REFORM UK have been urged to reveal who funds them and to rule out donors with links to Russia – after the party bragged it was targeting wealthy backers in Monaco.
In a letter to Nigel Farage, LibDem deputy leader Daisy Cooper asked the Reform leader to reveal its sources of funding after calculating the party had spent more than £2 million on personalised letters to postal votes ahead of the English local elections, The Guardian reports.
She pointed out that Reform had reported donations of only £281,000 in the last quarter of 2024.
The party has said its annual income is £5.6m.
Noting that Reform treasurer Nick Candy told the Financial Times last week that the party was targeting wealthy expatriates in places like Monaco, Switzerland and the Crown Dependencies, Cooper demanded Farage “publicly rule out accepting any donations from wealthy donors linked to Russia or the Trump administration”.
The LibDems calculated that Reform have sent two personalised letters to each of the 1.9 million people registered as postal voters for the English local elections next month, which they estimated would cost around £2.1m.
Farage’s party has been increasingly flush with cash, launching their local election campaigns at an arena in Birmingham which was fitted out with probs including a closed-down pub and pot-holed roads to convey the party’s message about Britain being “broken”.
Cooper (below), in her letter to Farage, said she was writing “to request clarity over the sources of funding for Reform UK’s local election campaign”, noting the likely cost of the direct mail campaign, and Reform’s reported donations.
She wrote: “The Electoral Commission will not publish information on donations for the first quarter of 2025 until after polling day on 1 May. That means that voters will not know the potential sources of funding for your party’s local election campaign before they cast their votes.
“So will you publicly rule out accepting any donations from wealthy donors linked to Russia or the Trump administration? And will you do that before this week’s local elections?”
Parties must declare donations of £500 or more to the Electoral Commission. Only people on the UK electoral register can donate to parties, but the Tories changed the law to allow people to donate if they had lived outside the UK for more than 15 years.
A Reform UK spokesperson said: “The figures published by the Electoral Commission are large donations only. Our outstanding election campaign has been funded by Reform members, and grassroots small donors.
“Reform has two-and-a-half times as many members as the Liberal Democrats, so we understand how this would be an alien concept to them – 225,000 members x £25 per year is £5.6m.”
