Dear John,

Nigel Farage wants you to think he’s leading a grassroots rebellion. A party of ordinary people finally rising up against the establishment. But when you follow the money, the truth is a lot less romantic: in many ways, Farage is the establishment.

75% of all donations since 2019 have come from just three men: Christopher Harborne, Jeremy Hosking, and Richard Tice. Not three million ordinary contributors. Three millionaires.

It might be reasonable to bankroll a party because you like the cut of its jib. But when a party is reliant on a flood of cash from wealthy donors, the obvious question arises: whose interests does that party end up serving?

When you look at what these men are known for, and you look at what Reform UK’s leadership has been saying and promising, the overlaps are hard to miss.

Let’s start with Christopher Harborne. He’s a major cryptocurrency investor, with reported interests linked to Tether, the ‘stablecoin’ giant. He gave Reform UK a record £9 million, the largest political donation from a living donor in the history of British politics.

What strings came attached?

Byline Times reports that Nigel Farage has been talking up Tether, urging Britain to “embrace” it and to become a global trading centre of stablecoins – mocking calls for caution from the Bank of England as the work of “dinosaurs.”

That’s the leader of a political party - currently in pole position for Downing Street - publicly advocating for a product and a sector directly related to his biggest donor’s financial interests. It was also revealed in November that Tether was used to facilitate the Kremlin’s war effort in Ukraine and assist Russians in evading Western sanctions.

Then there’s Jeremy Hosking, who has donated £1.7 million to Reform UK. He’s a wealthy investment manager, whose company Hosking Partners has at least $134m invested in the fossil fuel sector. Unsurprisingly, he has strong negative opinions about net zero.

Reform UK says it will scrap net zero and related subsidies, fast-tracking licences for North Sea drilling and test sites. That would be a complete 180 shift from Britain’s policy direction, and it just so happens that donors like Hosking stand to benefit tremendously.

While you can’t prove a quid pro quo - that Hosking donated to secure that policy - it does at least mean that Reform UK’s climate programme is perfectly tailored to the interests of fossil-fuel investors rather than voters.

And then there’s Richard Tice, a property tycoon and Deputy Leader of Reform UK, worth a reported £40 million.

Property and planning may sound less dramatic than crypto or oil and gas, but it’s where many fortunes are made in Britain. Planning policy determines who gets to build, where they get to build, and what they can extract from the public realm in the process. It’s also at the heart of the cost-of-living crisis we face today (the longest such squeeze on record).

Reform UK has plotted a major overhaul of the planning system, including fast-track planning for brownfield sites and a “loose fit planning policy” with pre-approved guidelines.

That’s certainly developer-friendly language. Britain needs to build far more homes, faster, and there is little denying that the current system is broken. But the issue is that when the party’s internal power structure and donor base includes a major property figure, the “Is this in the public interest?” question becomes inseparable from “Who stands to profit?”

The greater picture is clear: three wealthy men, operating in sectors where Government has always picked winners and losers, lining up with a party that explicitly plans to change policy in order to make them the winners.

Reform UK stands as the most dramatic example of how this broken system actually operates. A system where a handful of mega-donors can effectively underwrite a political project, and where the rest of the country is then asked to treat that project as the authentic expression of popular will.

While none of this is necessarily illegal, it exposes a very real problem: how power really works and the urgent need to fix our democracy before it breaks entirely.

Legality is a low bar. Perhaps a better metric is whether it’s utterly eroding people’s basic faith in democracy itself. Is our system about the needs and aspirations of voters, or just who writes the biggest cheques?

If a party is only viable because of three very wealthy men, then those three men and their financial interests matter. And the policies that overlap with their profits deserve vastly more scrutiny than they’re currently getting.

Ignore the culture wars, the red herrings and the dead cats thrown out to distract and derail debate. Britain has a growing campaign finance problem. And until we fix it, we’ll keep getting politics shaped by the people who can afford to buy it.

All the best,

Conor

Conor McKenzie
Digital Engagement Manager, Open Britain