Five questions over Nigel Farage’s £5 million donation
Sam Power, University of Bristol
Questions about a £5 million gift to the leader of Reform UK Nigel Farage from a crypto billionaire simply won’t go away. As someone who spends their life thinking, writing and talking about money in politics, I’ve been left with at least five questions that remain unanswered. These centre not just on the donation and Reform’s financial arrangements, but also on what it says about the system of political finance in the UK.
1. Should he have declared it?
It appears so. It was reported in late April that Farage had received the cash from Christopher Harborne. This was shortly before deciding to stand in the seat of Clacton in the 2024 general election, which he subsequently won.
Farage claims that because it was a personal gift it did not need to be registered. However, the House of Commons code of conduct states that the possible motive of the gifter and what the donation is to be used for should be considered. If there is doubt, the code is clear that it should be registered.
Harborne has said he expected nothing in return, but only wanted to ensure Farage’s security. But given the timing of the gift, in 2024, questions might be asked about his motive. At this time, according to the Electoral Commission, Harborne had given about £1.5 million to the Conservatives (and £1 million to Boris Johnson’s private office). He had also given millions to Reform ahead of its 2019 general election campaign.
As such, Harborne was not some unknown benefactor. This information, at the very least, creates doubt about whether the donation ought to be declared. And there have also been questions over a house Farage bought weeks after receiving the £5 million.
But the question of whether the money should have been declared is now one for the parliamentary standards commissioner, which is investigating whether Farage broke the rules.
2. What does it tell us about how Reform is funded?
One thing that we know about Reform is that its funding base is remarkably shallow. In fact, investigative journalist Peter Geoghegan has found that 75% of all the reportable donations Reform has received came from just three men. They are Christopher Harborne, millionaire businessman Jeremy Hosking and Reform’s own deputy leader, Richard Tice.
I have shown in my research that the UK is very much a donor-led democracy where the few get more of a say than the many. So concerns about the wealthy having a larger influence on the way politics is run are certainly not a Reform-shaped novelty.
3. Should the public be worried?
Yes. It has been argued that for elections to have integrity, four things need to be on show: participation, contestation, deliberation and adjudication. Importantly, perception is as important as reality here.
Public opinion fluctuates, but one of the more robust polling findings is that the public has always been and remains concerned that donors have an outsized influence on British politics. So whether they do or not (and it’s notoriously hard to prove), the damage is done.
4. Should Reform be worried?
When he was questioned about Farage’s £5 million, Tice maintained that voters knew about it and “they said, we want more Nigel”. It is true that if you ask the UK public to rank issues that matter to them, then (unless you happen to knock on my door) party funding wouldn’t come close to the top ten.
And yet standards never seem to matter to politicians – until they really do. Just ask Boris Johnson, Keir Starmer or Peter Mandelson, all of whom have faced questions of their own. There are many populists who build personas as mavericks who refuse to play by the rules. While voters might not always agree with their methods, they get results. (And some voters might even think: gosh, you can’t help but love them a little bit for it.)
Nigel Farage might not think the public cares about this. But it appears that they do. And maybe Farage knows this too. If not, he’d probably have been happy to mention the £5 million in the first place.
5. Why don’t Labour care?
It remains astonishing that Labour seems to be so uninterested in addressing a financial pattern of behaviour that could risk undermining democracy – which the party is professing to protect.
It seems even more astonishing that the party seems so casual about addressing the issue of mega-donors while a bill is going through parliament that is quite literally designed to restore faith in politics.
But it may be that the government doesn’t want to cap donations (as many other countries do) because it thinks it would mean introducing more state funding. But the problem has now become too stark to ignore, and a compromise position is imperative.
This could be a “democracy backstop” donation cap of £1 million. This is far higher than any other cap I know of around the world. But it would reflect the voluntarist tradition of the UK – and could start a conversation. Get a backstop in place, and then conduct research on how much it can be lowered without a) risking the financial ruin of parties or b) the need for further state support.
After the May elections, Labour said it was listening to voters and that as a government it needed to be bold. It’s time for the party to put its money where its mouth is. That is, before a mega-donor does it for them.
Sam Power, Lecturer in Politics, University of Bristol
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Tuna has overtaken cod as the UK’s top‑selling seafood – here’s why
Angus Atkinson, Plymouth Marine Laboratory and Simon Thomas, University of Plymouth
Awesome, unexpected and unforgettable: a sudden bolt of silver as a tuna jumped clear of the sea. Nobody else saw it, and I (Angus Atkinson) almost thought I was hallucinating. But since I first saw one from a boat just off the south Devon coast ten years ago, Atlantic bluefin tuna have steadily increased in the southwest UK. Last year I even saw them from the shore, and tuna now supports a local fishery.
Tuna is not the only species to make a rapid change in the southwest UK about a decade ago. Blue, thresher and porbeagle sharks suddenly increased dramatically. Spiny lobsters suddenly increased. Meanwhile basking sharks and many important fish species like cod and pollack declined. What is going on?
Fortunately, in the southwest UK, help is at hand. Not only does this peninsula host some of the most complete long-term recordings of observations in the UK, we also have a burgeoning network of marine observers.
This was the brainchild of marine consultant Bob Earll, who 15 years ago set up a network called South West Marine Ecosystems. This links scientists, marine charities, fishermen, conservation trusts, managers and citizen scientists many of whom have natural history skills to match the best. This network enables members to more easily share observations and recordings about marine life.
Alongside established high-tech and long-term monitoring such as at the Western Channel Observatory (a set of sampling sites at sea within a 30-mile-radius from Plymouth), many pairs of eyes are looking at the sea along the entire coast of this peninsula. Each year we meet and put data together to report on the status of everything in the marine ecosystem, whether it swims, crawls or flies, and from nutrients right up to the numbers of stranded whales.
South West Marine Ecosystems’ annual reports and annual conferences put the previous year’s observations into the context of all that has gone before. That includes strange new events such as the 2025 octopus outburst. This near-real time reporting, with everyone comparing notes, provided a lightbulb moment: these species shifts were not continuous but seemed to be concentrated into a short intense period of massive change around 2014 to 2016.
In the southwest UK, tuna have increased to the extent that they support a tightly regulated fishery, with a UK catch quota of 230 tonnes for 2026-28. Fishing is always an emotive subject, and some people say we should be leaving these beautiful animals alone.
A recent announcement by the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) offers some hope that tuna fisheries worldwide are moving in the right direction.
The MSC endorses those seafood sources that have been harvested sustainably, meaning that they abide by the rules of well-managed fisheries based on scientific advice, with minimal collateral ecological damage. This most recent announcement shows an important positive result: the proportion of tuna products available with an MSC endorsement has just risen to nearly 50%, compared to less than 20% only five years ago.
Remarkably, tuna has just overtaken cod as the main seafood bought in the UK. This probably reflects the increasing availability of more sustainably-sourced tuna and sharply declining cod stocks.
A state of flux
Managing these fisheries involves treading that tightrope between allowing livelihoods for the fishing industry, but allowing the whole ecosystem to flourish. The challenges of climate change, shifting distributions and fishing pressure combine into a real headache to manage fisheries responsibly.
Abrupt shifts in ecosystems, as we have witnessed in the southwest of the UK, are critical for fisheries management. In just a few years an ecosystem can lurch into a different operating space with different species and links.
Computer simulation models of ecosystems can broadly project how food webs might respond to the average pace of climate change. Importantly, these models are notoriously poor for predicting abrupt shifts, often known as regime shifts, that punctuate the steadier pace of change.
With these challenges, fisheries managers need all the help they can get to understand abrupt ecosystem shifts. The tuna increase was well documented by South West Marine Ecosystems. The success of this network means that similar programmes are spinning up around the other coasts of the UK.
Similar initiatives are underway elsewhere. The Norwegian Institute of Marine Research provides a data network from public reporting of jellyfish increases, which are important for the management of Norwegian aquaculture.
Joined-up science efforts like South West Marine Ecosystems, alongside long-term scientific monitoring studies and, of course, traditional fish stock assessments, will help us know better whether tuna should stay on the menu.
Angus Atkinson, Professor of Marine Ecology, Plymouth Marine Laboratory and Simon Thomas, Visiting Fellow, Marine Ecology, University of Plymouth
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
‘No records’ from meetings between top officials and Mandelson’s lobbying firm
Article by Ethan Shone republished from OpenDemocracy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence.
Government failed to declare meeting with top Global Counsel clients, and says no notes were taken at several meetings
The government has no official records of meetings that top civil servants held with senior figures and clients from Peter Mandelson’s lobbying firm last year, including an undeclared meeting with oil giants and private equity firms, openDemocracy can reveal.
Global Counsel went into administration earlier this year after details of Mandelson’s close relationship with Jeffrey Epstein were revealed in the Epstein Files, including emails showing how he sought the billionaire paedophile’s advice on establishing the firm.
But before its collapse, Global Counsel’s business was booming as it and its founder established close ties to Keir Starmer’s Labour Party.
Ahead of the 2024 election, the company donated a member of staff to support Labour’s work on financial services policy development and produced promotional materials, which openDemocracy has seen, touting its significant access to the party. “Our clients’ engagement pays dividends in the long run,” it promised, adding that it was “uniquely placed” to help corporate clients “establish relationships that outlive the election and deliver policy dividends on the other side”.
By the end of that year, Starmer had appointed Mandelson as the UK’s US ambassador, and Global Counsel had seen its UK revenue surge by 75% since 2022, from £7.9m to £13.9m. The business also took on over 20 new clients in the first quarter after Labour’s win – more than in the previous five years combined – including Palantir, Shell and TikTok.
Now, openDemocracy can reveal that the most senior civil servant from the Department for Business and Trade and a senior Treasury official met with Global Counsel’s representatives several times last year, including at a roundtable the firm hosted for its clients.
No records from the discussions – including notes or minutes – exist, the government told openDemocracy in response to a Freedom of Information request.
Our investigation comes as parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee takes the rare step of voicing “grave concerns” about the government’s failure to keep proper records from official meetings, following its review of documents set to be published relating to Mandelson’s time as US ambassador.
ISC chair Lord Beamish wrote to the government expressing a number of concerns, including over a “lack of an audit trail – in terms of agendas, minutes and records of conversations,” which he described as “unacceptable in government.”
Shadowy meetings
In January last year, Gareth Davies, then permanent secretary at the Department for Business and Trade, met Global Counsel’s most senior adviser on business and trade, Geoffrey Norris, at the exclusive Royal Horseguards Hotel in Whitehall.
The meeting was useful enough that four months later, in May 2025, the pair returned to the same hotel to chat some more.
Yet little is known about what they discussed. The department quite vaguely recorded the purpose of these meetings as “to discuss latest business updates” and “discussion on growth”, respectively.
When openDemocracy asked for more information, the government said it had none.
Davies then spoke at a Global Counsel dinner event in early June and attended a client roundtable event that the firm hosted, which Norris chaired, at its offices weeks later.
There, the senior civil servant spoke with executives from several Global Counsel clients, including oil giants Shell and Equinor, plus JP Morgan and Blackstone. But you wouldn’t know that from the government’s published transparency requests, which fail to mention that clients were present. Their attendance was revealed to openDemocracy only in documents obtained via Freedom of Information requests.
Norris was not the only Global Counsel member Davies was in touch with. In July last year, he met with Benjamin Wegg-Prosser, the company’s co-founder and CEO, “to discuss the industrial strategy”.
Both Norris and Wegg-Prosser are New Labour alumni. Norris was a top business aide in Tony Blair and Gordon Brown’s governments, and later advised Mandelson while he was business secretary, while Wegg-Prosser worked as an adviser to Mandelson before becoming Blair’s director of strategic communications.
When Labour lost power at the 2010 election, Mandelson and Wegg-Prosser established Global Counsel, which Norris joined soon afterwards, remaining at the company until its collapse in February.
Wegg-Prosser was reportedly offered a peerage and a role as Labour’s investment minister in September 2024, but declined to avoid stepping down as Global Counsel’s CEO. He eventually quit in February of this year after it was revealed that he’d had extensive contact with Jeffrey Epstein, including traveling to New York to meet Epstein in 2010, two years after Epstein was convicted for soliciting prostitution from a minor. Global Counsel went into administration weeks after Wegg-Prosser’s exit.
Davies is a long-serving civil servant who recently left DBT to become the top official at the Home Office. He began his career in government alongside Davies, Wegg Prosser and Mandelson, as a Downing Street adviser during the New Labour years.
A DBT spokesperson said: “Transparency returns are published in line with Cabinet Office guidance, and the Civil Service Code has not been broken.”
‘We need full transparency’
Global Counsel also enjoyed significant access to the Treasury under Labour – in some cases with no record of what it lobbied ministers and officials about.
A Global Counsel lobbyist specialising in financial services was seconded to the office of Labour’s first City minister, Tulip Siddiq, before she resigned in January 2025 over alleged corruption links to her aunt’s ousted government in Bangladesh. The staffer’s secondment was a registrable donation-in-kind valued at more than £35,000, and not against parliament’s rules.
In November 2024, Siddiq, who was also economic secretary to the Treasury, met with one of Global Counsel’s most senior figures, its financial services lead, Rebecca Park, to discuss “growth and competitiveness of the financial services sector”. The government declined to provide any details of what was discussed after openDemocracy submitted an FOI request last year.
Later, in July 2025, the Treasury’s director general of financial services, Gwyneth Nurse, met Global Counsel’s Benedict Brogan, a former journalist-turned banking lobbyist, at the Wolseley to “discuss the UK regulatory environment”. Again, the government told openDemocracy it held no further record of what was discussed at the meeting.
Follow-up correspondence obtained by openDemocracy shows Brogan invited Nurse to a client roundtable event in the autumn, with the suggested date of 20 October. Government transparency data shows Nurse attended a Global Counsel dinner event on 20 October, though the records do not show which of the firm’s clients were in attendance.
Financial deregulation has been a significant feature of Labour’s policy offering to the City, which has won the party rare public shows of support from some of the world’s most influential financiers, notably JP Morgan’s Jamie Dimon and Jon Gray of Blackstone. Both firms have, incidentally, worked with Global Counsel.
The lobbying firm was also reportedly contracted by other financial giants as part of an ultimately successful campaign against an increase in ‘carried interest,’ the reduced rate of tax that dealmakers pay on their profits from private equity deals, which can often save them millions.
Mick McAteer, a former regulator and the director of the Financial Inclusion and Markets Centre, said the finance sector should “serve the interests of the real economy, environment, and society”.
“But, finance sector lobbyists now exercise undue influence over finance sector policy. As a result, we are seeing a programme of deregulation and corporate welfare designed to promote finance sector growth, which could ultimately harm our interests. We need full transparency on meetings between policymakers and finance lobbyists.”
The government has previously faced significant criticism over its failure to declare a meeting in early 2025 between Starmer, Mandelson and Palantir.
Now, its failure to keep records of the meetings it has had with Global Counsel and its clients appears to breach the Civil Service Code, under which all civil servants are legally required to “keep accurate official records”.
Separate guidance on managing records in ministers’ private offices states explicitly that officials are “bound by the government’s commitment to keep records of meetings with outside interest groups”.
Duncan Hames, senior director of policy at Transparency UK, said: “When government transparency is treated as a tick-box exercise, or ignored altogether, this undermines our right to know how decisions are made and leaves room for undue influence.
“In this case, as in so many others, it is clear that the current system is not working as it should. It’s time for the UK government to follow Scotland’s lead and publish a comprehensive register of those lobbying government.”
openDemocracy contacted Ben Wegg Prosser and Benedict Brogan but neither responded.
Article by Ethan Shone republished from OpenDemocracy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence.
dizzy: Busy this morning.
Morning Star Editorial: US threats to Cuba and Raul Castro must meet global defiance
https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/us-threats-cuba-and-raul-castro-must-meet-global-defiance
A marcher holds a framed composite image of Fidel Castro, Raul Castro and Cuba’s President Miguel Diaz-Canel, during the May Day parade at Revolution Square in Havana, May 1, 2025US THREATS to Cuban revolutionary leader Raul Castro reek of the extraterritorial arrogance of a thuggish imperial power.
They indicate too that the extreme economic war Washington is waging to break the Cuban people could escalate to a direct military attack very soon.
The charges levelled at the 94-year-old former president of Cuba — a veteran of the 1959 revolution and a communist even before his great brother Fidel — are a sick joke.
Claiming the Cuban military shooting down a plane belonging to the terrorist, Miami exile-based Brothers to the Rescue outfit that had violated Cuban airspace back in the 1990s amounts to murder is to deny Havana the basic rights of a sovereign state — to protect its borders and its people.
But then, Washington has denied Cuba those basic rights for over 60 years.
…
The United States hates Cuba because it demonstrates that another world is possible — that a country can export doctors not bombs, stand for peace not war, socialism and equality not capitalist exploitation.
Those are exactly the reasons Cuba must survive. Every pressure must be brought to bear on our government to call out Trump’s lawless aggression and maximum solidarity and practical assistance to the island mobilised via the Cuba Solidarity Campaign.
Article at https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/us-threats-cuba-and-raul-castro-must-meet-global-defiance