Does money matter in an election?
In the US, where billions of dollars are spent each election cycle, the answer has long been a definitive yes. But in the UK, in part because of strict campaign spending limits, the jury is still out.
Now, two record-breaking donations to Reform UK totalling £72 million look set to test the theory to its limits.
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Despite calls to strengthen legislation going through Parliament to include a cap on individual domestic donations, government sources insist last week’s mega-donations by two crypto-billionaires are “not being viewed inside Downing Street as a game-changing moment in this debate”, said Jack Fenwick on the BBC.
“But people across the political spectrum are now asking whether this massive injection of money will be remembered as a key moment when politics in this country changed.”
“For all the failings of modern British politics, one virtue has largely remained,” said Lee David Evans on UnHerd: “big money plays little role in deciding our elections.”
In total £94.5 million was spent across the entire 2024 UK general election campaign, according to the Electoral Commission. By contrast, $11.6 billion is reportedly going to be spent in advertising alone for this year’s US mid-terms, said Reuters.
It would be “too defeatist (or triumphalist, depending on your perspective) to conclude that these [Reform] donations mean the next election is already over”, said Evans. But they are “likely leave the ordinary party member feeling more irrelevant”. And if it means Britain’s political parties and politicians have to spend more time fundraising, “then our politics will have become a lot more American – and will be worse for it”.
The focus up to now has been on foreign influence, and “for good reason; it is for UK voters to choose their government”, said The Guardian. But now “ministers must look beyond the narrow question of outside interference” and find ways to limit mega-rich donors paying for “years of polling, advertising, data and staff, before election-period limits apply”.
But this is just “frothing at the mouth and gnashing of teeth”, said Ameer Kotecha, chief executive of the Centre for Government Reform, in The Spectator. There has been a “collective amnesia” from the mainstream parties, who have long received multimillion-pound donations from wealthy individuals and trade unions.
Arguments about how such donations help level the playing field for upstart parties such as Reform aside, these are “huge and potentially transformative sums for British politics”, said Ian Birrell in The i Paper. Yet Labour and the Tories have “only themselves to blame for this toxic situation after their failure to clear the stench of corruption that hangs over Westminster, despite a string of funding and lobbying scandals”.
The two parties have “tinkered at the edges of real funding and lobbying reforms” and now Reform “threatens to wash them both away with a tide of cash from a couple of billionaire crypto kings”.
People also naturally “assume that the donors are driving a bargain – that for a large donation, they expect something in return”, said former Conservative parliamentary candidate Iain Dale on LBC. “In my experience, that is not true, and most donors act philanthropically.”
The only alternative “is for the taxpayer to fund political parties through a regime set up by the state”. I do “wonder how many taxpayers would think this was a wise use of their taxes”.
What next?
Labour’s Angela Rayner has said the law to stop foreign and crypto donations will be used “retrospectively” and “backdated to 25 March” when it was announced.
But surely the “real question here is whether Labour is trying to save British democracy or itself”, said David Maddox on The Independent.
It’s a dangerous game they’re playing. “They may celebrate forcing Reform to hand back £72 million”, but if Reform were to win power “they could easily point to Labour’s actions to justify their own attempt to stop other parties receiving funding”.
Andy Burnham and his ministers “need to beware of creating a tit-for-tat scenario, which could be far worse for British politics in the long run”.
