Reform UK’s £72mn weekend is not simply a funding story. It is a warning that economic inequality is being converted into political power – and that a revolt born from social failure risks being captured by the people least likely to pay its price.
This weekend, in the space of 48 hours, crypto billionaires Ben Delo and Christopher Harborne each gave Reform UK £36mn. Two men. £72mn donated to a UK right-wing populist party.
According to the Electoral Commission, every registered political party in Britain combined accepted £64.84mn in donations and public funds during the whole of 2025.
A polite response might be to call this democratic participation, perhaps a more honest assessment is to call it an extraordinary concentration of political power from deep pockets of yet another set of billionaires.
A pensioner placing £5 in a collection tin or subscribing to a political party expresses an opinion. A billionaire placing £36mn gives a political party the potential to employ hundreds of organisers, build databases, recruit candidates, commission polling and massively increase its advertising reach.
So, whilst the ballot papers remain equal, almost everything that shapes the choices printed upon them does not.
There is no evidence that either donation has purchased, or will purchase, a particular Reform policy, and none should be implied. But that is almost beside the point. Corruption is the crudest form of political power, but not the only one. Democracy should not have to wait for the discovery of a brown envelope before becoming concerned about the influence of extreme wealth.
A more fundamental question is why one citizen’s fortune should be capable of buying a political voice millions of times louder than another citizen’s. When £36mn can purchase organisers, mass-market advertising, data analytics, prime time access and most fundamentally the infrastructure of a political movement, the democratic concern is bigger than whether money passes between donor and politician.
It is that extreme wealth can be converted directly into extreme political influence.
When fortunes accumulated in the market can be converted almost without limit into electoral influence, economic inequality reproduces itself as political inequality. The wealthy do not need more votes than everybody else. They can buy more opportunities to decide what everybody else is voting for. That is the stronger democratic charge here: not that billionaires are buying politicians, but that extreme private wealth can buy an extraordinary capacity to shape democratic choices while remaining insulated from the consequences of those choices.
The revolt the centre created
In part one of ‘Is the political centre dead?’, I argued that Thatcher and Reagan did more than win elections. They moved the boundaries of mainstream politics through privatisation, deregulation, restrictions upon organised labour, lower taxation of capital and an expanding faith in markets. Centre-left governments later adapted to that inheritance. What began as accommodation became orthodoxy.
In part two, I argued that voters are not necessarily becoming socialist. They are becoming anti-settlement. By ‘settlement’, I mean the institutions, interests and assumptions that decide what government may reasonably do, who carries economic risk and who receives the rewards. That settlement promised rising prosperity. Increasingly, it delivers expensive housing, insecure work, weak wage growth, struggling services and accumulated wealth at the top.
For millions of people, the outcomes defended as moderate no longer feel remotely moderate. Yet they are still told that public housing is radical, stronger collective bargaining belongs to the 1970s and taxing accumulated wealth would frighten the only people whose confidence apparently matters.
This is the opening through which the populist right advances.
Farage understood the exhaustion before much of the centre left. Trump did too. Their skill lies not in inventing the pain but in redirecting it: blame the migrant, the refugee, the civil servant, the welfare claimant, the lawyer, the university, the trade union, the climate campaigner or the imaginary ‘globalist’ conspiracy. Almost anybody, in fact, except those with enough wealth to write a cheque for £36mn.
That is the central contradiction of billionaire populism. Right-wing populism sells itself as a revolt against an establishment while being bankrolled by the very same people sitting at its economic summit. It invites voters to rage against elites, provided they rage against the right elites: the civil servant ensuring corporate governance rather than the offshore billionaire; the migrant rather than the rent extracting landlord; the welfare claimant rather than the tax avoider.
Concentrated wealth does not merely escape the dock. It finances the prosecution, selects the defendants and supplies the megaphone outside the court.
This is not the politics of outsiders
Thus, Farage and Reform present themselves as an insurgency against a self-serving elite. But what we witnessed was that insurgency being financed by the two largest political donations in British political history. To continue framing Reform and Farage as anti-establishment is therefore increasingly difficult, not when the richest people inside that system can purchase the infrastructure of revolt on such a scale.
The connection between money and policy does not need to be transactional to be politically important. Reform has advocated reducing capital gains tax on cryptocurrency gains to 10% and creating a Bitcoin reserve. Reuters reports that both £36mn donors made their fortunes in crypto. Their support may be entirely sincere. But sincerity does not dissolve economic interest, and shared ideology does not make concentrated influence democratic.
Ordinary voters support parties because they hope their lives will improve. Mega-donors can support parties whose victories may also improve the political and regulatory environment surrounding their wealth. Those motives can coexist. Pretending the overlap is irrelevant is not neutrality. It is naivety.
Nor does influence begin and end with the manifesto. It includes access, gratitude, staffing, candidate selection, the ideas that receive institutional backing and those dismissed before reaching the public. A party dependent upon a handful of fortunes does not necessarily need to receive written instructions. The influence can operate more subtly, through access, relationships and an understanding of where its financial support comes from.
The American Tea Party offers a more relevant warning than an overheated comparison with 1930s Germany. It contained real activists with real grievances. But research by Theda Skocpol, Vanessa Williamson and John Coggin found that its conservative identity was funded by Republican business elites and reinforced by a powerful conservative media network.
That distinction is crucial. Manufactured politics does not require manufactured anger. The anger can be authentic while the explanation attached to it is designed, tested, financed and relentlessly distributed from above.
Grassroots Tea Party supporters were not simply obedient libertarians. Many valued social security and Medicare. Yet the wider infrastructure built around their activism pressed a far more uncompromising free-market programme. As Skocpol later described, politicians seeking the Koch network’s money, voter data, advertising and activists faced pressure to accept its ultra-free-market agenda.
The voters supplied the energy. Wealth supplied the megaphone, the organisational muscle and a powerful influence over the policy.
Trump perfected the contradiction. He ran as the billionaire enemy of elites and promised to restore power to forgotten Americans. One of his central first-term achievements was the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. Distributional analysis by the Tax Policy Center found benefits skewed towards higher-income households, while the permanent reduction in corporation tax sat beside individual provisions designed to expire.
Silvio Berlusconi offered an even more literal demonstration of wealth becoming political power. Political scientists examining the Italian case describe the support his television system gave his political role. He did not simply fund the messenger. He owned much of the means by which the message reached the electorate, then governed a country responsible for regulating his business interests!
Berlusconi, the Tea Party, Trump et al are not identical to Farage and Reform, and they do not need to be for the warning to matter. What recurs is the mechanism through which power is acquired. Concentrated private wealth can buy the infrastructure through which political reality is described to the electorate: advertising across social networks, political discourse in mainstream media, data-driven campaigning, doorstep messaging – and then repetition, repetition, repetition.
These tactics then transform policies favourable to wealth into apparently spontaneous demands from below. The remarkable achievement of billionaire populism is not that billionaires persuade ordinary people to love billionaires. It is that they can help determine what ordinary people are angry about while making the distribution of wealth and power itself disappear from the argument.
Part two explains what can happen if political unrest is used to base new policies on, and ultra-rich donors are allowed to influence those policies.
