Britain has long seen itself as more resistant to the corrosive effects of big money in politics, but recent trends suggest otherwise.

Across the Atlantic, the scale of billionaire influence in politics is staggering. Analysis by the New York Times found that during the 2024 federal elections, around 300 billionaires and their immediate families donated more than $3 billion, accounting for 19 percent of all political contributions.

On average, each billionaire family contributed about $10 million, roughly the same as the combined donations of 100,000 typical political donors. Even this understates the true scale of influence, as it excludes money channelled through opaque ‘dark money’ groups that are not required to disclose their funders.

Britain should not assume it is immune to similar mega-donor influence. The conditions that allow extreme wealth to dominate politics, such as rising campaign costs, sophisticated digital campaigning, and weak transparency rules, are present here too. Public trust is already fragile, and recent controversies surrounding elite networks and political access have reinforced a growing suspicion that influence often travels through wealth and proximity to power.

Nor has the change in government yet dispelled that anxiety. When Keir Starmer led Labour to a landslide victory in the 2024 general election, he promised a “government of service.” That pledge raised expectations that politics would become more transparent and accountable. If those expectations aren’t met, Britain risks drifting toward the same troubling trajectory now visible in the United States.

The American warning

The American example shows how concentrated wealth can reshape modern campaigning. Billionaire donors can finance highly targeted digital advertising, saturate television markets, build sophisticated voter databases and deploy canvassing technology designed to guide campaigners to precisely the right doors. In tightly contested races, these tools can be game-changing.

And mega-rich donors are not only influencing federal policy. They are investing heavily in state legislatures, courts, school boards and city councils, arenas where key decisions about abortion rights, tenant protections, charter schools and tax policy are often made.

In Illinois, home to 12.7 million people, the top-spending candidate almost always wins statewide races, where 87 percent of the money given to gubernatorial campaigns has come from billionaires, the NYT analysis found.

Just this week, it was reported that several groups with ties to the America Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), spent at least $20 million in four primaries backing candidates who their deem pro-Israel and defeat those who they believe will hurt their cause in Washington.

There has to be at the least the suspicion that such funding is linked to a reluctance by many US politicians to condemn, or even criticise, actions by the Israeli government.

In Wisconsin, a recent Supreme Court race, which would determine the ideological balance of the court, attracted millions from wealthy donors nationwide, and became the most expensive judicial race in US history.

Yet this level of financial concentration is relatively recent. Before a landmark 2010 Supreme Court ruling dismantled many campaign-finance restrictions, billionaire spending accounted for just 0.3 percent of political contributions. Since the court classified campaign spending as a form of protected free speech, far fewer limits apply to political funding.

Britain is not immune

Britain has long seen itself as more resistant to the corrosive effects of big money in politics, but recent trends suggest otherwise.

Research by Transparency International UK found that 66 percent of private political donations in 2023 came from just 19 mega-donors. The organisation estimates that £1 in every £10 donated to British politics comes from an unknown or questionable source.

Campaign spending is also rising sharply.  The 2024 general election saw parties spend a record £92 million. In the year leading up to Keir Starmer’s victory, companies donated £42 million to parties and politicians, almost double the previous record before Boris Johnson’s 2019 win and triple the level seen before the 2017 election.

Much of this funding does not come from Britain’s major listed companies. According to the campaign group Democracy for Sale it increasingly flows from firms controlled by ultra-wealthy individuals, opaque companies with minimal disclosure requirements, and UK-registered businesses owned by foreign nationals who cannot legally donate in their own name.

Just five companies provided more than £27 million to Labour and the Conservatives in the year before the election.

The Conservatives received £15 million from the Phoenix Partnership, owned by businessman Frank Hester, a company that has secured £591 million in public contracts since 2016. Other donations included £1.25 million from Access Industries UK, ultimately owned by billionaire Len Blavatnik, alongside contributions from companies linked to Lords Michael Spencer and Joseph Bamford.

Labour also saw a sharp rise in corporate funding. In the year before the election, it received £13.3 million from companies, more than it received from trade unions for the first time in its history. Major donations included £4.7 million from green-energy entrepreneur Dale Vince and £4 million from the hedge fund Quadrature Capital, whose parent company is based in the Cayman Islands.

The rise of political funding networks

Financial influence increasingly flows through political networks as well as parties.

The right-wing Labour think-tank Labour Together has become a powerful force inside the party. Previously led by strategist Morgan McSweeney, who resigned as Starmer’s chief of staff amid the fallout from Peter Mandelson’s ill-fated appointment as Britain’s US ambassador, the group helped develop the campaign machinery that propelled Starmer to the leadership after Jeremy Corbyn.

Ahead of the 2024 general election, Labour Together reportedly donated £1.45 million to Labour and £280,000 to 23 MPs and several senior cabinet ministers with close ties to the organisation. The think-tank had previously been fined by the Electoral Commission for failing to properly declare around £740,000 in donations that helped finance Starmer’s leadership campaign.

Reform’s crypto mine

Then there’s the insurgent Reform UK, which has relied heavily on funding from its own leadership circle. Since 2020, deputy leader Richard Tice’s company Tisun Investments has donated more than £1.4 million to the party.

Reform has also come under scrutiny for failing to share the addresses of any of its digital cryptocurrency wallets with the Electoral Commission, limiting the election watchdog’s ability to monitor where the party is getting its money from. 

Earlier this month, Labour Party chair Anna Turley wrote to the Electoral Commission after its quarterly report revealed Reform had secured a second multimillion-pound donation from a Thai- based billionaire, boosting the party’s war chest ahead of the crucial May elections. The £3 million donation from crypto investor Christopher Harborne, who also helped bankroll Brexit, follows the record £9 million he gave to Farage’s party last year.

A test for Labour

Last summer the Labour government began to deliver on its manifesto promise to make elections fairer in order to restore trust in politics. Dropping the voting age to 16 attracted most attention but campaigners and election watchdogs are urging the government to curb the growing influence of donors. They argue that without stronger safeguards in the Elections Bill, British politics will remain vulnerable to foreign-linked funding, opaque donations and privileged access for the super-rich.

The question is whether Labour act decisively, or prove too feeble, complacent or even reluctant, given its own growing reliance on wealthy donors.

The Elections Bill aims to modernise election rules, reviewing voter ID requirements, extending voting rights, improving voter registration and tightening donation rules. Yet most notably, it stops short of introducing a cap on political donations.

The Electoral Commission has warned that loopholes remain. They have called on the government to grant it tough new powers to regulate cryptocurrency donations to political parties, warning that the existing legal framework must be “strengthened to prevent impermissible foreign funds entering the UK system.”

Similarly, anti-corruption campaigners argue that unlimited contributions allow wealthy individuals to exert disproportionate influence over political parties.

Duncan Hames of Transparency International UK warns that without meaningful reform, public trust will continue to erode.

“Legislation to close the dark money loopholes in British politics is long overdue, and this bill takes some welcome steps. But it does not go far enough — either to achieve its stated ambitions or to contend with the biggest threats to our democracy. 

“Public trust in our politics is already perilously low and these new rules will still allow the super-rich to buy political influence through large donations. Until that changes, trust will only continue to fall.”

Other democracies take a stricter approach. France caps individual donations to political parties at €7,500 per year. Canada, Belgium, Portugal and South Korea impose similar limits, and some even ban corporate donations altogether.

The lesson from the United States is clear: once extreme wealth becomes the dominant currency of politics, reversing its influence becomes difficult.

Britain still has time to avoid that path but doing so will require more than modest reforms. Capping donations, tightening transparency rules and closing the loopholes that allow opaque funding networks are essential if the country is to avoid being shaped by the highest bidder and putting political power in the hands of the richest.

Gabrielle Pickard-Whitehead is author of Right-Wing Watch

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