March 25 was a bad day for the UK’s right-wing populists and their overseas bankrollers.
The Rycroft Review into foreign financial influence and interference in UK politics was published. So was a well-researched book* by Labour MP Liam Byrne exposing the supply side of right-wing populism, most notably the sources of its vast inflows of cash. Finally, in what must have been a co-ordinated move, the government announced a cap on donations from overseas electors and a ban on crypto donations, with immediate effect.
For Nigel Farage, it must have taken a bit of the shine off his launch of Reform UK’s local elections campaign in Sunderland the following evening. Not that you’d have known it from watching his strutting performance.
The Rycroft Review
The government commissioned Sir Philip Rycroft, a senior civil servant, in December to carry out his review. It opens bluntly: “This country faces a persistent problem of foreign interests seeking to exert influence on, and to interfere in, our politics. Too much of this is malign and seeks to sow distrust and exacerbate divisions in UK society, with the ultimate aim of undermining confidence in our democracy.”
Money donated to political parties is currently both unlimited and difficult to trace:”[W]ealthy individuals who have chosen to live abroad in order to have their wealth taxed abroad are nevertheless currently entitled to make unlimited donations to UK political parties,” says Rycroft. “Despite choosing to minimise their contribution to the UK Exchequer, these individuals have the opportunity to make potentially game-changing donations into British politics.
Cryptocurrencies are also a potential problem, says Rycroft: “[T]here is a risk that cryptoassets are used as the vehicle to channel foreign money into the political system in the UK. The government needs a strategy for dealing with that risk.”
Rycroft makes 17 recommendations, including an annual cap on political donations from British voters living abroad and a moratorium on political donations made in cryptoassets until Parliament and the Electoral Commission are assured that relevant regulation is effective.
Why Populists are Winning and How to Beat Them: book review
Author Liam Byrne and his team analysed 484 transactions drawn from the Electoral Commission, the register of MPs financial interests, Companies House, U.S. tax returns and elsewhere and found that between 2020 and 2026 over £170mn flowed in to MPs, parties, media organisations and think tanks aligned with the UK’s populist right.
Much of the money comes from four very wealthy individual British citizens, all of whom made their fortunes in hedge funds or high finance and two of whom are based overseas.
Byrne and his team discovered £153mn “sloshing through what has emerged as a populist media-political complex” between 2020 and 2025, with nine-tenths of it coming from three of these men or companies connected with them.
Other sources of cash for right-wing parties in the UK and Europe are Russia, as is widely understood, and the American Christian right. One authoritative study, says Byrne, found that between 2019 and 2023 faith networks funnelled more than $20mn a year into Europe, sustaining a vast network of litigation shops, think tanks, broadcasters and campaigns worth well over a billion dollars.
Byrne is a Birmingham Labour MP, was a minister in the Blair governments and currently chairs the House of Commons Business and Trade Committee. His thoroughly researched book contains much else of interest apart from the finances of the populist right.
The five tribes of Reform
It would be wrong, he believes, to see Reform voters or potential voters as a homogenous group. He sees them as divided into five tribes, to which he gives mostly ungainly names.
- Disgusted disruptors display the fury of the forgotten; typically men in their late 50s living on grim estates.
- Left-behind collectivists, believing in the social contract but seeing it as now broken; typically women in their mid-50s who have spent their lives doing the right thing: working hard, raising a family and keeping faith with a country they believed would keep faith with them.
- Traditional Conservatives, believers in thrift, duty, order and the quiet pride of self-reliance. They are the oldest of the tribes and about 60% are men; they are not bitter, just exasperated.
- The melancholy middle, still coping but no longer confident; getting on in age, often educated and comfortably off, the “soft-spoken souls of England’s market towns”, not so much angry as heart-broken for their country.
- Civic pragmatists, not rebels but reformers, they are the youngest of the tribes, generally financially comfortable, believing in decency, fairness and hard work, not cynical but impatient and frustrated with politics as usual.
The first two groups are a write-off as far as Byrne is concerned; there is no point in trying to wean them away from Reform, but with the others there is hope. The top issue facing the country for all tribes is immigration, while the living standards crisis is the root of disillusion for all five.
If there is one criticism of the book it relates to the final chapter in which Byrne sets out a ten-point plan for beating the populists. Ten points! Including “a new civic gospel.” What’s that when it’s at home?
Byrne does not seem to have taken one of his own lessons to heart, which is that populists are winning because they are better communicators. He has written a serious book for apprehensive, politicaly aware readers. But by the time he gets to his ten-point plan he seems to have forgotten what he wrote, perceptively, much earlier: “Today’s populists are among the best communicators in the world; better than mainstream politicians and better masters of new digital channels.
“Why? Because good communication requires one thing above all: clarity about what we are trying to say. For too long politics has offered word salads while populists holler a cri de coeur. They offer simple stories for complex times.” Byrne’s ten-point plan is far from simple.
So his book may, as he says, have provoked lively debate in The Guardian and packed out the Oxford Literary Festival, but how is it going down with drinkers on their mobiles in the Queen Vic and the Rovers Return? To which he may give the nuanced reply that it is not aimed at the populists but at those who would hope to win over the populists. For them it is a must-read.
Government restricts party political donations
The government acted with unusual promptness to the Rycroft Review. The day it was published ministers announced action on two of its recommendations.
British citizens living abroad will face an annual cap on their political donations of £100,000 and regulated transactions such as loans of the same value.
And all cryptocurrency donations will be banned, which the government said would prevent bad actors using untraceable means of influencing elections.
Both measures will come into effect immediately. The government will amend the Representation of the People Bill with retrospective effect. Once the legislation comes into force, political parties and regulated entities like candidates and MPs will have 30 days to return any unlawful donations they may have received in the interim, after which enforcement action can be taken.
Steve Reed, Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, said: “This government will do whatever is necessary to protect our democracy. Foreign interference and dirty money are menacing the integrity of our elections.
“A ban on cryptocurrency donations is vital. The UK will now be a world-leader in stamping out this growing threat to freedom, and we will stop hostile foreign states and others who want to weaken and exploit the UK by stoking division and hatred. It is our patriotic duty to safeguard the British people’s right to freely choose their own government.”
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