Labour could consider a cap on political donations after two cryptocurrency billionaires living overseas gave Reform UK a combined £72million, a senior minister indicated today.
Angela Rayner said party funding had become a “live issue” after financiers Christopher Harborne and Ben Delo together set a new record for the biggest donation in British political history.
Mr Harborne, who is based in Thailand, and Hong Kong-based Mr Delo each gave £36million to Nigel Farage’s party on Saturday.
Mr Farage said the pair had handed over the money in advance to head off any Labour effort to impose donation limits, while helping him accelerate plans to build a party operation capable of competing with Labour and the Conservatives.
A Bill currently progressing through Parliament would limit overseas donations to £100,000. However, both men are registered UK voters, meaning their contributions are legal.
Prime Minister Andy Burnham has declined to support a backbench proposal that would extend tighter rules to UK-based donations, following resistance from trade unions that provide funding to his party.
Speaking to Sky News today, Ms Rayner said: “We’re saying that if you don’t pay taxes, if you don’t live here, you can’t buy your way into our democracy because you’re a billionaire.
“It’s a really live question for us about making sure that our democracy is about the people and them having a choice, and not about people with billions of pounds being able to buy their way.”
Angela Rayner said party funding was a “live issue” after Christopher Harborne and Ben Delo jointly broke the record for the largest political donation in British history.
The first donation came from Ben Delo, pictured, the BitMEX co-founder and Britain’s first Bitcoin millionaire.
Delo’s donation was matched by Christopher Harborne, a tech investor based in Thailand
Reform UK has insisted its two crypto-billionaire donors want ‘nothing’ in exchange for their combined £72million gifts to the party.
Neither Mr Harborne nor Mr Delo will be given a knighthood, a peerage or a government contract if Reform comes to power, the party said, after receiving the two gifts in the space of 24 hours.
The donations, amounting to £36million from each man, are the largest in British political history and together are equivalent to three-quarters of the money spent at the 2024 general election by all parties combined.
Thailand-based Mr Harborne, Reform’s largest donor, said his gift was ‘a philanthropic gift to our country’ intended to help the party prepare for government.
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As well as donating to the party, Mr Harborne gave £5million to Mr Farage personally, with the Reform leader’s failure to declare the gift leading to an investigation by the Parliamentary Standards Commissioner.
Mr Delo, who was pardoned last year by Donald Trump after a conviction for violating the US Bank Secrecy Act, said his donation was intended to create a ‘level playing field’ for Reform with the other parties.
Reform finance spokesman Robert Jenrick said the combined £72 million donations from two crypto-billionaires will enable Reform UK to be ‘battle ready’ for a general election.
He repeated assertions that the donors have asked for nothing in return and would not receive honours under a Reform UK government.
‘Nigel (Farage) has said this in the last few days: neither of these two individuals, nor anyone who donates to our party, is going to be on some honours list in the years ahead if we’re lucky enough to to be in government, and I can assure that.’ he said.
He added: ‘We’re very confident that these two donations are perfectly legal.’
Mr Jenrick said Mr Delo was a ‘very respected businessman’.
T he shadow foreign secretary said the crypto industry ‘has backers in people who want to launder money’.
Tom Tugendhat told Sky News that ‘the British people can’t be bought’ and it was ‘an illusion that people can buy their way into public office’.
The Conservative MP for Tonbridge said: ‘I welcome people supporting political activity in the country because I think it’s important that democracy is supported. What I do say, however, is every party is responsible for checking the sources of their own donations, and we’ve seen reports about that in recent weeks.
‘And so I hope very much that the due diligence has been done on this. It should have been, it’s a legal requirement.’
Mr Tugendhat added: ‘Now, this appears to be very focused on the crypto industry. And the crypto industry has got many supporters, I know, including in Iran where they use it to buy weapons from Venezuela; including in Russia where they use it to launder money in order to pay agents around Europe.
‘The crypto industry has backers who have great interest in a new form of currency.
‘It also has backers in people who want to launder money.’