In the last 24 hours, two crypto billionaires have given Nigel Farage’s party £72 million in donations. No one can pretend the threat of a Reform government isn’t real. It is very real. Seventy-two million pounds. That is an obscene war chest with one goal: to buy a place in Number 10 for Nigel Farage to turn our country into his version of Trump’s America.
This is a message from the Liberal Party who have survived on fumes over the last 100 years.
I can feel for their frustration. But I am more mystified by Reform’s obsession with funding. Isn’t this the party who have been exposed with their trousers down on Channel 4. If there was funding just around the corner on this scale , why not just wait for the funding to arrive? Or was this funding prompted by pity from the crypto-currency two, for whom Reform had been so much in need?
Neither of these explanations makes much sense to me. We have not the history that America has, of spending high amounts on publicity. There is a strong case for saying that would change if money was available and that’s what Reform and funders are saying.
We will have to wait and see. The provenance of this £72m is not clear. The Labour and Conservative parties have not had donations at this level or anywhere near. The highest is the £10m from the Sainsbury family from an inheritance. The question that remains is whether those who have said recently they will vote Reform will stick with that , translating by-election and local election voting to the General Election which now looks to be three years away.
Reform claim to be changing the way we do politics ; this money will help them but will it help a country which has suffered two decades of bad Government? My hope is that rather than Reform’s demand for populist change , the country buys a return to what worked well before the financial crisis early in the century. My worry is that we have a Trump style party in Britain which relies on populist prejudices against immigrants – and those who Trump’s now calling “Dumbocrats”.
It is good that we have three leaders in Burnham. Badenoch and Davey that are popular and hold strong views against these prejudices. It will be good to see a better fist made for decency that was made in America by Biden and Harris’ democrats.
But my fear is that this enormous amount of money will buy votes by pandering to the lowest common denominator. That takes us down a path that Britain has not seen since the 1930s when Oswald Mosley and the British Union of Fascists established the threat now posed by Reform and Nigel Farage.