LONDON — Nigel Farage’s Reform UK is spoiling for a legal fight against Labour’s attempt to prevent record-shattering donations from reshaping British politics. The insurgent right-wing party plans to carry on spending the £72 million donated over the weekend by two crypto-billionaires — even as an incoming law threatens to make them impermissible. Labour MPs are bracing for Reform to launch an “Establishment is out to get us” court drama that plays into the narrative Farage has been shaping of a plucky outsider being scuppered by the machine.
It’s a clash that two senior figures in Reform, both granted anonymity to discuss plans in the making, signaled to POLITICO they are well up for having. Farage has been dogged for months by allegations of undeclared donations, and more recently lost two top aides who were caught in an undercover cash sting. A skirmish over the record-breaking £72 million in gifts would be another opportunity to reclaim Reform’s underdog positioning.
A person advising Reform believes the party could take the challenge against applying the legislation retrospectively all the way to the European Court of Human Rights, the Politics at Sam and Anne’s podcast reported. Another person close to Reform, who believes an “almighty fight” is coming in the courts, acknowledged the “optics” of that might look off, given that Farage wants to pull the U.K. out of the international court. But it is Article 7 of the European Convention on Human Rights that Conservative former Attorney General Michael Ellis has suggested could be used to appeal against the retrospective nature of the proposed law change, which the government argues is necessary to prevent malign actors getting around the change before it’s enacted.
The government plans to backdate its law change to March 25 this year — when an independent review proposed the overseas cap because of the extra complexities of tracing the source of funds being sent from abroad. The law would mean that anyone who registers in the U.K. after that date will be subject to the cap until at least 2028. Farage’s carefully-crafted comments have been taken as a suggestion that the two donations of £36 million each by Christopher Harborne and Ben Delo may not be acceptable under the government’s pending legislation to impose a £100,000 cap on overseas donations.
The party leader has only gone as far as saying the donations are “100% compliant with the law today,” but Reform is refusing to set out when both men registered in the U.K. Privately, however, Reform is more bullish — and the party has been setting out how it’s already spending the money on an expansion of its staff and in a new online television channel, as the Times reported Tuesday. Without a legal challenge, it’s hard to see how Delo and Harborne’s donations won’t have to be paid back.
Delo only said in April he would move back from Hong Kong so he could continue donating in full to Reform and the Thai-based Harborne reportedly only registered on the U.K. electoral roll in June. Both Delo and Harborne have said they’re not acting for personal gain. While Reform’s legal position on when the two became eligible to donate under the legislation is unclear, so too is just how far reaching Labour’s residency changes could be.
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