The principles of fairness, transparency, and accountability are the bedrock of a democratic society. They enable trust between the electorate and those in power — and allow a level playing field in which voters, not special interests, drive debate and government decision-making.
In Britain today, these ideals are under threat. Just 6 per cent of the country believe that voters are the main influence on government decision-making. Nearly two-thirds of the public now say that politicians are “merely out for themselves”, a sharp increase from past decades. Just one in three Britons said they trusted this year’s general election campaign to represent the concerns of “people like me.”
It’s this crisis of trust that prompted the formation of the new cross-party group of which I am proud to be Vice Chair: the All Party Parliamentary Group for Fair Elections. With over 100 members, it is already one of the largest APPGs in parliament.
The group has three aims. Firstly, to end the injustice of our First Past the Post voting system, which means most people lack a real say in our general elections. Secondly, to combat disinformation in election debates, both amongst the traditional press and social media platforms. And thirdly, to tackle dark money and hidden influence in our politics.
The fact is, just 13 per cent of Britons think campaign funding is transparent enough. The public is now more likely to link economic crime to politicians than to any other profession, including business executives and oligarchs.
Consider why that might be. In the last decade, there’s been repeated stories of donations from secretive sources, some with questionable ties to foreign interests. Glaring loopholes in our campaign finance rules not only leave Britain open to undue and often hidden influence, but diminish voters’ confidence in politicians, institutions, and in the power of their vote to effect change.
While our crucial campaign finance watchdog, the Electoral Commission, does its best to regulate, its powers and independence from government are limited. The last government’s Elections Act only made matters worse.
Our campaign finance system is startlingly opaque. Donations under £500 are not checked for permissibility (they’re technically not even considered donations), and can enter politics from anywhere at all. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism found it was possible to make multiple donations under £500 in order to give far above the threshold, all with complete anonymity.
Only donations over £11,180 are required to be publicly reported by the Electoral Commission, meaning significant sums of money enter our political campaigns without proper public scrutiny.
Even for donations above the reporting threshold, there’s a number of loopholes which can be used to dodge official oversight. Unauthorised donors can funnel large sums through eligible individuals by proxy, through limited liability companies, and through unincorporated associations. In many cases these legal entities are completely benign, but they provide malevolent actors, in some cases associated with rogue governments or illicit industries, with easy access to British politics.
In one example from 2022, a donation to the Conservative Party of over £630,000 triggered compliance concerns, and the bank flagged the donation to the National Crime Agency on suspicion of money laundering. Subsequent documents revealed that the money originated from a Russian bank account belonging to a former official with links to Putin. Due to gaps in oversight rules, there was no mechanism to hold anyone accountable for the donation.
But perhaps nowhere better demonstrates the corrosive effects of dark money better than the United States. The US Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision ushered in billions of dollars of donations from wealthy individuals and non-party independent groups. Dark money organisations with secretive funding sources, not unlike the clandestine donation vehicles we have in the UK, emerged as the ultimate political power-players in American elections. With the guardrails removed, pay-to-play political culture dominates US politics to this day.
We’ve seen where that path leads. The world’s wealthiest man, Elon Musk, was able to pump hundreds of millions of dollars into a Republican ‘Super-PAC’ in the lead-up to this year’s presidential election. Through it he offered $1 million a day to certain swing-state voters, on the condition they signed a pro-Trump petition.
Our politics is vulnerable to the same dark forces that now threaten to subsume American democracy. It’s vital that the British government takes action to defend the integrity of our system and restore trust in our politics. The APPG for Fair Elections is campaigning for an end to dark money in politics. In a new report — Free But Not Fair — we are calling for the closure of donation loopholes, which allow would-be donors to evade scrutiny, as a first step.
Doing so would be the first major change to campaign finance rules since the year 2000. It would give people confidence that votes, not bank accounts, determine British elections. And would demonstrate that the government is serious about defending democratic principles of fairness, transparency, and accountability.
Politics.co.uk is the UK’s leading digital-only political website. Subscribe to our daily newsletter for all the latest news and analysis.constitu
