Fire fighters at the scene where a fire has broken out at Larne Leisure Centre following vandalism at the facility, June 11, 2025
NORTHERN Ireland’s First Minister Michelle O’Neill has said Stormont communities minister Gordon Lyons should resign over a social media post sent hours before an attack on Larne Leisure Centre.
Mr Lyons has faced criticism over a post about the location of migrant families who fled their homes.
Mr Lyons has resisted calls for his resignation and said he would “strongly hit back at any notion” that he had publicly revealed the facility was being used to house immigrant families affected by violence in Ballymena.
Masked youths attacked the leisure centre on Wednesday night and set it on fire.
Prior to the fire, Mr Lyons posted on social media that the building had been used to accommodate several people following riotous behaviour in Ballymena, which is 30 minutes away.
Police said that ethnic minorities have been targeted in the violence, which they have described as “racist thuggery.”
Mr Lyons’s post said: “As a local MLA [Member of Legislative Assembly] for the area, neither I nor my DUP council colleagues were made aware or consulted on this decision until late this afternoon.”
Nigel Farage speaks during a press conference on May 27, 2025 in London, England. | Dan Kitwood / Getty Images
Nigel Farage says his party is a break from the political establishment. That claim doesn’t match up with its donors
Reform has received almost £5m from wealthy donors since 2023, including those with links to fossil fuels, the financial services industry and tax havens, openDemocracy can reveal.
Nigel Farage’s party received around £1.5m in large donations in the first quarter of this year – far less than the £3.3m given to the Conservatives and £2.3m to Labour – according to our analysis of Electoral Commission data published this week.
The figures are likely particularly disappointing for Reform’s leadership, which has boasted of a major fundraising drive this year, as they don’t include a further £1m that the Tories reportedly received in recent weeks from software and gaming entrepreneur Jeremy San.
But what does the £4.8m of donations tell us about Reform’s aims, especially if it were to win office at the next general election? openDemocracy analysed the past 18 months of donations data to shed light on who is donating to the party – and where their interests lie.
Our findings reveal that, despite claiming to represent a break with the current political establishment, Reform is largely funded by ex-Tory donors, who account for around a quarter of the £4.8m it has received in large donations (only those who give £11,180 or more in a year need to be declared to the Electoral Commission) since 2023.
We also found that Reform has an unusually high number of overseas backers with links to tax havens, which the party has publicly stated is part of its fundraising strategy.
While the party previously criticised Labour’s £4m donation from a Cayman Islands-controlled hedge fund, which openDemocracy revealed last year, more than 10% of its total donations are from sources with strong offshore ties.
How much has Reform raised?
Reform looks set to receive more money in large donations in 2025 than it did last year. The party took £1.5m in Q1, compared to £3m in all of 2024. (The latter figure has been misreported as £4.75m, due to double-counting of donations made during the election period, which are listed twice on the Electoral Commission’s website.)
Farage’s party has sought to frame itself as an alternative to the political status quo of the Conservatives and Labour, yet this is at odds with its wealthy funders, many of whom are longtime political donors and paid-up members of the elite.
Commercial interests in regulated sectors such as energy and financial services are overrepresented among both the established political donors and the first-time donors that Reform has attracted.
As well as this cash from rich donors, Reform has likely raised a significant amount of money through its membership, which party figures say has been the main source of funding over the last year or so.
While Reform declined to provide details of its funding through membership and small donations, its own website says it has more than 233,000 members at the time of writing. If accurate, this would generate between £2.3m and £5.8m a year for the party, whose annual membership costs £25 or £10 for under-25s.
It is important in understanding Reform to note this element of its support, particularly at a time when Labour and the Conservative memberships are thought to be dropping significantly.
The estimated figures suggest that Reform’s claims of being driven by a grassroots movement are true, though so are claims from the party’s opponents that it is taking millions of pounds from the ultra-rich.
Who has donated to Reform?
More than half the £4.8m given to Reform since 2023 comes from people in its inner circle.
The party’s biggest donor is Richard Tice MP, its deputy leader, who has put more than £1m into its coffers, while Zia Yusuf, who spectacularly quit as party chair last week in a row over a burqa ban only to rejoin two days later in a similar role, has chipped in £206,000.
Holly Vukadinovic, better known as Holly Valance, who is married to the party’s main fundraiser, Nick Candy, has also given £50,000.
After Tice, the party’s top donor is Fiona Cottrell, an aristocratic socialite who once reportedly dated the King, who has given £750,000. Though she isn’t directly tied to the party, her son George Cottrell – nicknamed ‘Posh George’ – is a longtime associate of Farage and ran fundraising for his previous political party, UKIP, as a teenager.
George is today understood to be a close aide to Farage and, despite having no official role in the party, was last spotted alongside the Reform leader at a press conference this week. He is believed to live between the UK and Montenegro, where he has a number of business interests, including in cryptoassets.
Following Sarah Pochin’s election in May, Reform now has five sitting MPs again. Rupert Lowe, originally elected as a Reform MP, now sits as an independent having lost the party whip | Carl Court / Getty Images
As openDemocracy has reported, George recently set up opaque corporate entities in the UK and the US, which his lawyers told us will be political consulting firms.
Although George has not given money directly to Reform, he has funded trips for Farage to Belgium and the US worth around £25,000. Electoral rules state that an individual must be registered to vote in the UK – including as an overseas voter – in order to donate directly to political parties, but anyone can pay the “reasonable costs of a visit outside the UK”.
As the party has grown in influence, it has attracted the backing of many donors with a history of financially backing right-wing political projects. The majority previously gave money to the Conservative Party, but some have funded Farage’s former parties and the hard-right Reclaim Party, which is fronted by actor Laurence Fox.
David Lilley, who gave £274,000 to Reform, is a veteran hedge fund boss who co-founded Redwood Kite Capital alongside Tory peer Lord Michael Farmer. Both Red Kite and his current firm, Drakewood Capital Management, focus on mining and metals trading.
First Corporate Consultants, a think tank that has given Reform £200,000, is owned by Terence Mordaunt, former chair of the opaque think tank Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) which campaigns as Net Zero Watch. openDemocracy revealed in 2022 that the GWFP has been funded by an oil-rich foundation with huge investments in energy firms.
We have also previously uncovered significant interests in fossil fuels held by Jeremy Hosking, who has given Reform £140,000 and whose fund, Hosking Partners, has tens of millions invested in oil firms and the wider fossil fuel sector. Hosking has poured millions into the UK right in the last decade, including backing Vote Leave to the tune of millions and more recently funding the Reclaim Party and The Critic, a conservative political and cultural magazine.
Nick Candy, a property mogul and former Tory donor who is now in charge of leading Reform’s fundraising efforts, has publicly stated that his strategy is to court ultra-wealthy donors in low-tax jurisdictions around the world with ties to the UK.
This plan only got underway in earnest toward the start of this year and any donations made in recent months are yet to be published. But Reform already has several confirmed donors resident in Monaco, according to corporate filings.
All in all, around £600,000 came from individuals and organisations either resident in perceived tax havens, or controlled via them. They include Roger Nagioff (£100,000), a former Lehman Bros executive now resident in Monaco according to corporate filings, and Luxembourg-based brokerage firm JB Drax Honore (£50,000), which donated through its UK subsidiary.
Some of Reform’s biggest donors, including Malcolm Robinson (£160,000) and Duncan Mackay (£100,000), have not yet been publicly identified.
Political parties have no obligation to publish any information about their donors other than names and details of the donation, and an unavoidable quirk of these donor transparency rules is that individuals with uncommon names are subject to greater scrutiny than those with common names, because they are easier to identify.
Jeremy Hosking was a major funder of the Brexit campaign and has backed a number of right-wing causes in the years since | Jack Taylor / Getty Images
openDemocracy asked Reform to provide a brief biography for several donors who have given more than £50,000 but are yet to be publicly identified, including Robinson and Mackay, but the party did not respond.
However, openDemocracy can reveal that Simon William Smith, who has given the party £58,000, is an ‘angel investor’ with significant interests in cryptocurrency and related technologies. Reform has pledged to deregulate crypto and reduce tax on capital gains made on it.
Reform has also attracted many first-time donors to its cause, with around a quarter of large donations during this period coming from people or organisations with no apparent history of donating to political parties.
Among them are people with a varied range of commercial interests and professional backgrounds. They range from a former BlackRock executive to a company specialising in stage lighting electronics. Some of these donors control companies providing services to local authorities, including in the social care sector, while another donor has previously spoken out about the impact of small boat crossings on his haulage firm.
Overall, though the interests of the party’s wealthy backers are varied, there are common themes and a clear relationship between their political and commercial interests and Reform’s platform. Many stand to benefit significantly from an anti-net zero push, cutting back regulation in finance or energy, lower taxes on wealth and the liberalisation of cryptoassets.
Billionaire backing
While some of the funders from the UKIP and Brexit Party phases of Farage’s political life are now Reform donors, there is currently one notable absentee.
Christopher Harborne is a British billionaire with interests primarily in the fuel and aviation sectors and cryptocurrency. Though much was made of a potential massive donation from Elon Musk to Reform, in Harborne, the party already seemingly has the support of an eccentric tech billionaire who has form for seriously altering the course of British politics with huge donations.
Over a couple of years, Harborne gave Farage’s Brexit Party millions, becoming one of the largest British political donors in the modern era. He also gave Boris Johnson £1m around the time his government started talking up the crypto industry.
While Harborne has yet to put money directly into Reform in its current form, he has funded trips to the US for Farage. As he has active links to both the UK and Thailand (where he has adopted the name Chakrit Sakunkrit), it is not clear whether he is eligible to donate directly to the party, though he does control trading UK companies, which would be able to donate.
Reform also arguably receives significant backing from another major backer of right-wing UK causes: GB News. If payments that the television channel made to Reform MPs for TV gigs were classed as political donations rather than individual earnings, GB News would have been Reform’s second-largest external donor since the start of 2023, giving around £490k. Most of that cash went to Farage, but another of the party’s MPs, former Tory Lee Anderson, is paid £100,000 per year to host a regular show on the channel.
Nigel Farage reminds you that he’s the man that brought you Brexit and asks what could possibly go wrong.Nigel Farage explains the politics of Reform UK: Racism, Fake anti-establishmentism, Deregulation, Corporatism, Climate Change Denial, Mysogyny and Transphobia.
Ukip leader with his ‘goons’ intimidating aid workers and migrants in Calais. Photo: Lachlan Macrae
This is what happens ‘when you’ve got a prime minister echoing Enoch Powell’.
British far-right thugs harassing migrants in northern France are being encouraged by mainstream politicians’ increasingly dehumanising rhetoric, aid workers have told Novara Media.
Faced with daily police violence and no safe route to the UK, migrants living in refugee camps in northern France have more than enough to worry about. But just to make things even worse, last week far-right troublemaker Nick Tenconi turned up with a mob of activists who filmed themselves intimidating migrants and aid workers for a self-promotional video.
Wearing black leather gloves, a stab vest and wielding a megaphone, Tenconi is seen goading aid workers by calling them “communists”, “Nazis” and “terrorists”, and tells viewers that leftists are “architects in the subversion of British culture and Christianity”.
Tenconi, who is 41 years old, gets exasperated when aid workers won’t “rationalise” with his arguments before telling them to “go win a war”. This was then packaged as a promotional video for Ukip, ending with a plea for money for this “vital work”.
Ukip’s national chairman Ben Walker has set up a crowdfunding page asking the public to donate £50,000 to support “a crucial initiative” to “secure our borders”. Making a sinister – and almost certainly fabricated – claim that the party had just “conducted its first operation… collaborating with French police to locate and stop small boats from crossing the channel”, the fundraiser asked for donations in order to “maintain designated teams on rotas in the North of France, working tirelessly to prevent the dangerous and illegal crossing of our borders.”
Tenconi is leader of Ukip and far-right group Turning Point UK (TPUK). TPUK was behind a series of protests against drag performances in south London pubs in 2023. Last year, Novara Media reported how TPUK was a key force organising far-right action against leftwingers and Palestine protests, sometimes descending into disorder, while attempting to maintain links with leading figures in the Conservative party. Its honorary president, Marco Longhi, has since defected from the Tories to Reform.
Rescue workers comb through the ruins of a residential building bombed by Israel on June 13, 2025 in Tehran, Iran. (Photo: Majid Saeedi/Getty Images)
“Trump must act immediately to suspend all military support to Israel and stop allowing U.S. arms to fuel war crimes, mass civilian death, and regional collapse,” said one critic.
Progressive U.S. lawmakers and human rights defenders demanded an end to unconditional American armed and diplomatic support for Israel after it launched a series of attacks on Iran early Friday, reportedly killing senior military officials and civilians including nuclear scientists, women, and children in a dramatic escalation that Iranian leaders vowed to avenge.
Israeli forces carried out at least five waves of airstrikes targeting not only Iran’s nuclear facilities but also its military leadership and capabilities, Al Jazeera reported. In addition to airstrikes, Israeli and international media reported that operatives from Mossad, Israel’s foreign spy agency, also conducted assassination and sabotage attacks in Iran.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) claimed that Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Commander-in-Chief Major Gen. Hossein Salami and Iranian Armed Forces Chief of Staff Major Gen. Mohammad Bagheri were assassinated, as were numerous Iranian nuclear scientists.
Israel is bombing and killing civilians across Iran
These are all apartment buildings where ordinary people lived in Tehran
IDF attacks targeted cities including the capital Tehran, Natanz, Isfahan, Arak, Tabriz, and Kermanshah. Iranian television reports showed bombed-out apartment towers and said that an unknown number of civilians including women and children were killed in the strikes.
The attack on Natanz—home to Iran’s primary nuclear enrichment facility—sparked fears of radiological contamination.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the attack—dubbed Operation Rising Lion—a “preemptive strike,” a dubious form of warfare previously waged by forces including imperial Japan during the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the George W. Bush administration in Iraq.
Israeli President Isaac Herzog said the attacks were meant to “neutralize an immediate and existential threat to our people,” an apparent reference to Iran’s nuclear program. Successive U.S. administrations including President Donald Trump’s have concluded for decades that Iran is not trying to develop nuclear weapons.
During his first term, Trump unilaterally abrogated the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, also known as the Iran nuclear deal.
Last year, Israel and Iran carried out limited tit-for-tat attacks following the former’s assassination of Hassan Nasrallah, who led the Lebanon-based resistance group Hezbollah, and Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh.
This time, Iranian leaders vowed “severe punishment,” with fears that the U.S. could be targeted due to its staunch support for Israel as it wages what the international community increasingly views as a genocidal war on Gaza. While U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio claimed that his country was not involved in the attacks, Israeli officials insisted there was close coordination with the Trump administration.
Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei said Friday that “in the early hours of today, the Zionist regime extended its filthy and bloodstained hand to commit a crime in our beloved country, exposing its vile nature more than ever by targeting residential areas.”
“With this crime, the Zionist regime has prepared a bitter and painful fate for itself—and it will undoubtedly face it,” Khamenei added.
As the world braced for Iran’s response to the attacks, U.S. progressives called for a diplomatic solution and an end to American support for Israel.
“The Israeli government bombing Iran is a dangerous escalation that could lead to regional war,” Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) said on social media.
Tlaib asserted that Netanyahu, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza and is facing a domestic criminal corruption trial, “will do anything to maintain his grip on power.”
“We cannot let him drag our country into a war with Iran,” she added. “Our government must stop funding and supporting this rogue genocidal regime.”
Referring to negotiations on a new Iran nuclear deal, Congresswoman Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) said: “Just as talks with Iran were set to resume, Netanyahu launches a strike and declares a state of emergency. He is provoking a war Americans don’t want.”
“We should not allow ourselves to be dragged into yet another conflict, against our will, by a foreign leader pursuing his own agenda of death and destruction,” Omar added.
The U.S.-based peace group CodePink—some of whose members held an emergency protest outside the White House in Washington, D.C.—said that it “strongly condemn[s] Israel’s unprovoked and reckless attack on Iran, which risks igniting a catastrophic regional war.”
NOW: We're protesting outside the White House to say NO WAR WITH IRAN!
Israel says these are "preemptive strikes," but the only thing they are preempting is a peaceful dialogue between the United States and Iran to come to a nuclear deal.
“This dangerous escalation threatens millions of lives across the entire Middle East,” the group added. “The U.S. must not continue to support and enable this illegal act of aggression.”
CodePink co-founder Medea Benjamin said: “It’s horrific that Israel is bombing yet another country. And Trump calls himself a peace president? He knew this was coming and stood by. This is entirely out of step with the will of the American people.”
“The whole world is desperate for peace in the Middle East, and instead, Israel decides to move the region closer to World War III,” Benjamin added.
Noting that nuclear talks with Iran were set to resume this weekend, the National Iranian American Council (NIAC) said that “this is an attack on peace and diplomacy.”
“Israeli political officials have demonstrated that U.S. diplomacy and a peaceful resolution with Iran is what they consider to be the true threats,” NIAC asserted.
“This much is clear: This is a war of choice, and an illegal and unprovoked attack,” NIAC added. “Trump must weigh in to stop this conflict before it spirals out of control, and to preserve the chance of maintaining diplomatic offramps.”
Israel, the only country in the Middle East with nuclear weapons which is currently committing a genocide against Palestinians, is bombing Iran to start a war and sabotage U.S.-Iran diplomacy.
Michael Schaeffer Omer-Man, Israel-Palestine director at the advocacy group Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN), contended that “Israel deciding to launch a war against Iran at the very same time it faces unprecedented international isolation and pressure over its genocide in Gaza is a nightmarish outcome of impunity.”
DAWN executive director Sarah Leah Whitson said that “Israel has committed an unlawful, unprovoked attack on Iran to undermine the growing global efforts to sanction it for its illegal occupation and to disrupt Trump’s efforts to independently pursue America’s interests via diplomacy.”
Nihad Awad, national executive director at the Council on American Islamic Relations, issued the following statement:
We condemn Israel’s offensive strike on Iran and the broader pattern of aggression it represents. Netanyahu is using American weapons and taxpayer dollars to launch illegal and destabilizing wars across the region. President Trump must act immediately to suspend all military support to Israel and stop allowing U.S. arms to fuel war crimes, mass civilian death, and regional collapse. Secretary Rubio’s statement confirms what we already knew—Israel is acting recklessly, and the U.S. is letting it happen.
CodePink noted that “in the past month and a half alone, Israel has bombed Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and Iran.”
“There is no other choice,” the group added, “ARMS EMBARGO NOW!”
Fire fighters at the scene where a fire has broken out at Larne Leisure Centre following vandalism at the facility, June 11, 2025
