According to a 2025 YouGov poll, trust in UK democracy remains worryingly low, with only 14 per cent of respondents saying that they trust elected representatives and just 18 per cent agreeing that funding of, and spending by, parties is open and transparent. The rising size of donations and the vulnerability of the democratic system to foreign influence has challenged the integrity of UK elections. In August, Reform received a £9m donation from Christopher Harborne, a Thailand-based cryptocurrency investor, the biggest donation ever made by a living donor.

In 2020, the Intelligence and Security Committee warned about Russian influence on UK democracy, including through funding and disinformation. Two years later, MI5, the UK’s domestic counterintelligence and security agency, issued an ‘interference alert’ that an alleged Chinese agent had sought to influence parliamentarians by donating over £420,000 to an MP over a five-year period. The conduct of Peter Mandelson, the former UK Ambassador to the US, has also brought a renewed focus on the influence of wealthy foreign interests.

Sam Power, lecturer in Sociology, Politics and International Studies at Bristol University, says multi-million donations increase the risk of the donor having an outsized influence on decision making, particularly if they are largely responsible for funding that party. ‘They are either ideologically aligned, or they are pragmatically donating because they want something in return and quite often these things aren’t mutually exclusive,’ he says.

The People and Representation Bill, currently before Parliament, is a chance to overhaul the rules to prevent foreign influence and introduce caps on donations, which are adopted by many other major democracies, including France and Australia. So far, the government has not committed to the latter and anti-corruption experts, while welcoming stronger know-your-donor checks on donations and strengthened enforcement, have criticised its proposals as failing to address major loopholes for undue influence.

The Electoral Commission says that the People and Representation Bill does not go far enough to address risks associated with corporate donations. The government has suggested placing a limit on company donations, based on how much revenue they make in the UK, and allowing only businesses owned and controlled by people eligible to vote to donate. The Commission says that a donation limit based on profit companies have made and paid tax on in the UK ‘would provide much stronger protection against foreign interference and greater assurance for voters’.

Steve Holt, a partner at Grant Thornton and an officer of the IBA’s Anti-Corruption Committee, says that the UK’s political financing system is vulnerable to money laundering risks, particularly in the current fractured political climate where many inexperienced politicians may not know the appropriate rules. ‘In an election cycle you will see substantial donations from offshore entities that may appear on members’ registers, but it’s those that aren’t reported that present the biggest risk,’ he says. Currently and under the latest proposals, UK political parties are only required to report single donations over £11,180.

But tightening the rules on donations can only go so far in dealing with the problem of undue influence in UK democracy. In November, a judge sentenced Nathan Gill, a former Member of the European Parliament and leader of Reform UK in Wales, to 10 years in prison for accepting approximately £40,000 in bribes between 2018 and 2019 to make pro-Russia statements in the European Parliament. In February, UK authorities arrested Peter Mandelson, the former UK Ambassador to the US, on suspicion of misconduct in public office following documents released by the US Justice Department that appeared to show he passed on market-sensitive information to the late convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein while serving as Business Secretary. The documents also appear to show Mandelson advising Epstein to tell the then-CEO of US bank JP Morgan to ‘mildly threaten’ the Treasury over a planned tax on bankers’ bonuses following the 2008 financial crisis. Global Insight approached Mandelson's legal team to comment, but they declined to do so. Mandelson himself denies wrongdoing.

Power says the Mandelson scandal demonstrates the historic ‘uneasy alliance between wealth and power’ in most liberal democracies. But, he says, it also speaks to the laxness of the UK’s lobbying laws, which at the time were non-existent. Despite the Lobbying Act being introduced in 2014, which introduced an open register of lobbyists, experts heavily criticise the legislation as containing major loopholes, which keep most lobbying activity off the register. According to Transparency International, only four per cent of lobbyists are covered by the register, with 80 per cent of the most frequent lobbyists from FTSE 100 companies. Following the conviction of Gill, the government has opened an inquiry into foreign financial interference in UK democracy and, following the arrest of Mandelson, asked the Ethics and Integrity Commission to conduct a review of the UK’s lobbying rules. ‘The story of British politics is politicians making the mistake of thinking that standards and ethics in public life don’t matter because they never appear on the list of voter priorities,’ Power says. ‘The test now is whether they have learned their lesson’.

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