When we vote, we aren’t just picking a name on a ballot paper. We’re choosing what kind of world we want to live in, and handing the people we elect the power to build it. If they win, that power is enormous. So it’s worth asking, before we hand it over, whether the world they promise is the one they’d actually build and one we’d want to wake up in.

On Monday, in Hythe, Nigel Farage and Zia Yusuf gave us a glimpse of the future world they want to build. In front of a replica dinghy, they set out a plan to suspend the asylum system for a full parliamentary term. Every new claim rejected. Existing claims voided. The asylum tribunal scrapped, and the 90,000 people currently with appeal cases deported. Yusuf talked of deporting “north of 1 million people”. Children and mothers would not be exempt. Asked about children, Farage said that letting in Afghan or Palestinian women and children “may well sound compassionate”, but would open the door to “husbands coming, to partners coming, before you know it you have plenty of young men coming as well.”

I can say, categorically, that this is not a world I want to live in.

What strikes me most is the language. People become numbers to be counted, categorised and shifted around, like packing crates in a warehouse. A million here, 90,000 there. Women and children are a door that has to stay shut in case someone else walks through it.

I know these people aren’t packing crates, because I used to sit across a table from them.

In 1992 I joined the Home Office as an asylum caseworker, in the South and South-East Asia section of what was then the Asylum Division of the Immigration and Nationality Department. My job was to assess asylum claims under the 1951 UN Refugee Convention, which protects people with a well-founded fear of persecution because of their race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership of a particular social group. Part of that job was conducting in-person interviews with claimants: filling the gaps in their applications, testing their accounts, challenging inconsistencies and factual errors their claims depended on.

Let me be clear about something, because it comes up in every conversation I have about our asylum system. Many of the claims I assessed - the vast majority, in fact - did not qualify. Most of those came from people, often young men, who appeared to be seeking a better economic future for themselves and their families. I never blamed them for trying. But that isn’t grounds for asylum, so I felt no guilt in recommending refusal. That’s not what the asylum system is for.

But some people did qualify. And their stories are still clear in my head more than 30 years later.

There was a Sikh activist who had a kettle of boiling water poured over him during a police interrogation. Another man who had been tortured with red-hot metal pressed against his skin. There was a woman from a minority Muslim sect. When her husband died, her neighbours harassed her by throwing stones through her windows at night. She sought the help of the local police. They publicly ridiculed her, and then several officers gang-raped her in front of her young children. There were young Tamil men forced to inhale the fumes of burnt chilli powder by Sri Lankan police.

There were others but I will leave it there - you get the picture.

I can still recall the faces of these people as they told me what had happened to them. And I remember the tears in the eyes of the interpreters, as they translated words no one should ever have to hear.

These were real human beings. They had survived things most of us can barely imagine, and then made a monumental effort to reach safety, in a country they knew as law-abiding and compassionate, where they believed they could live the rest of their lives in peace. They were not packing cases or numbers on a spreadsheet.

Under Reform’s plan, their claims would have been rejected automatically. None of them would have had an interview. There would be no one across the table, no one testing their account, no one to say yes. The point of a hearing is to sort the chancer from the torture survivor. A blanket ban doesn’t sort them; it stops anyone looking. Yusuf says Reform is “not in the business of sending people to be killed or tortured”, and that “edge cases” could be sent to third countries. But without a hearing, who can know where the edge cases are?

And the people this would catch are not who the slogans suggest. In the year to June 2026, roughly four in ten people claiming asylum in the UK were women or children, according to the Home Office’s own figures.

To do all this, Reform says it would leave the European Convention on Human Rights, repeal the Human Rights Act and disapply the Refugee Convention, so the courts can’t stop it. That is the part that should worry everyone, whatever they think about immigration. It means switching off the checks that stop any government doing whatever it likes to people it has decided don’t count. Britain helped write the post-war rules on protecting the persecuted. Walking away from them would say something about who we are. And it would leave all of us exposed too.

In his interview on The Rest Is Politics: Leading, released at the weekend, the Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, said that “Britain has to stand for something first and foremost”, and spoke of standing “for the rule of law, for international organisations and doing things properly.” Whatever your politics, that’s worth applauding. And most people in this country seem to share those values, including most people who vote Reform. When More in Common asked last November, only a third of Reform voters (36%) wanted to close our borders to people fleeing war and persecution. Nearly three in five (59%) wanted them to come through capped, controlled routes. Wanting control is not the same as wanting cruelty.

Which brings me back to the ballot paper. Under our voting system, a party doesn’t need most of us to agree with it to win power. In 2024, Labour won a large majority of seats on about a third of the vote. As recently as April, More in Common’s model had Reform within touching distance of a Commons majority on just 28% of the vote. Yes, polls move, and Reform’s numbers have fallen since. But More in Common’s latest model, from September, found that a five-point swing from Labour to Reform would be enough to give Reform a majority. That would still be well under a third of the vote. The rules that would let a minority hand itself near-unchecked power haven’t changed.

At the next election, we’ll hand power to one group of politicians or another, and they’ll build the world we all have to live in. I hope it’s a group that stands up for democracy and human rights, and has the courage to show compassion to people who need it, wherever in the world they come from. I hope it’s not one designed by a group of zealots propelled by a minority who don’t embody the best of this country’s tradition for fairness and compassion.

In July 2020 the government answered a question from Parliament in one sentence: “a retrospective assessment of the EU Referendum is not necessary.”

This weekend the Prime Minister said he had asked the question anyway. Speaking on The Rest is Politics, Andy Burnham said: “I asked the question coming to Downing Street: was there interference in the 2016 referendum from Russia? And I’ve had the clear answer that yes, there was.”

The BBC reports it is the first time a UK prime minister has said that. Both sides of the Brexit argument are reading it for what they wanted to hear. Read it instead for what it tells us about the next election.

What we want, and why this matters

Open Britain’s aim is simple to state. Future elections should be open and fair, and serve the needs of the people of this country. That can’t be true unless we are as sure as we can be that results aren’t swayed by foreign interference.

You don’t get that assurance by hoping. You need four answers. How did foreign actors try to undermine our democracy in the past? What impact did they have, or might they have had? What new tools, from technology and elsewhere, do they have now? And what defences does the Government have to prevent, mitigate and deter them?

Burnham has just given us a sliver of the first answer. Nothing yet on the other three.

What he said, and what he didn’t

He said that when he arrived in No 10 this summer he asked about 2016, and the answer was yes. He added that Britain has been “too much on the back foot” and “we haven’t informed people sufficiently about the extent to which people are seeking to disrupt the political process from overseas.”

He didn’t say who gave him the answer, what the evidence was, or what kind of interference it was. And he didn’t say it changed the result. The Guardian noted he did not disclose “whether any interference had affected the result of the vote.”

So this is a conclusion without the working: serious, but still a sentence on a podcast.

Nothing here makes the 2016 result illegitimate. Seventeen million people voted Leave for their own reasons. The result stands. Burnham hasn’t claimed otherwise, and neither do we.

Impact is the wrong place to start

Britain Unbound, the pro-Brexit campaign, called his comments “another crude attempt to undermine the legitimacy of the decision that the British people made in 2016,” adding: “There is no good reason to believe that Russian intervention influenced the outcome.”

Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) would partly agree. Its 2020 Russia report said the impact of any interference “would be difficult – if not impossible – to assess, and we have not sought to do so.” But it went on: “it is important to establish whether a hostile state took deliberate action with the aim of influencing a UK democratic process, irrespective of whether it was successful or not.”

That’s the point both camps skip. Whether someone tried to tamper with a British vote is about our security, not about Leave or Remain. You’d want to know if someone had tried your front door, even if they never got in. Not least because they might come back with better tools.

The state that chose not to look

The ISC said the Government’s written evidence “appeared to suggest that HMG had not seen or sought evidence of successful interference in UK democratic processes.” It added: “We have not been provided with any post-referendum assessment of Russian attempts at interference.” In the United States, by contrast, an assessment of Russian activity in the 2016 presidential election was produced within two months of the vote, with an unclassified summary made public.

So the ISC asked for the same here, “and that an unclassified summary of it be published.” Even a finding of minimal interference, it said, “would nonetheless represent a helpful reassurance to the public.”

Boris Johnson’s government said no: “We have seen no evidence of successful interference in the EU Referendum,” and a retrospective assessment was “not necessary.”

It is easy to see no evidence of success if nobody is asked to look. Six years later the Prime Minister says he has a clear yes. Either that answer was in the system all along, or someone has since done the looking. Either way: where is the summary?

We asked these questions in May

In May, Open Britain published Russian Interference in British Politics, a report I co-wrote with Sergei Cristo, a former Conservative Party fundraiser turned whistleblower.

It found the UK is an international outlier. France, Italy, Germany, Canada, Moldova, the European Parliament and the United States have each run substantive investigations into Russian political interference, and most reported within two years. Britain has not. It found there is no structured channel between our intelligence services and the Electoral Commission, so the regulator cannot draw on classified intelligence when deciding what to refer to the police. And it warned that the next election will be fought with more capable technology and new weak spots, not least cryptocurrency donations, that the current rules don’t properly cover.

Put that against our four questions. The past has never been fully investigated in public. No government has published an assessment of the impact. The tools have moved on. The defences have gaps. The report calls for a full, independent public inquiry. Publishing a summary of what Burnham was told is the first and easiest step towards it.

Back foot, front foot

Burnham set the test himself. If Britain has been “too much on the back foot” about telling voters, the fix is to tell them properly.

He says defences are coming. At the UN last month he said Russian agencies “spread lies and disinformation” and announced a centre to “stem the poisonous tide.” The Guardian reports the UK is developing a National Centre for Information Defence.

A centre like that will only be trusted if it shows its evidence. Telling a podcast the answer is clear asks people to take national security on faith.

You can think Brexit was right and still want to know what a hostile state did in 2016. You can think it was wrong and still accept the result. What none of us should accept is walking into the next election without knowing.

Since last night, the right wing on X/Twitter has concluded that Andy Burnham wants to rig the next election. The spark that triggered the hullabaloo was a Telegraph headline: “Burnham rushes to axe photo ID checks at elections”. A Telegraph opinion piece went further with the serpentine line: “Quite why Labour wants to make electoral fraud easier to commit is unclear.” Burnham is neither axing photo ID nor unleashing a torrent of electoral fraud.

So if someone raises this with you over Sunday lunch, or in the pub tonight, you know where they got it from - and you can use this article to put them straight.

A fix for a problem that barely exists

The Elections Act 2022 introduced a requirement to show photo ID before voting. At the time, the justification for the change put forward by the then Conservative government was something called personation: someone turning up and voting as somebody else. Police figures show how vanishingly small a problem that is. In 2022, before anyone needed photo ID, police recorded seven – not seven-thousand, or seven-hundred, just seven - allegations of personation at polling stations. And none of those allegations were so serious that they resulted in a conviction in a court of law. In 2023 there were two, and in 2024 seven. None of those led to a conviction either. It’s a mystery why this requirement was introduced at all when a bigger percentage of the population believes Elvis is still alive than commits personation. (Note: The Ugly Politix stats checkers are off today - the Elvis thing might not be 100% correct. Don’t sue me.)

So, a huge imposition of red tape to address the actions of sixteen wrong-uns in three years. And the impact on honest voters? At the July 2024 general election, the Electoral Commission says about 50,000 people were turned away for lacking the right ID. Around two-thirds of them came back later with the right paperwork, but by close of poll about 16,000 had not.

A list that made little sense

Part of the problem is the list itself. In England, an older person’s bus pass counts, and in London so does an Oyster 60+ card. But a student’s 18+ Oyster photo-card doesn’t, and nor does a 16–25 Railcard. Older people’s travel passes are in. Young people’s aren’t.

Those without valid ID can obtain a free Voter Authority Certificate - a paper photo ID just for voting - but they have to know about it (many don’t) and apply well in advance of election day to get one. And who among us, busy earning a living and/or raising a family thinks about elections that much ahead of time?

Ever since the Act brought voter ID in, Open Britain has said the list was unhelpfully narrow and should be widened so it doesn’t stop people voting, especially the groups least likely to hold a passport or driving licence. The current government’s explanatory notes for this bill say the change helps voters “less likely to hold currently accepted ID, such as younger electors or those with disabilities”. That gets a big tick from me.

So, what does the bill actually do?

The Representation of the People Bill keeps the rule that you must show ID, and every photo ID that counts now still will in future. It just adds one thing: a valid UK bank card showing your name as it appears on the electoral register. It also sets checks for digital versions of accepted ID, like the coming digital driving licence. The government’s research says the share of people with no accepted ID would fall from 2–4% to under 1%. Again, that seems right to me.

The honest, real-world maths

The molehill that the Telegraph’s is trying to convert into a mountain is this: A bank card has no photo. The Electoral Commission accepts that the lack of a photo makes it “less secure” and harder for staff to check you are who you say you are. In theory, someone could turn up with a relative’s card. Note, in theory.

But picture the scenario in the real world, not the theoretical one that policy wonks live in. A polling clerk, sitting in one of the many polling stations where people are casting their votes at the next election. Someone rocks up and gives a name and address that match the register and hands over a valid bank card with that name on it. Which is more likely? That this is one of the roughly 20 million people who vote honestly? Or one of those behind the seven polling-station allegations police received in the whole of 2024?

Asking that real-world question is what an evidence-based, risk-proportionate rule looks like. You don’t let a narrow list turn away thousands of registered voters to stop a vanishingly small number of cases, so minor that none led to a conviction.

Consider where this narrative could take us

I know Britain isn’t America, and our ID rule was never as extreme as the ones Trump tried to put in place over there. But America shows us where fraud talk without fraud evidence can lead. The idea of stolen elections still reverberates across the US, and still drives social division among the people.

In March 2025 Donald Trump signed an order, billed as protecting election integrity, requiring proof of citizenship, such as a passport or birth certificate, to register for federal elections. The Brennan Center, a US research group, estimates 21.3 million voting-age citizens don’t have those papers readily to hand. Now, happily, Federal courts blocked it, ruling he had no power to set those rules and the main parts of a second order this year, which names reducing voter fraud as its aim, were declared void by a judge in June. But he tried. He tried to prevent millions of people from expressing their democratic will. And there is a well-funded and highly organised network within the media and political system here who would be happy to do the same. We can’t allow that. Not if we want our country to be more than a democracy in name only.

Your job today

If someone brings this story up over Sunday lunch, tell them straight that it’s nonsense. Direct them to this piece, if you wish. “Photo ID stays. Bank cards are added. And the fraud these people claim they want to stop barely exists. Now, please pass the carrots.”

Enjoy your Sunday.

Many Open Britain supporters have told us a version of the same thing lately. Farage is in trouble, Andy Burnham is in No 10, and things are on the right track now - everyone can sleep soundly again. I understand why they say that, but there’s a complacency in there that worries me. Here’s why.

Let’s start with why people feel like that. From spring 2025 until this July, Reform led the national polls without a break, and Keir Starmer became the least popular prime minister in Ipsos’s records. People who had watched Donald Trump’s actions since returning to the White House began to wonder whether Britain was next, and that fear was a fair reading of the evidence.

Now look at the past three months. Labour is back in front, and more people view Farage unfavourably than ever in YouGov’s tracking. Parliament’s standards commissioner is investigating a gift he didn’t declare, and the Metropolitan Police are investigating donations to his party. If you feel the pressure has come off, you are reading the news correctly.

But Westminster still uses first past the post, where whoever gets the most votes in a seat wins it, however small their share. In 2024 that gave Labour a landslide on about a third of the vote, and it works the same way for whoever is ahead. More in Common’s September model found that if two voters in every hundred switched from Labour to Reform, Reform would become the largest party. Two points. Yes, this is a snapshot and polls change, but it’s a snapshot that shows how little it would take.

Honeymoons usually fade, too. Gordon Brown’s ratings were comfortably positive in the summer of 2007, and four months later most people told Ipsos they were dissatisfied with him. Theresa May was riding high in 2016 and lost her majority the following year. Burnham may be riding high now but the next election can come as late as 2029 and a lot can change in the meantime.

And Farage has told us what he would do with power. In his conference speech on 4 September he said that if the House of Lords blocked his programme, “We’ll appoint hundreds of new peers so that we have a majority in the House of Lords.” Given Reform’s difficulties finding properly qualified candidates who don’t later turn out to have unsavoury back stories, imagine what that might look like. He said Reform would “perhaps have to consider how judicial appointments work in the future.” And he said that “if civil servants try to obstruct us, they will be removed from their posts and replaced by people from outside”.

Those are his words, and they are the evidence. I accept that Farage is not Donald Trump and that he has recently sought to give the impression that he has distanced himself somewhat from his old best buddy. Most notably, he has questioned Trump’s judgement over Iran and says the president “is not dictating policy to me”. But, that could just be media management for our consumption, and America shows what removing constitutional checks and balances looks like in practice.

None of this needs a majority of voters. It needs a majority of MPs, and first past the post can deliver one on a minority of the vote.

Something else I hear all the time is, “Wouldn’t a proportional system just help Reform?” Honestly, it likely would result in Reform winning more seats, roughly in line with its votes – which, as a democrat, I think is fair. But it would also need partners to govern. Sir John Curtice, the elections expert, says electoral reform could make it much harder for a future Reform leader to become prime minister. In May, in Wales’s first election under a fully proportional system, Reform won more than a third of the Senedd’s seats, and yet Plaid Cymru governs.

Burnham’s announcement of a new National Commission on Electoral Reform is a real and positive step. Yes, Open Britain has campaigned for fairer votes for years, and the past year is why the stakes are higher now. But the commission is a promise, not a change. The voting system only changes if Labour wins the next election and then passes a law, and that next election will be fought under first past the post.

If you are one of those who thinks the danger has receded and everything in the garden looks rosy, I’d ask you to pause and reflect on the consequences of being wrong. Mood music and warm words can be a sign of positive things to come, or they can be a way of deflecting our attention and diluting our efforts, exactly when those things are needed most.

Fair elections that serve the ordinary people of this country require four fundamental changes. The removal of disinformation from our public debate. A way to ensure uber-wealthy individuals cannot use their money to influence politics more than we can influence it with our votes. A voting system that ensures the will of the people expressed at elections actually translates into representation in Parliament. And clear rules, robustly enforced, so that those who treat the system with disdain are properly held to account. Those things do not exist today and we would be naïve to think they will come if we don’t maintain the pressure now.

The relief is understandable. But the circumstances that give rise to it could turn out to be merely a break in the storm. We would all do well to keep that in mind.

Reform is developing quite a routine for dealing with scrutiny. When Nigel Farage faced a parliamentary standards investigation, he called a by-election and invited voters to judge his conduct instead. In its latest financial scandal, the party appears to have decided it can do the police’s job for them.

The scandal will be hard to have missed. Verbatim’s undercover investigation, broadcast by Channel 4 News last month, showed senior Reform figures discussing money with people they believed were a wealthy American donor and his UK-based son. There were payments for £30,000 of polling and discussions about a further £500,000 donation. Regular readers will remember our coverage at the time.

Now Reform has investigated Reform. Its own barrister and general secretary have produced a 27-page report finding no evidence that the party or the two senior figures involved, James Orr and Dan Jukes, broke the law. The actual police, meanwhile, are still investigating.

I’m not sure what I expected from Reform’s internal investigation, but a 27-page exercise in exonerating itself is certainly… something. It reads like a preview of the defence the party would offer if the police investigation led to charges.

In all honesty, I’m less interested in trying to decide what crossed the criminal threshold than in what Reform’s own account reveals about its mindset. The criminal questions belong with the police, prosecutors and, if charges follow, the courts. The questions about standards are already there for the rest of us to consider.

Start with the polling. Reform’s report says Jukes commissioned the polls personally, as a contractor. On that basis, it concludes the payments to the polling firm were not donations to Reform.

That is the legal argument. Politically, it offers remarkably little reassurance.

Orr was recorded suggesting the American businessman could pay for polling to help the party’s campaigns. He said it would “technically be a donation in kind”, but “the reality is we could easily get away with it”.

Those words suggest a clear awareness of the rules, coupled with an interest in how an arrangement might escape scrutiny. The money went directly to the polling company. The report relies on Jukes’s separate contractual status and the circumstances in which the work was commissioned. The polls nevertheless generated coverage helpful to Reform.

Whatever investigators eventually make of those distinctions, why should voters feel reassured by a party whose senior figures were discussing political help in those terms? The report’s explanation of who commissioned what does very little to answer that.

Its language about responsibility is revealing, too. It acknowledges that “people speaking for the party” said things that were wrong, careless and, in one instance, untrue. Yet when it explains the polling arrangements, the emphasis falls on Jukes acting independently as a contractor.

There may be legal distinctions between those situations. That’s for the police to unravel. Reform still has to answer for the conduct of the people it places close to its leader. Their contractual status offers very little comfort to anyone wondering how the party would conduct itself in government.

Then there is the proposed £500,000 donation. It never arrived. Reform says nothing was agreed or accepted, its formal donor checks were never reached, and it found no evidence that anyone knowingly participated in an arrangement to facilitate an impermissible donation.

‘Facilitate’ is doing a lot of work here. To a voter, setting up meetings with someone believed to be an impermissible donor, discussing possible loopholes and providing assurances about how their money could reach the party looks very much like helping to make it happen. A criminal investigator has to establish what was agreed, what people knew and whether the evidence meets the legal test. I’ll leave that assessment to the police and prosecutors.

The absence of a completed payment does nothing to make those conversations reassuring. If the opportunity disappears before the money changes hands, that is hardly an endorsement of everything that came before it. Voters do not need an exchange of bank details before they can recognise a serious problem with the judgement of people who want to govern them.

Jukes was also recorded saying other supporters had donated through their children. The internal investigation says it found no basis for that claim. His explanation, according to the report, is that he invented the circumstances to keep the conversation going.

Apparently, that is supposed to help.

We are being asked to trust the party’s account that a senior aide’s recorded description of how donations were arranged was untrue. Even on that account, someone discussing money with a prospective donor was willing to make things up to keep them interested. That is an extraordinary basis on which to ask the public for confidence.

The police have folded the Channel 4 allegations into a wider investigation into Reform’s finances. That wider scrutiny includes a reported investigation into £500,000 of donations from Fiona Cottrell, the mother of convicted fraudster George Cottrell, who paid for Farage’s security and social media staff. The alleged offences concern the concealment or disguise of donations from an impermissible source.

In that context, accepting a clean bill of health written by the party itself requires rather more public goodwill than Reform seems to realise.

The report describes a “sustained deception” reaching the party’s leader without anyone asking the questions that would have exposed it. It recommends procedural changes, including earlier donor checks and written notification of proposed donations.

I’m not convinced by the defence or the proposed solution. Farage was present on camera at one of the donor meetings. His explanation afterwards was that he had not been listening to the discussion about the donation. We can only hope he pays more attention if new procedures are implemented alerting him to potential donors.

There is also the question of what happens to the people involved. Reform is reportedly waiting for the police investigation to conclude before deciding their futures.

The party already has its own findings about their conduct. It has already accepted that people speaking for it said things that were ‘wrong, careless and untrue’ and that a ‘sustained deception’ took place. Why does it need the police to finish before deciding whether those are acceptable standards for a future role?

An organisation can exercise its own judgement about honesty, competence and trustworthiness. A party declaring that it ‘takes governance and conduct extremely seriously’ should be able to explain what its admitted failures mean for the people responsible.

For all the procedural recommendations, the political message of this report is overwhelmingly that Reform says no crime took place. That is an extremely low bar for elected officials, let alone a party that wants to govern Britain.

The wider problem remains our political finance rules. They need to account for the ways money and influence actually move, with transparency that lets the public see who is helping political parties and enforcement capable of testing their explanations.

Too often, our safeguards resemble a crumbling stone wall, with gaps that invite anyone willing to test them. Until we rebuild those defences, parties will keep searching for a route around them and offering us legal arguments about why we should be satisfied.

I am not satisfied. A democracy should expect rather more from people seeking power than an assurance that, according to their own investigation, they have stayed on the right side of the criminal law.

Reform UK has found a simple way to deal with a journalist whose reporting it dislikes.

Stop answering him.

That is what Reform-run Derbyshire County Council has decided to do with Local Democracy Reporter Eddie Bisknell after taking exception to his coverage.

The council says this does not amount to banning him. Bisknell can still attend meetings he has a legal right to attend. He can still write about the council. He can still send questions.

They just won’t answer them.

That is a remarkably narrow definition of press freedom.

Bisknell had questioned council claims about a dramatic fall in the number of potholes in Derbyshire. He had also reported on an 81-year-old woman’s dispute with the authority over a fence blocking access between her garden and a council car park.

If the council thought his reporting was wrong, it had plenty of options. Publish the evidence. Challenge the figures. Make a complaint.

Instead, its deputy leader says Bisknell will now have to work “twice as hard”.

That sounds an awful lot like a warning to journalists about what happens when their reporting annoys the people in charge.

Reform keeps doing this.

A Reform administration in Nottinghamshire previously restricted journalists’ access after objecting to coverage and backed down after the threat of legal action. Reform politicians in Suffolk have discouraged engagement with local media. Last month, the national party refused conference accreditation to three journalists who had produced critical reporting about Reform and people funding it.

Natalie Fahy, editor-in-chief at Reach, has documented the problem across Reform-run councils. One response from Ipswich Reform chairman Shayne Pooley is particularly revealing: “Neither we or the voters need you.”

That deserves more attention than it got.

Reform might genuinely believe it no longer needs journalists.

Nigel Farage has a huge audience online and a prominent platform on GB News. Reform can reach millions of people directly through social media. Following the extraordinary £72 million it received from two donors last month, the party is reportedly considering spending some of that money on an even bigger media operation of its own, including Reform TV.

You can see the attraction.

Journalists are annoying.

They check things.

They ask about the figure that does not add up.

They notice when today’s explanation does not match yesterday’s.

They sometimes ask another question after the politician has already given the answer they wanted to give.

A political party with its own enormous communications machine can increasingly avoid all of that.

Pooley’s second claim is where the problem lies.

Voters absolutely do need journalists.

Someone has to keep watch

Local journalism has already been stripped back across Britain.

Media Storm recently devoted an episode of their podcast to what that means for democracy, highlighting the closure of more than 320 local titles between 2009 and 2019 and some pretty worrying research showing that people are less likely to vote where local news is weaker.

Media Storm summed up the problem “bad journalism is bad for democracy, bad for community - and good for disinformation.”

That is why this should not be dismissed as a petty local spat.

Most people are not going to spend their evenings reading council committee papers. They will not compare claims made in a press release with the underlying numbers. They will not know that a planning decision buried on page 176 deserves attention.

Local reporters do that work.

They ask where the money went.

They talk to the resident whose experience does not match the official line.

They sit through the meetings everyone else would rather avoid.

Sometimes they ask the question the people running the council would rather nobody asked.

That is democracy doing its job.

The idea that politicians can simply stop engaging with journalists they dislike is dangerous for a very obvious reason.

A council should not get to choose which reporters are sufficiently agreeable to receive answers.

A government certainly should not.

We have seen this playbook before

Reform has never been shy about borrowing from Donald Trump and MAGA.

This looks familiar too.

Trump has spent years attacking journalists, rewarding friendly media and trying to control who gets access to him and his administration.

Since returning to the White House, that has gone beyond insults.

The Associated Press was excluded from presidential events after refusing to adopt the administration’s preferred name for the Gulf of Mexico. The White House has asserted greater control over which organisations get access to presidential events. Other major news organisations have since ended up in court fighting restrictions.

America shows where this instinct can lead.

Once politicians believe access belongs to them to give and take away, critical journalism becomes much easier to punish.

Once politicians have huge friendly media ecosystems and direct channels to millions of supporters, they have less incentive to tolerate journalists who make their lives difficult.

Reform already has both parts of that equation.

It has the alternative media ecosystem.

Now, wherever it gets power, we keep seeing signs of the other part.

Journalists who upset Reform find doors closing.

Today it is potholes

Today, the row is about potholes - but Reform wants to govern Britain.

That should change how seriously we take what is happening in Derbyshire.

What happens when the journalist is asking about a multimillion-pound government contract? Or a minister’s financial interests? Or foreign interference?

We should judge what Reform might do with national power partly by looking at what it does with the power it already has.

Why should anyone assume greater power would make it more tolerant of scrutiny?

America is showing, in real time, what can happen when a political movement that already distrusts independent media gains enough power to start deciding who gets access.

Press freedom does not have to vanish overnight to be damaged.

It can be chipped away one journalist at a time.

One unanswered question. One revoked pass. One newsroom frozen out.

Each incident can be dismissed as petty, personal or insignificant. That is exactly how the line moves.

Journalists, civil society and anyone who cares about transparency and fair information should be making a lot more noise about what is happening in Derbyshire, even if the latest story was about potholes.

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We went to Labour conference this week to make the case for fairer votes. From the main stage, Andy Burnham answered that call with a National Commission on Electoral Reform.

At last, we had a Prime Minister taking people’s call for fairer votes seriously and making it part of his plan for Britain.

Running through his speech was the idea that people should have more power over the decisions that shape their lives.

Burnham talked about who controls the things people rely on every day, from housing to water and energy. “We rely on them, we pay for them,” he said, making the case for stronger public control. He spoke, too, about Westminster’s failure to treat different parts of the country “equally and fairly”.

That principle reaches Parliament as well. The people who rely on those services elect the government responsible for them. Giving people more power over their lives includes giving them a fair say in who governs. Near the end of his speech, Burnham brought fair votes into that vision. He said his plan for Britain needed a change to our politics and that Labour would go into the next election committed to changing the voting system so that every vote counts.

We had called on him to kick off a commission in his first 100 days as Prime Minister. This was day 72. I think we’re allowed to enjoy that for a moment.

This summer, thousands of people signed our petition backing that call, and we took their names and comments to Downing Street. Asking people to sign a petition is one thing. Thousands of people also took the time to explain what was wrong and what they hoped could change. I spent time reading what they wrote. They described the frustration of voting in a place where the result feels decided before they turn up, or watching Parliament take shape in a way that bears little resemblance to how people voted across the country.

What stayed with me was their willingness to try to change it. People who had plenty of reasons to be fed up with politics still put their names to a proposal for a serious public conversation about how we elect MPs. They believed Britain could do better, and they wanted to be part of working out how.

Their comments make Burnham’s broader principle of ownership feel very real. Burnham recognised the gap between winning power and earning broad support. He warned that the current rules could put a government in Number 10 on less than 30% of the vote. Parliament makes decisions for the whole country. Its makeup should reflect how the whole country voted.

The voting system belongs to voters. Their experiences can help the commission understand what people expect from an election, where the current system falls short and what a fairer one should achieve. They will be asked to live with whatever rules come out of this process, so they deserve a meaningful role in reaching an answer.

Burnham also recognised how little trust many people have in politics. The comments we took to Downing Street showed some of the reasons why. If the commission brings voters into its work, takes their experiences seriously and shows how their contributions shaped its conclusions, people will be able to see that their views counted. That is how we make a decision about our voting system that people can trust.

A few months ago, I asked what political capital was for. Burnham has given us part of his answer. He used his first conference speech as Prime Minister to put the rules of politics among the things he is willing to examine. Prime Ministers do not often volunteer to look closely at the system that gave them the job.

The early signals are encouraging. This was a main-stage announcement, tied directly to his vision for change. He invited every party into the commission’s work, and Labour says voters of all parties and none will have the chance to participate. That is the right spirit for a question that belongs to the whole country. For those of us who have spent years making the case, hearing that from the stage was a moment to celebrate.

A commission is still the beginning of the job. Its independence needs to be beyond doubt. Voters need to shape its work in a way that can influence its conclusions, and people need to know what will happen when it reports. Those details will determine whether the process earns the confidence this moment deserves.

Burnham has put fair votes into his plan for giving people more power over Britain’s future. Now the process for deciding our voting system needs to live up to that promise. The people who helped bring this question to Downing Street should be able to help answer it.

Private security guards in stab vests are now patrolling Braintree, Chelmsford and Colchester. They were not deployed in response to a demonstrated rise in crime or antisocial behaviour. They are there because asylum seekers from the Wethersfield accommodation centre travel into those towns.

The guards are part of Operation Vanguard, a three-month initiative created by Reform-led Essex County Council. They have no police enforcement powers. Their presence may be highly visible, but their practical role appears to consist largely of observing, reassuring and passing criminal matters to the police - the public service already responsible for patrolling these areas and responding to crime.

What evidence turned the presence of asylum seekers into a security problem requiring its own uniformed response?

That is where Operation Vanguard becomes more than a strange local spending decision. It offers an early glimpse of what can happen when a party that has built support by amplifying fear and division takes control of the institutions and budgets needed to turn its political story into public policy.

Reform warned people that asylum seekers made their communities unsafe. Reform won power in Essex. Reform then spent council money putting private security on the streets in response to the presence of asylum seekers.

The fear came first. The policy followed.

A security operation in search of the crime

Residents are entitled to feel safe. Allegations of harassment or criminal behaviour should be taken seriously, investigated properly and dealt with according to the evidence. Nobody should have a genuine concern waved away because the politics around immigration are difficult.

But the evidence in Essex tells a different story to the one Reform has been pushing.

Essex Police says that crime in Braintree, Chelmsford and Colchester is lower than it was three years ago, when Wethersfield began receiving asylum seekers in Essex.

Most revealing of all is Essex County Council’s own decision report. It records the Home Office position that there is no evidence of Wethersfield having an impact on crime levels.

The report acknowledges only anecdotal evidence that the presence of asylum seekers creates “a fear and perception of a risk of crime”.

That distinction is crucial. The council had no demonstrated increase in crime to answer. It had public fear, a perceived risk and the presence of a particular group of people. On that basis, public money was released and private guards were deployed.

Council leader Peter Harris has openly acknowledged that the council is acting before any such increase: “We cannot and will not wait for an increase in antisocial behaviour and crime before acting.”

That may sound reassuring until you consider what it concedes. Operation Vanguard was not introduced in response to an established increase in crime or antisocial behaviour. It was introduced in anticipation of one, with that anticipated risk attached to a particular group of people.

When political rhetoric acquires a budget

Operation Vanguard follows years of Reform presenting immigration as a source of danger and disorder.

The party has repeatedly made immigration the explanation for insecurity, declining services and a country that feels less orderly. It has encouraged voters to see the presence of asylum seekers as evidence of danger before any individual has done anything wrong.

That rhetoric has consequences even when a party is outside government. It can shape what people fear, what they notice and whom they blame. Once the party takes control of a public institution, it gains something more powerful: the ability to make the institution behave as though its claims have already been proved.

Essex County Council can commission services, award contracts and place an official-looking security presence in public spaces. A political message that once appeared on campaign leaflets can now be expressed through council policy and paid for by the public.

The council says the guards are there to reassure the public and will not target any demographic. Yet Operation Vanguard was created specifically because asylum seekers from Wethersfield travel into these town centres, with patrols concentrated around the places where they are dropped off.

Whatever the stated intention, that sends a clear message: their presence is a security concern. A policy introduced in response to public fear now gives that fear the visibility and authority of the council, making division more likely rather than easing it.

A prototype worth watching

Six security guards in three Essex towns do not amount to a new national policing system. Operation Vanguard may end after three months having achieved little beyond photographs, headlines and a six-figure bill.

It would be a mistake to ignore it for that reason.

Reform now controls several councils. Other administrations will be watching what earns favourable coverage, satisfies supporters and makes the party appear to be doing what established institutions supposedly will not. A scheme does not need to work particularly well to be copied if its real value is political theatre.

Operation Vanguard therefore deserves to be understood as an early marker. It shows how a politics built on suspicion can travel from election campaigning into government.

There are plenty of serious questions about asylum accommodation, integration, local services and the way residents are informed about decisions made in Whitehall. Governments should answer them honestly. Leaving people with poor information and legitimate frustrations creates exactly the space in which division thrives.

A council committed to making its communities safer would start with evidence, work through accountable public institutions and target conduct rather than identity. Essex has instead commissioned a visible security response to a threat it has not demonstrated.

Reform spent years telling people whom to fear. In Essex, it now has the power to spend their money acting as though that fear is fact.

The Government is finally waking up to the threat of hostile information interference from Russia and others.

In a speech to the United Nations on Tuesday evening, Prime Minister Andy Burnham said Britain had “tiptoed around” Russian disinformation for too long. He described an “industrial-scale assault” on our information environment.

That diagnosis is hard to argue with. Russian agencies spread lies, amplify far-right narratives and use fear and division to turn people against one another. They exploit moments of tension, inflame unrest and undermine confidence in our elections and democratic institutions. AI will give them faster, cheaper and more convincing ways to do it.

The response is a new National Centre for Information Defence, tasked with detecting, attributing and disrupting hostile state information attacks. That marks a serious change in approach.

Open Britain’s report on Russian interference, published earlier this year, reached much the same conclusion about the scale of the threat and how badly Britain’s defences had fallen behind it. We have long called for this to be taken seriously, so the shift from tiptoeing to action is welcome.

How well these campaigns work also depends on the society they land in.

Russia does not need to invent Britain’s anger and division. It finds the cracks already there - people struggling, losing faith in politics or feeling shut out - and pushes them wider. Genuine grievances become fuel for false narratives, far-right agendas are amplified and communities are encouraged to turn on one another.

That makes tackling inequality and rebuilding trust part of Britain’s national defence. A society in which people feel secure, heard and able to shape their future is much harder to manipulate. Burnham has recognised this, and he deserves credit for doing so.

He summed up the public’s role in that strategy in one line. “Faced with this information warfare, security starts in every home.”

That line carries a responsibility for government too.

Burnham should take note of what experts have already been telling Parliament. In April, Russia expert Fiona Hill warned that Britain increasingly looked like a “soft target” because people were not being prepared for information warfare. Lord Robertson called for an “all of country approach”. Their message was clear. If security really starts in every home, the public has to be part of the defence.

That creates an immediate problem. In his speech Burnham claims that Britain has learned from the last decade and is ready to share that understanding with other democracies. The difficulty is that we never properly investigated what happened here.

There is evidence that Russia tried to interfere in the 2019 general election. The Brexit referendum was never subjected to a comprehensive assessment. The 2020 Russia Report found that the Government had neither seen nor sought evidence of successful interference in British democracy. No full post-referendum assessment had even been commissioned.

Successive governments treated the lack of definitive findings as though it proved there was nothing to find, even though the work needed to reach those findings had never been done.

The United States, France, Germany, Canada and the European Union investigated Russian political interference. Britain did not.

Our own questions remain unanswered. Claiming that we have learned the lessons and are ready to teach others feels a little rich when they did the investigating that we avoided.

Those unanswered questions have a direct bearing on the next attack. We need to understand how Britain was targeted, which divisions were exploited, where our institutions failed and which vulnerabilities remain open.

This is the gap in Burnham’s plan. Security is meant to start in every home, and the evidence given to Parliament shows that public understanding is essential. Yet without an inquiry, Britain cannot give people a credible account of what happened, how the country was targeted or what they should look out for. A new Centre may improve what the Government knows. Household resilience depends on how much of that knowledge reaches the public.

That knowledge cannot remain locked inside government. People cannot spot techniques that are never explained to them or trust institutions that refuse to account for previous failures.

Nobody is asking the Government to hand the Kremlin a guide to British intelligence. There is plenty it can do without compromising national security. Start with the full, independent inquiry Britain has avoided. Review the classified material and publish everything that can safely be released. Then give people practical help to recognise manipulation when it reaches their screens.

A robust defence needs the new Centre, an honest account of past interference and a public equipped to recognise future attacks. Burnham has started that conversation. He now needs to trust the public with it.

Security cannot start in every home while the truth remains behind closed doors.

Voters are being asked to make democratic choices in an information environment that is failing them.

More than half of those surveyed after May’s elections in England said they had encountered misinformation. One in ten had seen a deepfake. These are no longer fringe threats. They are becoming part of how our elections are fought - while the rules and the platforms remain dangerously behind.

Voters should not be left to work out for themselves whether what they are seeing is real. The Electoral Commission has called for social media companies to take greater responsibility for the content their platforms amplify, and for election law to catch up with the use of AI.

Anyone wondering how urgent that is should take a look at what just happened at Meta.

An AI-generated video falsely showed a Scottish Labour councillor making inflammatory comments about refugees. She had never said them.

Meta left it online. Even after the case reached its own Oversight Board, the company insisted the video broke no rules and did not even need an AI label.

The Board eventually ordered its removal.

Taking it down was the right decision. It was also late. By then, the failure was plain: a platform capable of spreading a political deepfake at speed could not be relied upon to act against it. The people who had already watched it did not suddenly unsee it. The damage to the councillor’s reputation did not disappear with it. The lie had already reached voters.

The Oversight Board’s wider verdict was brutal. Meta’s protections against deepfakes were “consistently and fundamentally inadequate”.

When the referee you appointed calls your safeguards fundamentally inadequate, asking us to “trust the platforms” becomes a very big ask indeed.

Then Washington stepped in

The Government has, at least, started trying to put some rules around this mess. Those efforts include the Online Safety Act, the under-16 social media ban and plans to give trusted public-service broadcasters greater prominence online.

Washington has noticed.

PoliticsHome reports that senior British officials were called to the US embassy and challenged over all three. The priority in Washington was the impact on American technology companies.

A government source called the meeting “routine engagement”.

“Routine” is doing quite a lot of work there. Countries lobby each other all the time. Britain does plenty of it. But the line between diplomatic influence and foreign interference is not always easy to see. We are getting uncomfortably close to it here when it concerns our elections.

You should be able to tell whether the politician in a video really said those words. You should know who paid to put political content in front of you. Platforms should not be free to amplify convincing fabrications and shrug when the damage is done.

When a foreign government leans on Britain over those rules to protect companies headquartered on its soil, it is reaching into our democratic process.

“Routine lobbying” begins to feel like an inadequate description.

We have seen this pattern before

The embassy meeting did not come out of nowhere.

PoliticsHome then revealed that British diplomats had already reassured Trump officials that Andy Burnham would not launch a “clamp down” on American technology companies once he became Prime Minister.

Before Burnham had even entered Downing Street, British diplomats were making sure the Trump administration knew that US tech companies had little to fear.

Direct pressure from American officials is only part of the picture.

Regular Ugly Politix readers may remember our recent article on American influence in Britain.

We reported that the Free Speech Union International was in line for millions of dollars in US State Department funding. A confidential briefing from the UK organisation had urged JD Vance to press the British Government to pause the Online Safety Act and stop funding its anti-disinformation unit.

That is a British organisation asking the US Vice-President to lean on the British Government. The US Government are handing millions to lobbying organisations to fight the policy. American officials are now directly challenging British rules affecting the same online space.

The pattern is becoming difficult to ignore.

Say “foreign interference” and most people picture anonymous accounts, hacked emails and money moving through secret channels.

Modern influence can arrive through grants, policy briefings and embassy meetings. It can be completely visible and still place pressure on another country’s decisions about its own democracy. Seeing it happen does not make it harmless.

Whose democracy is it anyway?

American technology companies already exercise extraordinary power over Britain’s public debate. The US government is now using its influence to shape how Britain holds those companies to account.

Where are British voters voices in all of this?

Somewhere behind Silicon Valley’s business interests and Washington’s diplomatic priorities, apparently.

US officials are entitled to make their case. British ministers answer to the people who live, vote and stand for election here.

Friendship between countries does not come with a free pass to shape each other’s democracy. The rules of Britain’s democratic debate cannot be written in Silicon Valley and vetoed in Washington.

On Monday, Baroness Taylor opened the House of Lords debate on the Representation of the People Bill with a line worth holding on to.

She said it was a fundamental principle of democracy that every vote is equal to the votes of millionaires, crypto billionaires and industry magnates.

Money is one crucial part of that. Our last Ugly Politix piece called on the Government to use this Bill to cap donations and stop private wealth buying political influence unavailable to everyone else.

With Reform UK’s record-breaking £72 million arriving just before the debate, political money understandably dominated much of it.

Yet if every vote is supposed to be equal, the question does not end with who can afford to write the biggest cheque.

What happens when those votes reach the ballot box?

Baroness Smith of Llanfaes was one of the peers who highlighted the enormous voting-system-shaped hole in a Bill which deals with the Representation of People.

Baroness Lister backed calls for a National Commission on Electoral Reform.

Then Lord Teverson took the Minister’s opening principle about equal votes and followed it to its slightly uncomfortable conclusion.

He reminded the House that the 2024 election produced:

“A Labour Party in government with 411 Members of Parliament, a majority of 172, on an astounding proportion of one-third of the vote. Eight million people were missing from the register. Around 40% of registered voters did not turn out. Thousands were rejected at polling stations because they lacked the right ID. At least a quarter of those who did vote are estimated to have voted tactically rather than for the candidate they actually wanted.”

Lord Teverson welcomed the extension of the vote to 16 and 17-year-olds. He also asked the fairly obvious follow-up.

Will their votes actually count?

At present, where they live will have an enormous influence over the answer.

Lord Pack brought the argument together. First Past the Post was designed for a two-party system that no longer exists across much of the country. He wanted talk of a National Commission to turn into action.

By the end of the debate, the Government had clearly heard them.

We are finally in ‘when’, not ‘if’, territory

Closing the debate, Baroness Taylor said the Prime Minister is committed to bringing about a new voting system and welcomes a national debate about it.

She promised that the Government would set out a path in due course.

That is significant.

After years of campaigning, briefing MPs and peers and making the case for a National Commission, I would quite like to declare the job finished and spend some time lying on a beach.

I am delighted that we appear to have reached the point where the Government’s stated ambition is a new voting system. The conversation is moving from whether change should happen towards how and when it will happen.

That shift deserves to be welcomed.

Sadly, I am not packing the sun cream just yet.

“In due course” is an intention. It is not a timetable, a process or a roadmap.

The Government still has to explain how this national debate will happen, who will lead it, how voters will take part and how its conclusions will become something Parliament can act on.

There is also one fairly large problem sitting in the middle of its current position.

The manifesto catch

The Prime Minister has said that changing the voting system requires a mandate at the next general election.

That sounds perfectly sensible for about five seconds.

Then Lord Teverson’s figures come back into view.

The Government wants a manifesto commitment to provide a democratic mandate for replacing First Past the Post. That mandate would be awarded through an election run under First Past the Post.

We are asking the system whose fairness is in question to issue the permission slip for investigating it.

A party could win a huge parliamentary majority on one-third of the vote and call that a mandate. Millions of people may have voted tactically. Millions more may have supported parties offering similar reform commitments without those votes translating into many seats.

A general election also asks voters to choose between whole programmes for government. Nobody gets a separate ballot paper asking whether they support the voting-system paragraph on page 87 of a manifesto.

None of this makes an election result invalid. It does make a manifesto result a very blunt instrument for measuring public consent on the rules of the election itself.

The irony is difficult to miss.

We need to examine the voting system partly because First Past the Post fails to produce representation that accurately reflects how people voted. The Government’s current proposal is to use that same distorted translation of votes into seats as the test of whether reform has a legitimate mandate.

There is a better way to do this.

Build the mandate before writing the manifesto

A National Commission would allow the mandate to be built before parties make their manifesto commitments.

It would bring together independent commissioners, expert advisers and a representative Voters’ Forum. It would examine whether the current system still fairly reflects how people vote and, if not, what should replace it. The status quo would face the same test as every alternative. The Commission would also take that work beyond Westminster, driving a national debate as the evidence is gathered rather than presenting the public with a finished answer at the end.

The public would hear the evidence, test the arguments and help shape the conclusions. Parliament would receive a clear report. Political parties could then respond to those findings in their manifestos.

Voters would arrive at the next election knowing what had been recommended, why it had been recommended and what each party intended to do about it.

That would give the Government the electoral mandate it says it needs. It would also make that mandate far more informed, specific and legitimate than a promise produced behind closed doors and placed in a manifesto.

The Commission would not change the voting system. Parliament would still make that decision.

Its job would be to ensure that Parliament’s decision was built on something stronger than party interest and something more meaningful than counting seats produced by the system under review.

We have tried relying on the manifesto before

Anyone tempted to think a manifesto commitment means job done may wish to cast their mind back to 1997.

Labour entered that election promising an independent commission on voting systems.

It won a majority of 179.

The Jenkins Commission was established. It examined the options. It reported. No change happened.

First Past the Post had delivered Labour an enormous majority. Enthusiasm for changing the system that produced it somehow failed to survive the experience.

Starting the Commission now would make it much harder for electoral reform to disappear into another round of “later”.

Is the taskforce the path?

The Prime Minister has pointed towards a Cabinet Office democracy taskforce when asked about a National Commission. The Government has also described a cross-government task-and-finish team looking at political funding, illegitimate influence and broader threats to political equality.

Perhaps this is where the promised path will be designed.

At the moment, we do not know.

There are no published terms of reference, no membership and no timetable. The Government has not clearly said whether examining the voting system is part of its work.

If this taskforce will design the national debate, excellent. Tell us. Give it a timetable. Put citizens at its centre. Make sure its work can begin now and inform the next set of manifestos.

If it will not, the Government still needs a process capable of doing that job.

Peers have backed electoral reform. They have made the case for a National Commission. The Minister has confirmed an intention to bring about a new voting system and promised a path towards it.

That is progress. Real progress.

Now the Government has to turn intention into something voters can trust.

Let people examine the electoral system before they are asked to provide a mandate. Give parties an evidence-led basis for their manifesto commitments and give the next Parliament something credible to act on.

Then I will pack the beach bag.

Last night, news broke that Reform UK had received £36 million from Ben Delo - the largest political donation in British history. Almost before most people had had a chance to process that, Christopher Harborne matched it. Within 48 hours, two men had handed one party £72 million.

That may not mean much to you without some context. So what does £72 million actually mean in British politics?

Compare it with what every party normally raises, what entire national campaigns spend and what the independent regulator, the Electoral Commission, has to oversee the whole system and its significance becomes much clearer.

• It is more than every UK political party combined received in donations and public funds during the whole of 2025.

• EACH donation is larger than the £35.1 million a party contesting every seat is permitted to spend nationally during the year before a general election.

• It is more than twice the £32.6 million spent by ALL registered campaigners, on BOTH sides, during the Brexit referendum.

• It is £17.2 million more than the amount the Electoral Commission spends each year keeping our electoral system fair.

It is hard to know what a wake-up call on money in politics would look like if it does not look like this.

Tomorrow, Open Britain will publish Money in Politics: In a Nutshell, our new plain-English guide to who pays for British politics, how the rules work, what Parliament has done in response to this issue, and what it has chosen to leave untouched.

We started writing it because we thought more people needed to be aware of this growing problem. Yesterday’s £36 million donation made it urgent. Today’s £72 million figure has made its central warning impossible to ignore.

If the latest headlines have left you asking how any one person can legally give a party so much money, and why our Government, when it had a chance to stop politics going down this route, did not take it - the report provides the answers.

Look out for it tomorrow. Read it. Share it. Put it in front of anyone who still thinks £72 million in 48 hours is a freak event rather than the predictable result of the rules we have chosen to keep. It is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand not only why this has happened, but how we stop it happening again.

Mega-donors are serious. Is the Government?

Less than two weeks ago, our Government had an opportunity to show that it was serious about tackling the scourge of money in politics.

Stella Creasy’s amendment to the Representation of the People Bill would have introduced a £500,000 cap, reduced over time. It was backed by 64 MPs from six parties.

The Government did not back it.

Instead, ministers kicked the issue into the long grass. They promised that a cross-government task-and-finish team would be assembled to find a solution to the “issue of mega-donors”. Right now, that task-and-finish team has no published terms of reference, no membership and no timetable.

The mega-donors, meanwhile, are certainly not forming a working group.

They are not waiting for terms of reference. They are not considering options. They are not promising to report at pace.

They are moving ahead. Fast. 72 million mph.

Why isn’t the Government as serious as they are?

This is bigger than Delo and Harborne

Neither donor is new to writing enormous cheques to Reform. Delo had already given the party £8 million this year - the latest donation takes his 2026 total to £44 million. Harborne was already Reform’s biggest donor and says he had been giving around £1 million a month before matching Delo’s record.

Regular Ugly Politix readers will know both names. We have already looked at their growing role in British politics, what motivates them and Reform’s increasingly cosy relationship with crypto.

All of that remains important. We could spend the next week debating what either man wants in return. We could hold every Reform policy up to the light looking for their fingerprints - and there will be plenty of time to do that.

Right now, we need to ask how our political system allows two billionaires this much influence over a party preparing for government.

Mega-donors who can pay for the staff, offices, polling, policy work, advertising and infrastructure of a party preparing for government do not need to slip a formal request across the table when they want something. Everyone at that table already knows. Because they will be thinking about it every minute of every day…because the continued support of those donors matters every minute of every day.

Donations of this magnitude make people important to a political party whether they ask to be or not. They make not annoying the benefactor the north star objective of the organisation, and make a loss of that benefactor’s confidence catastrophic.

It creates dependency, regardless of what that organisation’s leaders may choose to say in public.

The rest of us get one vote. We might sign a petition, write to our MP, join a party or spend a wet Saturday knocking on doors. We do not get a hold over the party’s finances. We are not in a position to direct the political machinery that decides which policies are developed and how decisions affecting millions of people (us!) are taken.

Whose voices are getting louder?

The Government introduced the Representation of the People Bill as a vehicle to modernise our democracy, create fairer and more inclusive elections and help millions more people make their voices heard.

Those are its words.

So where, exactly, are the “more voices” in this?

While millions of people get one vote each, one donor can hand a party more than it is legally allowed to spend on an entire national election campaign. Whose voice do you think that party is going to listen to first?

A democracy that allows private wealth to be converted into this kind of outsized political influence is neither fair nor inclusive. It is a system in which the rich and powerful can simply drown everyone else’s voice.

I work on democratic reform because I believe politics CAN be made fairer and more accountable. That requires a certain stubbornness. You have to believe the rules can change even after Westminster has spent years explaining why now is not quite the right time.

It is precisely stuff like this that has damaged my trust in politics. And I am not alone. Eighty-three per cent of people believe wealthy individuals use donations to influence government in their own interests. Only 14% think party funding and spending is transparent. Just 9% trust politicians to tell the truth.

The damage is compounded by watching a government acknowledge the problem, look at an amendment designed to tackle it and decline to act - only for the full horror of that problem to explode onto our screens ten days later.

The donor took the law at its word. The Government appears to hope the rest of us will share its enthusiasm for a task-force…one with no members, remit or timetable.

We should not.

One more chance

On Monday, the Representation of the People Bill begins its serious journey through the House of Lords.

The Government should not need another wake-up call. It should not need another decade of design work. The Electoral Commission has modelled caps at different levels. Parliament has seen workable proposals for phasing, aggregation, enforcement and the treatment of genuinely pooled trade union funds.

All that is missing is a government willing to decide.

The Government should put a comprehensive donations-cap framework into the Bill during its Lords stages. That framework should be robust, enforceable and designed to ensure parties are built on a broad base of public support. It should apply the same principle to concentrated wealth at home that the Government has already accepted for donors living abroad.

The mega-donors have shown us how serious they are.

On Monday, the Government gets another chance to show us that it is serious too.

Fifty days after entering Downing Street, Andy Burnham is in danger of letting a reform he has spent years advocating slip through his fingers. He wants a fairer voting system and he wants one backed by a public mandate. Yet he still hasn’t launched the ready-made plan that could give him both.

My own organisation and others have asked him to kick off a National Commission on Electoral Reform in his first 100 days in office: an independent examination of how we elect MPs, with the public at the heart of the process, shaping its recommendations. By delaying that decision, he risks making it impossible to achieve the very change he has spent years saying he wants.

Last week, the Liberal Democrat MP Lisa Smart put two options to him in the Commons. Would he change the voting system before the next election? And if not, would he at least kick off a national commission?

Burnham replied that “there needs to be a mandate to make that change”. He answered the first question. He left the second hanging.

No serious person is suggesting something as fundamental as changing the voting system should be done without a public mandate. But a National Commission on Electoral Reform would not change the voting system. It would do four things: define what a good voting system should do, assess the current system’s performance against that definition, evaluate the alternatives already in use for elections away from Westminster, and recommend the one it judges best meets the needs of modern Britain. It would leave our elected representatives in Parliament to decide whether to change the law. There is no reason to wait for the next election to begin that work.

Indeed, if Burnham is serious about making our voting system fairer, he should be chomping at the bit to get the commission underway.

A meaningful mandate needs a clear proposal, better if it is one that the public has had a hand in shaping. Britain has recent experience of what happens when either part is missing.

In 2011, voters were offered the Alternative Vote, a system selected through coalition negotiations. They could accept or reject the proposal, but had had no role in developing it. More than two-thirds rejected it. Ever since, that defeat has dogged efforts to ensure that every vote cast actually counts for something. Putting a proposal to the people when they have had no role in shaping it is a risky business.

Five years later, the Brexit referendum exposed the opposite problem. It produced a decision to leave the European Union without settling the shape of the relationship that would replace membership. That left incompatible visions of Brexit competing to claim the same mandate. The resulting struggle consumed years of political bandwidth, distracting attention from core social issues and dividing the country to boot.

Open Britain grew out of Britain Stronger in Europe, the official Remain campaign. We know how bitter that experience became. Regardless of which side you were on in that particular referendum, the central lesson should be clear: agreement to end an arrangement does not automatically mean agreement on what should follow.

Burnham needs to avoid both traps: presenting voters with a finished answer they have had no part in developing, or asking them to endorse a change whose substance remains unresolved. Seeking a mandate for “Proportional representation” in his next manifesto will leave too much unanswered. People deserve to understand what change might mean, how they would choose their representatives and what the compromises would be.

The commission is designed to do that work. Its published blueprint brings independent commissioners and experts together with a representative forum of around 100 voters, chosen to be representative of the country at large. Crucially, its remit also includes prompting a national debate. Public hearings, regional discussions and accessible explanations would let people across the country examine the choices and contribute their views while the work was under way. People could challenge the thinking before the final recommendation was made.

That gives the commission a purpose beyond producing a report: helping the country understand the choice it will be asked to make. The commission cannot guarantee to find consensus, and must be open to conclusions campaigners on all sides dislike. But it can build the public awareness and understanding a meaningful mandate needs.

Rigorous work like this takes time. The proposed timetable allows three months to establish the commission and twelve months for it to report. Announced this autumn, it could report in early 2028, leaving time for public debate and manifesto decisions before an election in 2029.

Every month of delay reduces the time available and risks diluting the promise of meaningful change into a promise of yet more dither and delay.

There is an opening which Burnham should seize. Last week, Ministers offered cross-party talks on electoral reform, after an amendment to the Representation of the People Bill that might have brought the commission closer was ruled out of scope. The Prime Minister should use those talks to nail down arrangements for announcing the commission as soon as possible.

We know Burnham wholeheartedly believes in this reform. He has spent years calling for it. Failure now to kick off the work required to deliver it - when he is in the very best position to do so - would be an extraordinary own goal.

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What a week it’s been for those of us interested in the resilience of UK democracy.

On Wednesday evening, the Commons gave the Representation of the People Bill its third reading by 411 votes to 102. Angela Rayner told the House it “delivers much of the Rycroft review on foreign interference”. Five of Reform UK’s eight MPs voted against (the other three did not vote), with Danny Kruger describing the whole thing as “a flagrantly partisan attempt to kneecap Reform UK”.

On Thursday evening, Channel 4 News broadcast a year of undercover footage from inside Reform UK. In it, the party’s head of policy, James Orr, is recorded describing the Electoral Commission as “so dumb and ineffective”, before asking the question that ought to be engraved above the door of every campaign finance regulator in the country: “Is anybody gonna find out?”

By Friday morning, both Orr and Farage’s long-serving aide and de facto chief of staff, Dan Jukes, had stepped down pending the outcome of an internal investigation. Three parties had reported Reform to the Met. Farage told LBC it was “a clear case of entrapment”, then opened his party conference insisting that “Reform has broken no law” and that the aides’ recorded remarks were “loose pub talk”.

I’ll come back to Reform. But I want to start with the bill, because it deserves a fair hearing before I tell you what’s missing from it.

Credit where it’s due

This is a better bill than the one Steve Reed introduced in February. I said at the time that it was a rare shot at reform with some obvious gaps, and I listed the things Open Britain wanted added. One of them, the repeal of the Elections Act power letting ministers hand the Electoral Commission a “strategy and policy statement”, was delivered by government amendment at committee stage. That is much more important than it sounds. It was the kind of lever a future government with a grudge against the regulator could have pulled without a debate and our democracy is safer without it.

On Wednesday, the Government added a further tranche of measures lifted straight from the Rycroft review. Crypto donations are banned outright, retrospectively to 25 March, and any received since must be returned. Overseas electors can now give no more than £100,000 a year, and someone who moves back to the UK to dodge that cap stays inside it for the rest of the year and the whole of the next. Company donations must now be backed by real post-tax profits, assessed over five years, rather than by turnover.

That last change also matters more than it sounds. In June, Byline Times found seven companies that had given Reform around £485,000 between them while facing strike-off, liquidation or dissolution. The Electoral Commission confirmed in July that a company can be “in liquidation, dormant or late in filing documents” and still be a permissible donor. Under the profit test, a company with no qualifying profits cannot donate. As far as I can tell, most of those seven would have been caught.

Add to that a statutory information gateway between the Commission and other public bodies, a power for the Commission to demand documents from anyone without first opening a formal investigation, votes at 16, and the first real move towards automatic registration, and you have a piece of legislation that Open Britain can genuinely support without holding its nose.

So: well done. I mean that.

What the tape actually shows

Now the difficult part - starting with a paragraph to soothe the nerves of OB’s lawyers.

The Channel 4 investigation, by the not-for-profit group Verbatim, did not catch Reform banking foreign money directly. No £500,000 changed hands. Reform denies wrongdoing; Farage says he has a KC’s opinion and that the polling at the centre of the story was commissioned by “an independent third party”. The police are assessing. Nothing has been proven, and this piece does not claim otherwise.

What the tape shows is a mindset. It shows senior people in Reform UK discussing £32,500 of polling, commissioned by Reform aides and paid for by an American company, in terms that leave little room for doubt about the appeal. Jukes calls such arrangements “an amazing sweet spot” because “they don’t show up anywhere in public records”. It shows him explaining (in relation to a proposed £500,000 from the undercover reporter’s fictional American father) that “it’s the father and it’s the son. So that’s one of the ways in which we do it.”

Then there is the Electoral Commission’s response, which is worth reading twice. Reform’s official statement said its donor vetting process was “approved by the Electoral Commission”. The Commission replied that it “has not approved the donor vetting process for Reform, or any other party”. It added, with a regulator’s economy of words, that “any potential attempt to evade the controls on donations is for the police to consider”.

Note what the Commission is saying there. This is a matter for the police because the law already covers it. Donating on someone else's behalf is banned. Undeclared donations in kind are banned; Gavin Millar KC's view, given to the investigators, is that paying for a party's polling "is a donation just as much as giving a gift of money directly". Wednesday's bill has nothing to add to that. What it cannot do, on its own, is answer Orr's question. Rules about where money comes from are only as good as the odds of someone checking, and the new Commission powers do improve those odds. But they leave untouched the thing that made these Reform officials ask the question in the first place. A donor with a UK postcode can still hand over any sum at all, which means the "father and son" route has no ceiling either, and the prize for not being found out clearly justifies the risk in Reform’s eyes.

The omission that everyone in the Chamber could see

That is the first of three omissions, and it is the big one. There is still no cap on what a UK-based individual can give.

Stella Creasy laid it out with numbers. In the first quarter of this year Reform took £9.9 million in donations, more, she said, than the Government and opposition parties “put together”. Around £8 million of that came from three people, “all of whom have a UK postcode”. As she put it: “Nothing in the Bill as it stands will affect that.” Christopher Harborne’s £9 million, revealed last December, was the largest donation any living person has ever made to a British party. Under this bill, he could do it again next week.

The politics of how the domestic cap died are instructive, because they tell you what the Burnham government is made of.

In May, still mayor of Manchester, Andy Burnham wrote “yes, I do think there should be a cap on political donations”, suggesting a starting figure of around £500,000, to be reduced over time. Creasy tabled exactly that: £500,000 immediately, falling to £100,000, with trade union political funds exempt. Then, on 26 August, the Guardian reported that the Prime Minister would not back it, following a lobbying campaign by Labour’s affiliated unions. The GMB had written to 80 MPs warning that the amendment “risks having significant unintended consequences”.

On Wednesday the minister, Florence Eshalomi, announced instead that “the new cross-Government task and finish team” would be working “at pace to find a solution without unintended consequences”. Same phrase as the GMB letter. When Lisa Smart asked whether that meant something would be in place before the next election, the minister replied that she could not “unilaterally write the terms of reference for the taskforce”. Creasy did not press her amendment to a vote. The only cap-related division of the evening was on a Liberal Democrat proposal for a Royal Commission merely to study the question. Labour and Conservative MPs marched through the same lobby to defeat it, 427 to 85.

Let me be fair to the unions, because I think the argument deserves better than “unintended consequences”. Union money is different. Millions of members making small contributions through a political fund, already more heavily regulated than most political money in Britain, is close to the cleanest funding model we have. Creasy’s amendment recognised that and exempted it. The unions’ real worry is strategic: once the principle of a cap is on the statute book, a future government of a different colour could redraw the exemption. That is a legitimate fear. It is also one that can be answered in drafting, and it should be argued in public rather than settled in a letter to 80 MPs.

Because the alternative is what we have now. A Prime Minister who said he supported a cap. A Parliament in which dozens of MPs, most of them Labour, put their names to one. A public that, in every poll I have seen, supports one by a crushing margin. And a task-force with no terms of reference, no membership and no deadline.

The omission that was not even allowed in the room

The second omission never even made it to the floor. Alex Sobel’s new clause 31 would have required the Government to report within three months on the feasibility of a National Commission on Electoral Reform. More than 170 MPs from eight parties signed it, more than half of them Labour. The Chair ruled it out of scope. When members strayed towards the subject, the Deputy Speaker intervened: “Before we delve into a rabbit hole about proportional representation, it might be helpful if I remind all Members that it is out of scope of the Bill.”

A bill called the Representation of the People Bill, in which the representation of the people could not be discussed…a point made eloquently in the debate by Green MP, Dr Ellie Chowns.

The day before, in his first statement as Prime Minister, Burnham had been asked twice about the commission. To Ed Davey he offered a Cabinet Office task-force. To Lisa Smart he said that “there needs to be a mandate” for changing the voting system, and that if there is a consensus at the next election “a change can be made in the next Parliament”. At no point did he commit to the commission. He is right that a change needs a mandate. But a manifesto line saying “proportional representation” names a family of systems, not a particular system, and voters cannot give a mandate for something nobody has described. The commission is how you do the homework required to seek a meaningful mandate. It needs no legislation. It could be announced next week. We published a short guide on exactly this earlier in the week, and I will not repeat it here.

The omission nobody in government wants to talk about

The third is quieter. The Government says it has accepted all seventeen of Rycroft’s recommendations. Read the response, though, and you find one it has quietly parked. Recommendation 16 asked the Government to look at “potential channels for foreign money to flow into the wider political eco-system”: think tanks, lobbying, the influence economy that sits upstream of any donation. The Government’s answer in July was that these “are issues which warrant careful consideration” and that it would “consider opportunities for further work in the future”.

That is a door the bill leaves wide open. Two weeks ago we wrote about the US State Department planning to put $12 million into British right-wing organisations. None of that is a political donation. None of it is touched by Wednesday’s amendments. And there is still no independent inquiry into foreign interference in British politics, which Open Britain has been asking for since the spring. A regulatory review is not an investigation, however good its recommendations.

What happens now

The bill went to the Lords on Thursday. Second reading is pencilled in for 14 September. Rayner told the Commons she looked forward to “a strengthened Bill returning”, and Creasy noted, pointedly, that “the Lords already hear about what is happening”. That is where the cap fight moves next, and peers are less easily whipped than a Labour backbench in its second month under a new leader.

Three things would turn a decent bill into a good one, and none of them needs to wait for a manifesto.

Give the task and finish team terms of reference, a membership and a date, and make that date fall before the next general election. Announce the National Commission on Electoral Reform, which requires no law and would have most of the Commons behind it. And commission the inquiry into foreign interference that Rycroft was never designed to be.

This week, the Commons partially closed the front door. Then a television crew showed us people inside the house, on tape, talking about how the back door is still wide open.

So, “Is anybody gonna find out?” The honest answer, this week, was: only because someone happened to be filming. The job of the next few months is to make sure the defence of our democracy is not left to a film crew.

Today, Andy Burnham stepped up to the despatch box for the first time as Prime Minister, promising a different way of doing politics.

This week brings one of the first opportunities to show how different it will be.

The Representation of the People Bill returns to Parliament carrying some worthwhile reforms - and all the caution of the government that wrote it. It will lower the voting age to 16 and strengthen protections against foreign money entering British politics. Both deserve support.

The problem is how much the Bill leaves untouched.

Rushanara Ali, one of the ministers who helped write it, has described the Bill as too “timid” and “incremental”.

She is right.

The Bill extends the franchise without confronting what happens to people’s votes. It tightens some rules around foreign money while leaving British millionaires and billionaires free to donate almost any amount. It changes parts of our democracy while avoiding the deeper question of whether the system itself is working fairly.

Andy Burnham did not write this timid Bill. His choice is whether to accept it as a finished package.

The Bill was conceived under Keir Starmer and carries the limits his government chose for it. Those were political choices, not permanent boundaries. The previous government left some of the biggest questions facing British democracy for another day. Burnham does not have to inherit its caution along with the Bill.

That is what a change of Prime Minister can mean: not rejecting everything that came before, but reopening choices that were treated as closed.

Burnham did not become Prime Minister because the country wanted a more personable administrator of decisions made by Keir Starmer. His premiership carries an expectation of political departure. The revealing moments will come when he must decide whether the old limits still apply.

This is one of those moments.

Two of the biggest issues the Bill leaves open - money in politics and our voting system - offer Burnham the chance to set a more ambitious direction. On both, his own backbenchers are already creating the momentum for him to go further.

Britain still puts no universal limit on how much one person can give a political party.

Recent months have shown us where that leads. Reform UK has been engulfed by questions about Nigel Farage’s relationship with George Cottrell, the wealthy donor and convicted fraudster who helped bankroll the party.

Then there’s the revelation that Christopher Harborne gave Farage £5 million personally, just weeks before he decided to stand in the 2024 general election. Its size, timing and secrecy have raised questions that no healthy democracy should be comfortable leaving unanswered.

This is the bargain behind unlimited donations: wealthy people get extraordinary access and potential influence, political leaders get the money they need, and the rest of us are expected to trust that nothing passes between them.

Backbench MPs have tabled amendments to introduce a cap through the Bill.

Burnham knows the problem. Before becoming Prime Minister, he backed a cap of around £500,000. His Government has not backed those amendments, but says it has not ruled out returning to the issue later.

The choice is not between accepting these amendments exactly as written and doing nothing. If they are not right, the Government can improve them. The problem is clear and the opportunity to act is already here.

Later should not be the answer.

Electoral reform offers Burnham another opportunity to go beyond the package he inherited.

The 2024 election produced the most disproportionate result in modern British history. Tactical voting has become routine and millions of votes make no difference to the outcome.

Almost 100 Labour MPs are among 185 parliamentarians calling for a National Commission, with an amendment now before Parliament.

The Government has so far focused on whether changing the voting system would require a manifesto mandate.

That gets ahead of the decision actually facing Burnham.

A National Commission would not impose a new voting system. It would create an independent, evidence-led process, involve the public and allow the country to decide what should come next.

The immediate choice is not which voting system Britain should adopt. It is whether that process should begin.

The opportunity is also bigger than the amendment. Burnham can establish a National Commission with or without the Bill. He does not have to choose a new voting system this week. He can choose to start the process.

There is a danger that the Representation of the People Bill will be treated as a parcel that has already been sealed: worthwhile measures inside, difficult questions left out and too late now to change the contents.

It has arrived, however, at a more ambitious political moment than the one in which it was written. Its original limits do not have to determine what happens next.

Burnham does not need to accept every amendment or settle every detail immediately. He can commit to the principle of a donations cap and ask his Government to design one that works. He can launch a National Commission without waiting for another Bill or another election.

This is not an invitation to discard the Bill he inherited. It is an opportunity to give it the ambition its original authors withheld.

Today, Burnham promised a different way of doing politics. This Bill gives him one of his first chances to show us what that means.

He has inherited a timid Bill. He also has the opportunity to make it braver.

The key paradox of today’s politics is this: people are incredibly passionate, vocal and engaged, but our efforts to create lasting change seem to evaporate on contact with reality. As historian Anton Jäger has put it: we are slamming the accelerator with no petrol in the tank.

His new book, Hyperpolitics: Extreme Politicisation Without Political Consequences, offers a compelling diagnosis. The institutions that once channelled our political energies – mass parties, trade unions, churches, civic associations – have steadily withered. (I do think his book romanticises these often prejudiced and hierarchical organisations a bit – but the point stands that there used to be stronger bonds between civic, social and political life).

The prosperous, depoliticised “end of history” that began in the 1990s, and accompanied the erosion of these social bonds, was shattered by the 2008 financial crisis. People returned to politics in the late 2000s with a vengeance. But no one rebuilt the collective institutions that once channelled passion into power. Instead, we tried to replace them with the internet.

The result has been what Jäger calls “hyperpolitics”: a society saturated with political fervour, protest, and extreme polarisation, but increasingly confined to an algorithmic realm of fleeting outrage.

It seems naive now to think the internet could truly replace mass organisations. But we forget how strong that promise of digital democracy was – the promise of unprecedented new horizons of human connectivity. Instead – thanks to the Elon Musks and Mark Zuckerbergs of this world – we got echo chambers. A historic level of political balkanisation, a fragmented series of identity clusters, each screaming into its own algorithmic void.

The main beneficiaries of hyperpolitics have been the populist right. They figured out early (think back to Brexit and Cambridge Analytica) that grievance, division, and outrage could be gamed and monetised. Deploying simple catch-all slogans (“Make America Great Again,” “Take Back Control”), backed by mega-donor cash and troves of personal browsing data, they cobbled disparate groups together into coalitions that stuck together just long enough to win elections.

They continue to farm agitation: outrage over Black characters in The Odyssey, a trans person in a Bud Light advert, or manufactured panic about migrants eating swans. But as Trump’s second term demonstrates, their popularity stumbles once they attain power and routinely prioritise the interests of wealthy donors over their constituents.

The centre of politics, meanwhile, is struggling globally. Figures like Morgan McSweeney – Keir Starmer’s former Chief of Staff – remain wedded to a model that, as Jäger puts it, “treat[s] the electorate like a black box from which one hopes to extract insight after a plane crash.” Rather than rebuild relationships, they study an increasingly fragmented electorate from above: polling, focus-grouping, and segmenting it into ever-finer demographic slices.

This triangulation is the strategy of political actors with little to say. In an era of stagnant wages, soaring inequality, and crumbling public services, technocratic “evidence-based policy” is not speaking to people’s genuine frustrations.

That leaves the left, which has repeatedly mistaken online mobilisation for organisation. Various movements have created “repertoires of social expression that require little to no long-term obligation”: viral campaigns on Instagram, flash-in-the-pan mass protests and insurgent movements. From Occupy to Corbynism, the left has repeatedly demonstrated its ability to mobilise enormous numbers – often composed of young people – but has struggled to turn that mass energy into any kind of durable power bloc (despite often openly stating their intention to do so).

So where do we go from here?

There are obvious places to start. Getting big money and revolving-door lobbyists out of politics would force parties to cultivate members rather than mega-donors. And ending First-Past-the-Post would stop parties ignoring millions of voters while obsessively polling a handful of swing seats.

But none of this, on its own, rebuilds the collective life Jäger describes. To truly revive the mass politics of the 20th century, Jäger says, is like “the genomic reconstruction of a mammoth from DNA samples extracted out of the Siberian permafrost.”

All he has to say about the prospect of renewal, somewhat disappointingly, is that it will emerge in “everyday life” – in places where people communicate and express “common concern.”

But seeing as civil society and much of the economy have now gone digital, I do wonder if one such place could still be the internet. If only we could find a way to fulfil that original digital promise of meaningful and consequential connection, to break down the barriers of our echo chambers, liberate people from Big Tech’s walled gardens, and build systems that facilitate association, mass cooperation and healthy political competition.

The tools, as far as I can tell, exist: encryption, open-source software, interoperable networks, community-owned platforms and digital systems for deliberation and participatory decision-making.

Today’s billionaire-owned internet is designed to turn our fleeting attention into massive profits. Not to turn our connections into binding political associations.

It’s quite hard to envision a different kind of web, and the power-mad tech bros certainly wouldn’t welcome that act of imagination. There are plenty of questions that neither Jäger nor I can yet answer about what it would actually look like.

But if the thesis of Hyperpolitics holds true, perhaps that’s the place (beyond the obvious, immediately actionable regulatory reforms) where those of us who care about the future of democracy should start looking.

Last year, the United States published a National Security Strategy with an extraordinary diagnosis of Europe. It warns of “civilizational erasure”, predicts some NATO countries could become “majority non-European” within decades and celebrates the growing influence of “patriotic European parties” a cause for “great optimism”.

US policy, it says, should include “cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations”.

This isn’t a leaked diplomatic cable or an allegation made by America’s opponents. It is US government policy, written down.

The language of patriotism does a lot of work. Migration and demographic change are presented as a threat to European civilisation itself.

The strategy’s language was quickly linked by analysts and reporters to one of the international far right’s most notorious racist conspiracy theories: the Great Replacement - the idea that Europe’s existing population is being displaced through mass immigration.

Now there is money attached.

The US State Department intends to provide $12 million to conservative organisations in Britain. $7 million is destined for 878, a recently established organisation co-founded by former Conservative Minister, Jacob Rees-Mogg. Its priorities include ending mass immigration.

Another $5 million is reportedly going to Free Speech Union International, an offshoot of the Free Speech Union (FSU), founded by Conservative peer Toby Young.

Meanwhile, senior State Department official Sarah Rogers has been on a European road trip promoting the grants and the MAGA administration’s free-speech agenda, meeting figures from Reform UK and strengthening ties with the European right.

The money, the political outreach and the published strategy are all pointing in the same direction.

Taking back control, with help from Washington

Free speech is central to the justification. The Trump administration increasingly portrays European attempts to regulate online content as censorship, with Britain’s Online Safety Act becoming a particular target.

The Free Speech Union shares that fight. It has described the Act as “Orwellian” and cultivated relationships with figures in the Trump administration.

This week, the Financial Times reported that the FSU had gone a step further, urging US Vice-President JD Vance to press the British Government to pause the Online Safety Act and stop funding its anti-disinformation unit.

A British campaigning organisation was inviting Washington into a British policy fight.

Toby Young himself criticised Barack Obama’s intervention in the Brexit debate in 2016. Britons, he argued, could make up their own minds. Apparently foreign intervention in British politics looks rather different when the foreign government agrees with you.

Perhaps the strangest thing about all of this is how little it looks like foreign interference. We’re used to looking for Russian money, shell companies, bots, cyberattacks and covert networks.

Here, almost everything is happening in broad daylight.

The Government clearly knows foreign interference is a risk. It’s already tightening the rules, including a new £100,000 cap on political donations from overseas electors. That’s welcome.

Foreign money, though, doesn’t need to go anywhere near a political party to influence British politics.

Modern political influence has a supply chain. Money funds organisations, research, campaigns, events and social media. Ideas move into newspapers and television, reach politicians, shape political debate and eventually become policy. No foreign cheque needs to arrive at party headquarters.

If we’re serious about stopping foreign interference, I’d argue we need to look further up the chain too - long before foreign money turns into a political donation.

Normally, the hard part of foreign interference is proving that it’s happening. This time, America has written down what it wants for Europe, put millions of dollars behind it and started building relationships with the people who will help deliver it.

We don’t need an intelligence agency to uncover that.

We need a democracy equipped to deal with it.

New polling this week showed a sharp fall in the number of people who feel proud to be British.

National pride has fallen from 74% to 47% over the past 15 years.

Working for a democratic reform organisation, I can’t say I was wholly surprised by some of the other findings either. Pride in Parliament has fallen by 34%, while pride in the monarchy has almost halved.

It’s hard to feel pride in institutions you feel disconnected from. Trust in our politics has been falling for years, with too many people feeling ignored, shut out of decisions and unconvinced that the institutions governing them really work for them.

That trust needs to be rebuilt.

But there was one finding that genuinely encouraged me.

Pride in our local communities has actually risen, from 29% to 40%.

For all the talk of a country hopelessly divided, people feel a growing sense of connection to the places they live and the communities around them. That feels important.

The danger comes when uncertainty about national identity is spotted and exploited by people who see division as an opportunity. We have seen plenty of that recently.

Anti-migrant rhetoric, disinformation and hate spread rapidly online, encouraging communities to see one another as competitors for homes, public services and even the right to belong. In recent months, some of that anger has spilled from our screens onto our streets.

There are real consequences when division is allowed to flourish.

But perhaps our communities also show us part of the way forward.

If pride in our communities is growing while pride in our country and institutions is falling, the challenge is to reverse that trend - to build a bridge between the communities people increasingly value and the democracy and country they collectively make up.

That means listening to people rather than simply telling them what the country thinks.

It’s one reason the National Conversation exists - and why Open Britain has joined forces with it.

The National Conversation is asking people across the UK about the communities they value, what brings us together, what makes them feel they belong and what kind of country they want to become.

I’ve been filling in my own National Conversation this week, and some of the questions have made me think harder than I expected. Perhaps inevitably, some of my answers come back to Northern Ireland.

I grew up near the border, in a place where identity has never fitted neatly inside a single box. British, Irish and Northern Irish can overlap in ways that are deeply personal, cultural and political.

I’ve seen what can happen when flags, identity and even our sense of belonging are hijacked and turned into dividing lines.

In Northern Ireland, those divisions were never abstract. They shaped where people lived, where they went to school, the opportunities available to them and, at their worst, whether people felt safe.

But I’ve also seen that division doesn’t have to be permanent.

Northern Ireland has changed enormously during my lifetime. Not overnight, and certainly not through conversation alone. Political agreements, fairer laws, investment and people willing to cooperate across old divisions all played their part.

There is still a long way to go. Segregation remains stubbornly embedded and questions of identity can still pull people apart. But Northern Ireland is not the place many once assumed it was destined to remain.

The political settlement has endured. Fairer housing and employment have widened opportunity. Support for integrated education is growing. Investment has followed, while tourism, culture, music, food and the screen industry have flourished.

That experience makes me wary of anyone who tells us division is inevitable. It isn’t.

A conversation won’t rebuild trust, fix our democracy or make deeply held differences disappear.

But listening is how we start.

Right now, there is something worth listening to: people still believe in their communities.

If we can understand what holds those communities together, give them a greater voice and build a stronger bridge between them and our democracy, perhaps we can start rebuilding some of what has been lost.

If you have ten minutes, add your own experience to the National Conversation. What comes next shouldn’t be decided by the people shouting loudest about who belongs.

It should be shaped by all of us.

Take part in the National Conversation

“I asked the voters of Clacton to be my jury,” Nigel Farage said as he declared victory over the “establishment candidate” Count Binface in his self-induced, shambolic by-election campaign. “And the verdict has now come in.”

Asked by GB News about the Parliamentary inquiry into his £5 million “gift” from crypto tycoon Christopher Harborne, Farage responded: “Who cares? Who cares? The voters of Clacton don’t care.”

Winning an election, in Farage’s mind, effectively serves as a pardon. Never mind that no major parties competed in it, never mind that it’s in Reform UK’s safest seat in the country, never mind that more people in Britain would have preferred his novelty candidate opponent to win. For Farage and his media allies, the result represents the absolution of all sin.

In the same way that Donald Trump sought to frame his 2024 Presidential election win as a twisted exoneration from various forms of official scrutiny, Farage has it that Britain’s democratic institutions – accountability watchdogs, regulators, and even the police – should essentially give way to the whims of a small subset of voters.

Of course, that makes absolutely no sense for a variety of reasons. Defendants in court don’t get to choose their own jurors and then declare themselves exonerated by the verdict. There is an established code of ethics all must abide by, and an independent system in place to determine whether it has been breached. You might call it ‘the rule of law.’

I’ll be the first to agree that the system Britain has for enforcing ethics and accountability on officials is utterly broken. It’s exceedingly rare for elected politicians to be charged with misconduct in public office, and the fact that Farage has coasted on a tidal wave of dodgy donations for this long shows that the system we have to regulate campaign finance isn’t fit for purpose.

But even under a system in dire need of fixing, Farage will still find that the people of Clacton rightly lack the power to free him from consequences.

It didn’t take long for the Parliamentary probe into Nigel Farage’s £5 million ‘gift’ from Christopher Harborne to re-open – it’s already up and running again. His dramatic resignation in July merely bought him a 38-day grace period, at least away from the prying eyes of the Standards Committee. But that’s just one probe of many.

The Met police are actively investigating donations to the party amid questions about the ultimate source of funds, and the National Crime Agency has reportedly received multiple Suspicious Activity Reports relating to millions of pounds in transactions to organisations operated by deputy leader Richard Tice.

Our friends at Unlock Democracy and Compassion in Politics have now also reported the Reform leader to the Metropolitan Police, calling for the force to “investigate whether Nigel Farage MP may have committed the offence of misconduct in public office” over that £5 million gift.

And new information is constantly emerging that just raises more questions :

• Byline Times revealed today that Reform UK paid £440,000 to firms linked to party insiders;

• The Financial Times has uncovered *another* dodgy Polymarket account in the name of Reform donor, Farage confidante and convicted fraudster George Cottrell – placing big bets on Donald Trump’s 2024 election campaign.

• Tether.bet, the offshore crypto gambling company with links to both Cottrell and Harborne, mysteriously shut down in the UK in the wake of revelations in The Times about potential criminal wrongdoing.

So yes, fine, Farage is entitled to celebrate his electoral victory. The voters of Clacton have given him a genuine mandate to represent them in Parliament (at least as genuine as it can be when no other serious party was on the ballot). He should probably still be a bit embarrassed that a bin secured 26% of the vote.

What they have not given him – and could never give him – is a mandate for sleaze, or any kind of immunity from the rules that govern elected officials.

Perhaps he understands that his greatest challenges are yet to come, because the Reform UK leader hasn’t exactly behaved like a politician proud of a hard-won triumph.

He neglected to turn up to the declaration for a race that he himself called, saying that “I am damned if I am going to stand on a stage, having won a resounding victory […] and be demeaned and humiliated by nobodies.” He also conflictingly cited security concerns, suggesting that Essex Police advised him not to attend for fear of a “major disturbance” (Essex police say otherwise).

Farage won the by-election. What he didn’t win was the right to decide that the questions no longer need answering.

The coming weeks will test whether Reform UK can outrun its own paper trail. Farage says the verdict has come in. The trouble is, several others are still pending.

Politicians defending money in politics often sound the same. Rarely do they make the case that our system is in any way improved by massive and growing influxes of donor cash. Instead, they lament the campaign-finance-industrial-complex as an unfortunate but necessary evil.

I’ve come to think of it as a sort of ‘arms race’ mentality, fuelled by the frenetic winner-take-all logic of FPTP elections. It’s propelled America to ridiculous extremes, with the wealthiest spending $2.6 billion on the 2024 Presidential race compared to just $31 million in 2010. British politics isn’t quite at America’s absurd ‘actually donations are free speech’ level yet, but we’re certainly trending in that direction.

This ‘arms race’ mentality is sustained by a political and consultant class, on both sides of the Atlantic, that is utterly bereft of imagination. To these people, politics is a static grid. The system – however broken – is merely the water they swim in. Of course you need the billionaires: the other lot have billionaires. Of course you need the lobbyists: the other lot have lobbyists. Winning requires concessions, you know, and winning is everything. (These types always have a great deal to say about winning and rather less to say about what they intend to do once they’ve won.)

It’s a sort of political fatalism: voters believe what they believe, the system works how it works, and the shrewd politician merely plays the field. It’s how you end up with Keir Starmer’s ‘Island of Strangers’ speech, which (disastrously) tried to pander to the xenophobic anxieties of Reform UK voters.

But the terrain has changed, and the playbook must follow. A cloud of contempt and political disillusionment looms over both Britain and the United States. The general quality of life is stagnating – in some cases even declining – and prospects for young people are bleak. People are crying out for wholesale system change, and unless you buy the hard-right’s anti-immigration snake oil, there isn’t really much on offer.

Big money is part of the reason. When politicians are beholden to donors, they tend to govern tepidly – protecting incumbent industries, watering down reform, and prioritising the quarterly earnings of their backers over the pay packets of their constituents. The result is often policy paralysis on housing, healthcare, and wages. Voters feel the stagnation in their wallets and conclude that the whole system is rigged.

In Michigan, a state that Donald Trump carried in 2024, progressive outsider candidate Abdul El-Sayed just delivered a catastrophic blow to this received establishment wisdom. Last week, the doctor and former public health official won an uphill Senate primary against his opponent Haley Stevens – despite the fact that she had a record-breaking $60 million spent in her favour.

El-Sayed’s double-punch campaign was remarkably simple, as summed up by his killer refrain: “money out of politics, money in your pocket.” He rejected SuperPAC spending (the bloated fundraising vehicles that have all but conquered US campaign finance), and campaigned hard against America’s unaffordable health insurance system.

Under that conventional thinking, Stevens should have walked it in. But her greatest asset – a lot of money – instead became her greatest liability. El-Sayed was able to present her as another bought-and-paid-for politician. Crucially, he pointed to the donations she’d received from big players that have also backed Donald Trump: the health insurance lobby, oil and gas interests, cryptocurrency and gambling giants, big tech firms, and above all AIPAC (America’s notorious hard-right pro-Israel funding group).

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Politicians today can actually become more impactful – and far less robotic – when they shed vested interests. Like Zohran before him, El-Sayed is able to speak off the cuff about issues that matter to him (especially Gaza and universal healthcare) without worrying about upsetting powerful donors or interest groups. Democratic primary voters, who are increasingly tired of political automatons that routinely speak at length about nothing at all, clearly saw it as a breath of fresh air.

The smear-machine is already churning out fear-mongering disinformation about El-Sayed, and he’s still got to face off against Trump acolyte Mike Rogers in November. A lot more money will be spent trying to stave off this threat – as ever, the system protects itself – but it’s early doors and they’re already resorting to petty personal insults. As with Stevens, Trump and Rogers will struggle to properly rebut a campaign that puts their own perceived corruption at its heart.

The fatal flaw of the ‘arms race’ school of thought, then – which El-Sayed and others have exposed – is that public opinion has always changed. Ideas and connections can be explained and highlighted in ways that voters didn’t see before (money in politics is connected to the lack of money in your pocket). Political coalitions are not naturally occurring background phenomena – they’re built and rebuilt.

Perhaps the lesson for us here in Britain is that democratic reform needn’t remain trapped in roundtables about recommendations from the last roundtable. We have a habit of treating the rules governing political power as constitutional housekeeping separate from day-to-day politics, when it may actually offer – or at least be a gateway to – the change that people so desperately want.

Indeed, there’s currently an elections bill moving through Parliament that’s quite thin gruel when it comes to campaign finance – especially given all of the insane recent revelations about Nigel Farage’s finances. The one thing that Reform and MAGA alike fear most, I strongly suspect, is a genuine revolt against money in politics that exposes their billionaire-funded populist charade for the sham that it is.