The 72 million pound questions

Inside Briefing with the Institute for Government

The episode examines the implications of a record-breaking £7ly million donation to Reform UK by crypto billionaires Ben Delo and Christophe

Key takeaways

• Ben Delo and Christopher Harborne each donated £36 million to Reform UK, dwarfing previous single gift records.
• Tim Leunig argues against retrospective legislation, stating that donors should be judged by the law at the time of action.

Main topics

• Reform UK party donations
• Party funding legislation

Notable quotes

I don't like retrospective legislation at all.

Conclusion

A nuanced exploration of how massive private wealth and shifting econo

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:08) Both these donations are 100 % compliant with the law today, of that there is no question whatsoever. Well, that's what Nigel Farage says about the £72 million that has landed in Reform UK's bank account. But is he right? And if he is, then what could these sums of money mean for British politics? I'm Hannah White, and this is Inside Briefing, the podcast from the Institute for Government. Westminster has been rocked by the news that Christopher Harborne and Ben Delo, two crypto billionaires, have each donated £36 million to Reform UK. But with the two men, both until recently living abroad, and with legislation on donations making its way through Parliament, debate has been raging about the double donation. We're going to explore where this one goes next. The news of the two donations followed Reform UK's conference in Birmingham. Next up on the party conference circuit is going to be the Liberal Democrats. Ed Davey's party is off to Brighton and so is the RFG. We'll look ahead to a big couple of days for Parliament's third largest party. And finally, have we ever lived in such uncertain times? We're going to try and answer that question. All that to come. And this week, I am joined again by senior fellow and one-time Lib Dem special advisor, Giles Wilkes. Hi, Giles. Hi there, Hannah. I saw you agonising about what book you were going to read next. Did you come to a decision? Speaker 4 (1:36) Yeah, I got persuaded by the massive weight of evidence of the centrists on Blue Sky, which is that I ought to start on the Robert Caro Johnson biography, which is basically, you know, it's a commitment to a decade of enjoyable reading. Oh my goodness, is it the right decision? Already within 50 pages, you can tell that this guy can really write. And so I'm not regretting it one little bit. So that's my nonfiction. Speaker 3 (2:00) Am I allowed to interrupt there to say that I think if we're only on page 50, he hasn't been born yet. No, not at all. I Speaker 4 (2:06) seem to Speaker 3 (2:06) recall he doesn't get born until page 87. But I agree with you that it's an epic book, an epic piece of economic history and epic writing. So I think you've made the right choice there, Giles. Oh, it's Speaker 4 (2:15) wonderful. And I've learned so much about the soil quality of Hill County, Texas, that, you know, I will know what to think when I go there next time. Speaker 2 (2:22) Amazing. Well, you will have worked out via that intervention that we are also joined by IFG senior fellow and now Lib Dem peer, Tim Leunig. Or can we still call you Tim? Yes, definitely. Hannah Keenan, Associate Director on our Civil Service team, is also back in the studio. Hi, Hannah. Hi, Hannah. You can never have too many Hannahs on a podcast. Speaker 3 (2:42) Okay. Speaker 2 (2:43) So it is all about the money, all £72 million of it. Because that's how much Reform UK has just been given by two donors, each of whom transferred £36 million to the Reform UK coffers. These are huge sums of money, with each donation dwarfing the UK's previous record single gift of £15 million. But will Reform UK get to keep it all? Hannah, can you start us off with a quick rundown on who we're talking about and what's happened? Speaker 1 (3:10) So the first person we're talking about is a British. crypto entrepreneur called Ben D'Lo, who I think is a really interesting character. He kind of founded this crypto exchange and trading platform called BitMEX. And I think the interesting thing that I find about him is he's... He's a philanthropist. He's committed to giving away, I think, the majority of his wealth during his lifetime, which is quite interesting, quite tied up. And he said he's inspired by the effective altruism movement and that kind of world. And he's given his money to all sorts of quite a variety of different things. So he's established something called the Sheila Coates Foundation, which supports children in the UK with autism. He's given lots of money to kind of maths and physics research, to Commonwealth collaboration. And then most recently... £36 million to Reform UK. And then the second person that we're talking about is Christopher Harborne, which is a name you will have heard before from a £5 million personal donation to Nigel Farage, and who is a kind of longer term supporter of reform, who is again, a British businessman based in Thailand. And Speaker 2 (4:15) in part, this is blown up as a story in Westminster, because there is legislation currently going through Parliament about party funding, and hence the opportunity to to change things or the government's already decided it needs to do something about this, but the question's raised about whether they're doing the right things. Speaker 1 (4:35) Yeah, and so that's the representation of the People Bill. It's in the Lords at the moment. I'm not sure Tim can tell us more about that. But it's got some... provisions in it to cap kind of foreign funding of UK parties and to cap those types of donations about £100,000. What doesn't have at the moment and which we're kind of speculating might be introduced in the Lords is things that would either retrospectively or in future put a cap on the sorts of donations that we've seen from the likes of Bendito and Christopher Harbour. Speaker 2 (5:07) Tim, what do you think about this whole debate about the retrospectivity point? People saying, debating essentially whether these donations are going to be legitimate under the new rules or not. Is retrospective legislation a good reach for the government, do you think, at this point? Is it really addressing what some people perceive as the problem with these donations? I don't like retrospective legislation Speaker 3 (5:30) at all. You should comply with the law at the time that you do an action. I think it's a pretty odd principle that the government can say that what was legal yesterday is no longer legal yesterday. For sure, you can change the law in the future, but I don't like retrospective legislation. With the exception, just occasionally, when they find a tax loophole and someone is clearly exploiting something that is not the spirit of the law on the day they did it. But as far as I can tell, and I'm no legal expert, these two people are acting in the spirit of the law as it stands today, which is that if you are incredibly rich, you have the right to do what you like with your money. Speaker 2 (6:09) And with your Lib Dem hat on, are you alarmed by the prospect of Reform UK receiving this amount of money? What's your thinking? Of Speaker 3 (6:16) course, of course. £72 million is transformational for a party. If they use that well... I'm not saying they can buy the election. William Hague had more money than Tony Blair back in the day, and he still lost an election. You can't guarantee to win. Count Binface wouldn't win with 72 million, nor would the Monster Raving Moony Party. But could they use that very effectively to win dozens more seats than they otherwise would? Yeah, I'm sure they would. And then there is an issue for us as a country. Do we think it's right that rich people get to help parties that they like more than the rest of us? And specifically in this case, I worry that reform has come up with a policy platform that appears to have been designed to induce people in one industry to donate money. That, I think, is way more dangerous. When the Tories took loads of money from Russians, maybe the Russians thought that the Tories would be nicer to Russia. And you know what? They were wrong. Because the Tory party is different. They'll take your money, they'll smile sweetly at you, and then they'll ignore you when it suits them. And that's the sort of donation I like. The person thinks they're getting something, but they're not. Speaker 2 (7:22) Charles, setting aside who's doing the donating, who's receiving the money, what do you think about these issues Tim's flagging here about the potential influence of individuals within our politics? I Speaker 4 (7:36) mean, it's a really interesting question. I was going to come up with the same historical example as Tim first on the effectiveness. I've been busy trying to Google up how much does money make a difference. It's quite a well-studied topic and it can make a difference, particularly when they find constituency level increases or decreases, but not as much as the structural factors that matter. Like if people can't bear William Hagen like Tony Blair, you're not going to be able to spend any amount of money. And my, for disclosure, former boss, Stuart Wheeler, immolated 10 million pounds giving money to William Hague between 97 and 2001. We can all remember the difference in results. Absolutely zero. And Speaker 2 (8:12) also, was Stuart Speaker 4 (8:13) able to influence that Conservative Party towards his direction? Well, probably not, because he ended up joining UKIP, because he became a very kind of Brexity guy, and the Tories weren't going to shift that far. So that might be a different issue with this reform bunch, partly because I think this reform team seems to have a remarkable affinity with this world of crypto, with selling gold funds online, with a lot of this kind of slightly dicey online behavior. And, you know, that can kind of create a kind of clustering effect, you would worry. And there is right now a very live and I think important debate about the regulation of crypto that is, you know, right now in the States, we've just seen a bill to regulate crypto in a favorable way defeated in the Senate, I think. And so it's a really massive issue. There was a great story, in fact, in the FT about donations in the United States where a shoal of billionaires are giving loads to the Republican Party, all very much configured around this crypto issue. So, yeah, I think we should be extremely alert to that particular angle. Speaker 2 (9:15) So that's the influence of people trying to influence around certain industries. Tim, do you think that is materially different to trade unions trying to influence around workers' rights, for example? Speaker 3 (9:28) Yes, I do. Because although obviously a trade union leader is slightly better off if they have more members, their job is more secure, they might get a pay rise, they're not doing it for themselves as an individual. Almost everyone who goes and becomes a trade unionist does so because they believe in trade unions and they're advancing that agenda rather than trying to get rich. So yes, I think it's completely different. Speaker 1 (9:51) It is still an agenda and it's money in politics that is being used potentially or in the hope of moving a political party closer or further away from that agenda. You're sort of nodding along. Does that worry you less when it's a trading? Yes, it Speaker 3 (10:03) worries me much less because the individual is not gaining financially. And for me, that is very different. And the crypto people, some of them, I think, are on the margin. Some of them may not, in fact, now be trying to get rich through it. They may just genuinely believe in crypto. It's hard to look into someone's soul. But in the US in particular, I think we can see quite clear evidence that people are expecting the law to be changed in a way that will make them richer as a result of their donations. Speaker 2 (10:29) Tim, do you think there should be a full cap on donations? Yes, categorically. I think Speaker 3 (10:33) that's the only way you can do it. And where