Dear John,

It appears that American-style dark money is looking for a home in Britain.

In the US, politics has already been bought and paid for by the uber-wealthy. Super PACs – shadowy, unaccountable slush funds – drowned the 2024 election in more than 2.6 billion dollars of mega-donor cash.

Now, it looks like the same playbook is being imported here.

Meet ‘Great British PAC’. A new front group backed by Reform UK insiders, Tory MPs, far-right influencers, and libertarian think-tanks aims to “unite the right” by dodging donation rules and flooding our elections with untraceable cash.

They claim to be “inspired by the powerful impact of Political Action Committees (PACs) in the United States.” These are the same groups that Elon Musk used to channel ludicrous sums into the 2024 Trump campaign.

GB PAC likely won’t ever have to reveal their donors – even during election periods. That means foreign oligarchs, extremist billionaires, and Trump bankrollers could secretly pump cash into the 2029 General Election.

So what has this group of oddballs been up to so far?
* They claim their “academy” will train political operatives and grassroots leaders.
* They’ve launched an in-house ‘media rebuttal’ initiative to ensure that “political entities like the Labour Party are held accountable for misinformation, bias, and unfair practices” (which seems a bit rich).
* They’re recruiting anonymous snitches to target “activist judges” and “biased civil servants”– and threatening that “Justice Will Be Served” against them come 2029.

It’s easy to simply write these guys off as trouble-makers or classic right-wing grifters. After all, they certainly have ample opportunity to profit. But there are two very real takeaways here.

The first is that Farage, Trump, and their billionaire backers are laughing at us. The far-right and their associates pretend to be populists, all while rigging the system for the ultra-rich.

The second is that a fair campaign finance system would make this impossible. We’ve warned for years that loopholes in our system could give way to massive, unaccountable funding groups that look exactly like this one.

It truly couldn’t be clearer that it’s time for the UK to take action and prevent us from ending up where the United States is right now. We’ve had the blueprint to bring democracy back to the people for quite some time – we just need the government to listen.

We’re proud to play a leading role in the movement that’s fighting for a fairer campaign finance system – one that doesn’t turn our elections into playthings for the world’s most powerful.

If you want to see where big money politics ends up, just look across the Atlantic.

Please do lend us any support you can if you believe, like we do, that Britain can do much better.

All the best,

Matt

Matt Gallagher

Communications Officer, Open Britain
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