What just happened
- Bolsonaro supporters stormed Brazil’s congress, presidential palace and supreme court (more below).
- Israel’s far-right minister Itamar Ben-Gvir told police to remove the Palestinian flag from public spaces.
- Cornwall prepared to host the UK’s first rocket launch (more below).
The broad outlines of British political donations are well-known. Trade unions fund Labour and big business funds the Tories. It’s more complicated than that, of course – parties and MPs get donations from individuals as well – but the register of members’ interests requires them all to be declared.
So what? It’s much more complicated than that, as the Westminster Accounts reveal:
- Declarations are not necessarily the same thing as transparency.
- For every donor who’s a household name there are dozens who aren’t.
- Donors don’t have to disclose the source of their funds, nor what they may ask for in return.
The result is a system of disclosure in principle with acres of unanswered questions in practice.
By the numbers:
£17.2 million – total value of donations to individual MPs this parliament.
£127.8 million – additional donations to political parties.
£242,000 – value of gifts to MPs from Qatar this parliament despite rules prohibiting them from accepting foreign donations.
£191,000 – donations to Jeremy Corbyn from JBC Defence Ltd, a vehicle used to cover the former Labour leader’s legal costs in a libel action that was eventually settled out of court.
Top donors to Members of Parliament, by total value*
*Includes cash donations, non-cash donations, gifts and other benefits-in-kind.
Top Members of Parliament, by total secondary earnings
Includes cash donations, non-cash donations, gifts and other benefits-in-kind.
The JBC Defence donations are the sixth largest in the league table of donations to individual MPs by source, only two places below the Qatari foreign ministry. But donations to parties are an order of magnitude larger and dominated by those to the Conservatives.
Tories in clover. The Conservative Party not only receives 50 per cent more in donations (£76 million) than all the other parties combined (£51.4 million). It can also claim a broader base of donors. It has more than twice as many of them (737) as all the other parties (352). Some, like Lubov Chernukhin, the Russian-born banker (£841,000 this parliament), are well-known to students of UK party funding. But 12 other individuals without her name recognition have given more.
Workers united. Labour’s five biggest donors are all unions, accounting for 71 per cent of all gifts to the party by value compared with 15 per cent for the Conservatives’ top five. The sixth biggest Labour donor is the Cooperative Group, which runs the supermarket chain. The seventh: Francesca Perrin, whose money also comes from groceries; her father is Lord Sainsbury.
Over on aisle 10. Speaking of Lord Sainsbury, his $8 million this parliament to the Liberal Democrats is like Jupiter to the solar system. It accounts for more than half the party’s total funding and is the second-biggest donation in all of UK politics after the Unite union’s £8.8 million to Labour.
Not all dependencies are so transparent. Labour and the Tories have both taken money from companies almost no one, including most MPs, has ever heard of.
For example…
MPM Connect. Near the top of the donor list is a company with no internet presence that funds three Labour MPs. MPM Connect is owned by two low-profile millionaires, Peter Hearn and Simon Murphy.
MPM started donating to these MPs – Dan Jarvis, Yvette Cooper and Wes Streeting – in January 2020, when Hearn appears to have switched from donating in his name to that of MPM. Since then it has given nearly £330,000. But it’s very difficult to tell what MPM does – apart from donating to Labour MPs.
The company’s accounts offer very few clues as to what the company does, although they note that for the year ending December 2021, “the number of employees during the year was NIL”. Its head office is a semi-detached house in Broxbourne in Hertfordshire.
There is nothing wrong with this. But the shift from named individual to company puts a barrier between the public and the source of funds. Read more.
IX Wireless. Yesterday, residents of Blackburn went on a protest against IX Wireless, which they say has been putting up 15-metre 5G phone masts without permission. One resident we spoke to claims he has been “bullied” and “intimidated” over the positioning of a mast. The residents have repeatedly asked their MP, Chris Green, to step in. But they’ve heard nothing back.
Neither have we. We don’t know what Green thinks about IX Wireless, but we do know he received £5,000 from the company last year. He’s one of several Conservative MPs and members of the Northern Research Group on its donations list. IX Wireless has given nearly £150,000 in all, making it a top-15 donor even though not all of the recipients knew at first where the money had come from.
Christian Wakeford, who defected early last year to Labour, had received £3,500 from IX Wireless when a Tory. He told Tortoise: “The first I ever heard of IX Wireless is when I was told ‘this is something you need to put on the register of interests for compliance purposes’ – that was all I ever heard of them.”
In hindsight, he says, he should have asked more questions. But when we asked those questions no one from the company replied. When we visited the offices, they were padlocked and appeared virtually derelict. Read more.
