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Exclusive: Donations to political parties made by people in the UK would be capped at £1m under plans being drawn up by a Labour MP.
Alex Sobel, the MP for Leeds Central and Headingley, told PoliticsHome that he intends to amend the Representation of the People Bill in the hope that the government will agree to go further to tackle the influence of big money in British politics.
Last month, the government announced that it would cap political donations from individuals overseas at £100,000. It also announced an immediate and retrospective ban on political donations made via cryptocurrency, in a package of measures that Communities Secretary Steve Reed said would tackle “malign actors” funnelling “dark money” into UK democracy.
The policies were in response to an independent review by former senior civil servant Philip Rycroft, which warned that the “persistent problem” of foreign interests seeking to influence British political life had become “more acute” in recent years.
Campaign groups like the Electoral Reform Society (ERS) and Transparency International UK welcomed the steps, but said ministers should have gone further by introducing restrictions on donations from individuals based in the UK.
“This is widely supported by the public and would help prevent our politics from being swamped with massive donations, which now frequently reach into the multiple millions,” Dr Jess Garland, Director of Policy and Research at the ERS, said at the time.
This month, Ben Delo, billionaire co-founder of cryptocurrency trading platform BitMEX, wrote in The Telegraph that he was moving back to the UK from Hong Kong so that he could circumvent the new rules to continue donating to Nigel Farage’s Reform UK.
Reform has also received around £12m from Thailand-based British businessman Christopher Harborne, and is the only UK political party to have received cryptocurrency donations.
Sobel said he is tabling an amendment to the Representation of the People Bill at its report stage to prevent a “very small group of very wealthy individuals buying out our whole political system”.
While donations larger than £1m are rare, the Labour backbencher believes that this would “future-proof the system”.
“We need to have a culture where we don’t get bulldozed by the donations system,” he told PoliticsHome.
The amendment, if successfully added to the legislation, would exclude donations from organisations that have democratic internal structures, as well as donations that are made up of individual donations rather than one person’s money, like those from trade unions.
Duncan Hames, Director of Policy at Transparency International UK and former Liberal Democrat MP, suggested last month that ministers should consider a £50,000 cap on donations by people in the UK. Writing in The House, he likened the current package of measures to “trying to secure a building while leaving the front door wide open”.