineligible to fund Farage as an individual, the loopholes in our campaign finance system give him a number of options to get money to Reform UK.

He could donate through a UK branch of one of his various companies. He could create a ‘sweetheart’ business arrangement with a friendly UK billionnaire - someone like Nick Candy, Reform Party Fundraiser - and channel money that way. He could push money into Reform through an “unincorporated association”, entities that are largely unscrutinised. Frankly, his options are myriad.

Essentially, a donation that should not be allowed will probably be made possible by the loopholes we’ve spent years warning about.

Here’s what the Electoral Commission’s Chief Executive, Vijay Rangarajan, said: “We recommend three key changes: limit company donations to the money that they have made in the UK; legally require parties to conduct know-your-donor checks on donations to assess and manage their risks; and ensure those who donate to unincorporated associations are permissible donors. We are discussing these proposals with the government.”

It’s great that the penny is finally starting to drop on the issues that Open Britain, Fair Vote UK, and the APPG for Fair Elections have worked so hard to highlight in recent years.

But it’s worth noting that our friends at Fair Vote UK have been advocating for changes like these for nearly FOUR YEARS – long before Musk crashed into the political arena. Fair Vote’s January 2021 Report Defending Our Democracy in the Digital Age ([link removed]) explicitly called for corporate donations to come from profits declared in the UK, and for enhanced permissibility checks on all political donations.

For years now, we’ve warned that a day like this was coming. Sadly, numerous administrations failed to take those warnings seriously.

Musk’s donation threatens to set an incredibly dangerous precedent – that anyone, anywhere in the world, has the ability to use their wealth to distort British elections. This isn’t just about Musk – it’s about a basic democratic principle that has been undermined for years and appears now to be entirely destroyed.

We welcome the government’s decision to review political funding rules. It’s just a shame we had to reach a state of imminent crisis before action was deemed necessary.

The principle we’ve always fought for has not changed: It should be ballot boxes, not banknotes, that drive the direction of our politics. We’ll continue to fight alongside Fair Vote UK and the new APPG for Fair Elections to ensure that our politics isn’t up for sale to foreign oligarchs.

All the best,

Mark Kieran

CEO, Open Britain
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