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Suddenly it’s a good idea to put a cap on political donations.

Is that because Reform UK just had the biggest donation in UK political history and the other parties are running scared of that?

It was fine when THEY were the ones who were benefiting…

Here’s The Guardian: “Ministers should legislate to cap political donations to “rebuild voter confidence” in democracy, campaigners have said.

“In a letter sent this week to Steve Reed, the communities secretary, and Samantha Dixon, the democracy minister, 19 civil organisations said “a donations cap is the best way to protect our democracy and to rebuild voter confidence in the system”.

“Its signatories include the Electoral Reform Society, Transparency International UK, Hope not Hate and the UK Anti-Corruption Coalition.

“The call comes weeks after Nigel Farage’s Reform UK declared it had received £9m from the Thailand-based crypto investor Christopher Harborne, the largest donation made by a living person to a British political party.”

Caps on political donations have been treated by the major parties as a theoretical “nice-to-have” for many years – ignoring the obligations that these donations bring with them.

The argument was always practical rather than principled: campaigns are expensive, the state won’t fund them properly, and private money is therefore unavoidable.

That logic held sway as long as the beneficiaries of the system were Labour, the Conservatives, and their familiar circles of wealthy backers.

The Establishment parties got their money and their donors got their way when their choice of party got into office.

Nobody in power was especially keen to fix a system that was working for them.

What has changed is not a sudden outbreak of democratic virtue. It is the direction of the money.

A single £9 million donation to Reform UK shatters a long-standing comfort zone.

Large donations were tolerated when they were fragmented across multiple donors, tied to established interests, and embedded in networks the political class understood and could manage.

One enormous cheque to an insurgent party led by Nigel Farage is different because it concentrates power, accelerates disruption, and removes the reassuring fiction that money merely “supports” politics rather than reshaping it.

So this initiative cames with a strong whiff of panic dressed up as principle.

Notice how the language works: campaigners talk about “rebuilding voter confidence”, “protecting democracy”, and “closing loopholes”. All of that may be true, but none of it is new.

Transparency International, the Electoral Reform Society and others have been making the same arguments for years, while donations from hedge fund managers, property tycoons and private equity figures flowed into the Conservative Party, and millionaire donors bankrolled Labour’s election machine. The political response back then was inertia.

Only now, after the biggest donation in UK political history lands with Reform UK, does the idea of a cap suddenly feel urgent.

There is also a deeper anxiety at play: Reform’s funding model does not just threaten electoral outcomes; it threatens control.

Crypto donations, overseas-linked wealth, and donors outside the traditional British elite networks make the system harder to police informally.

When ministers say they are worried about “knowing who is providing the donation”, what they really mean is knowing whether the donor is legible, predictable, and containable within existing power structures.

That does not mean a donations cap is a bad idea. In democratic terms, it is long overdue.

A system in which 19 individuals can supply two-thirds of all private political funding is not meaningfully democratic, regardless of which party benefits.

But it does mean we should be sceptical of the moral conversion story now being told.

If Reform UK were still scraping by on small donations, would this bill be coming forward with the same urgency? Almost certainly not.

Labour, like the Conservatives before it, relies on big private donors (because Keir Starmer deliberately purged the party of hundreds of thousands of members, thereby destroying the financial power base of the party membership) and has spent years quietly accommodating that reality.

Labour’s reluctance to legislate after the IPPR proposed a £100,000 cap tells you everything you need to know about where its comfort level lies.

In short: the system was “acceptable” while it reinforced the existing political settlement. It became “dangerous” the moment it empowered a party outside it.

That hypocrisy does not invalidate the reform – a cap on donations would make politics more transparent, and may even make it more democratic, just as its proponents are suggesting.

But it does expose the motivation.

This is less about suddenly discovering that money distorts democracy, and more about those in power discovering that it can now distort democracy in an inconvenient direction.

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