Farage's £72m crypto windfall: has Britain learnt anything about foreign influence?

As the Representation of the People Bill reaches the House of Lords, Reform UK’s record £72 million windfall from two crypto billionaires - including one based in Thailand and another recently returned from Hong Kong - has thrown Britain’s political-finance rules into sharp relief. A new report from The Citizens and Democratys asks whether Parliament can build credible defences against foreign interference while still refusing to confront how it has operated in British politics before.

Edited by Sergei Cristo, the whistleblower who has spent years drawing attention to Russian interference in British politics, UK’s Russia Lesson: Building Deterrence against Foreign Political Interference brings together evidence from 12 expert witnesses spanning intelligence, politics, anti-corruption and investigative journalism.

Among them are former Attorney General and Intelligence and Security Committee Chair Dominic Grieve KC, Marina Litvinenko, widow of murdered former Russian intelligence officer Alexander Litvinenko, investigative journalist Carole Cadwalladr, former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele, Spotlight on Corruption Executive Director Susan Hawley and intelligence historian Professor Rory Cormac.

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Or watch a short film that gives you all the intel...

What has Britain learned?

At the heart of the report is a problem that has never gone away. Britain is now legislating to protect its politics from foreign interference without ever having properly investigated how Russian political interference operated here in the first place.

“In contrast to major European nations, the US and Canada, there has not been a proper investigation into Russian political interference in Britain,” Cristo says.

One of the areas the report examines is the use of proxy donations, where permissible UK donors can be used to channel money originating from impermissible foreign sources into British politics. It comes as Reform UK faces a police investigation into allegations surrounding tens of millions of pounds of foreign funding.

There are already laws designed to prevent proxy donations. Yet in the past 25 years, not a single prosecution relating to proxy donations has been successful, Cristo reminds us.

And that raises a bigger question. If the existing system has struggled to deal with foreign money once it enters British politics, how do you deter it before the damage is done?

The report argues that the Representation of the People Bill gives Parliament an opportunity to do more.

Alongside tighter rules on political donations, the report calls for new sanctions regime targeting foreign actors, their proxies and enablers who attempt to interfere in British politics, drawing on measures already used by the US, Canada and the EU.

Sanctions could give Britain another way to target the people and networks behind foreign interference, rather than relying solely on investigations and prosecutions after suspected money has already entered the country. But preventing future interference also means understanding how it has operated before.

Six years after the Intelligence and Security Committee raised the alarm...

the Citizens is renewing its call for a full investigation into Russian political interference in the UK.

If Parliament is going to protect British politics from future interference, it needs to know what it is protecting it against.

Download the report now.