There’s a sensible rule in British politics: it should not be funded by foreign donors. Democracy is meaningless if a country isn’t run at the behest of its people. But the rule is riddled with loopholes. Those who have done the most to keep them open are those who most loudly assert their patriotism. Noisy “patriots” are always the first to sell us out to offshore capital.
Here are some of the tricks they use. One is the “unincorporated association”. This refers to groups that don’t have to open business bank accounts, file financial statements, register with any official body or even give themselves a name. They’re as transparent as the Berlin Wall on a cloudy day. Astonishingly, these associations are a legal channel for campaign finance in the United Kingdom.
The Good Law Project has calculated that these groups have shovelled £5.3m into the major political parties since 2022. We have no means of knowing where most of this money came from before it passed through these associations. Here’s how it works.
In principle, an unincorporated association must register with the Electoral Commission if it passes more than £37,270 to political parties in the course of a year. But donations don’t count towards this total unless they each exceed £500. So a donor could schedule a payment of £499 to an unincorporated association every minute of every day, amounting to millions of pounds, and the association would neither have to register with the commission nor report such gifts – or even keep a record of them. It’s an open invitation to “impermissible donors”.
The Tories are the worst offenders, taking £3m of the £5.3m. Money passed through these channels has long been........