We awoke yesterday morning to the news that the Reform party has received a massive donation from an overseas source. Reform UK has received a £36m donation from British cryptocurrency billionaire Ben Delo – making it the largest single donation to a UK political party on record. Mr Delo said he was making the donation to create ‘a level playing field’ with other parties and ensure that Reform is given a ‘fair fight at the polls in the next general election’. The donation makes him Reform’s largest donor ahead of fellow crypto entrepreneur Christopher Harborne, who donated £9m to the party in August. Writing in the Daily Telegraph, Mr Delo said: ‘Unlike the people who express mock concern for the health of our democracy while doing everything they can to keep it as a cartel, I want a fair fight and a level playing field. My conclusion from Reform’s recent troubles is that they should spend less time trying to raise funds to compete on equal terms and more time preparing for government’. Now whether this counts as a legal donation or not depends upon the credentials of the donor. There are currently no restrictions on the amount of money UK-based donors can give to political parties. But Labour previously introduced a £100,000 cap on donations from British citizens who are living overseas or have recently returned to the UK. Sheffield-born Delo, who has already donated £4m to Reform, has previously said he will move back to the UK from Hong Kong to continue his backing for the party. Last year, Delo was given an unconditional pardon by US President Donald Trump over a breach of anti-money laundering laws at his crypto trading platform, BitMEX, to which he had pleaded guilty in 2022. Sums of this magnitude must surely break the spirit of the legislation designed to ensure that ‘foreign’ money does not influence British elections but probably it is too late to shut the stable door after the horse has bolted. Later on in the morning, I will attend the latest ‘free’ orchestral concert to be given in our large Anglican church, St. John’s, which overlooks the town. This church acts as a source of unofficial municipal concert venue for the town and the arrangement is that the concert is provided ‘free’ in exchange for coffee and cakes afterwards and a donation to the church funds. I always enjoy these concerts and ensure that I take a cushion with me as the church benches can prove to be a little too hard if the concert is of any length. I will probably go down and park in the nearby Sanders car park and as I have attended such events before, I sometimes bump into people that I know by sight, probably from the U3A fraternity. During the past week, we have witnessed a strange incident where most of the plane flights across the country were grounded for the best of a day whilst there had been a serious breakdown in the national air traffic control system. It has now emerged in the weekend edition of the Financial Times that a military aircraft entering ‘spurious’ flight data into air traffic control led to a system outage that grounded thousands of planes this week. Four sources have told the paper that a flight plan submitted by a military aircraft led to a shutdown of British skies for several hours, causing a ‘meltdown’ within the wider air traffic control system. The incident has led to ‘strained relations’ between carriers and National Air Traffic Services, the paper writes. I wonder if the Ministry of Defence could be sued for the millions of pounds for the disruption caused but I suspect that I know the answer to this question.
My son called around to see me after his little sojourn with his wife and mother-in-law in Swanage and we had a pleasant chat over matters domestic and political. I left for town shortly before 10.00am to pick up my newspaper and some last minute supplies and then headed towards the church where the concert is to be held. There is a flight of fifty stone steps which gives access to the church from the town and in my younger days, I used to see f I could get up them, two steps at a time under about 50 seconds. But those days are now long gone but I settled into my pew, together with a cushion, some 20 minutes before the start. I was acquainted with some of the U3A membership were at the concert which was about an hour long. The concert comprised of two pieces, one by Mozart and one by Haydn and were musical jokes. Some of the jokes would only be properly understood by musicologists but some were self-evident such as the brass section (horns) going and off doing entirely their own thing instead of supporting the main melody played by the strings. The Mozart piece, for example concludes with a resounding discord where every section of the orchestra is playing in a different key. After the concert was over, I acknowledged several of my U3A friends and acquaintances and then had a coffee and cake with a fellow Classical Music member, and we chatting about her career as it progressed through nursing and what we felt about the fate of the Assisted Dying Bill which failed to pass through Parliament yesterday. Then I popped into the Asda supermarket for one forgotten item that I may need for the lunch time meal tomorrow. This evening is going to be taken up with the Last Night of the Proms and I never fail to be surprised by how quickly this comes around each year. I always feel that this musical offering signals the very end of summer for us, even though we may have more sunny weather in prospect. I started to watch the epic film of Lawrence of Arabia which has some superb cinematography but after watching about an hour of it I stopped as other cooking duties are calling for my attention. In the political sphere, the £36 million given to Reform has just been matched by another crypto billionaire so this means that £72 million has been pledged to Reform in the last day or so, I cannot help but feel that these vast amounts of money will only act to the detriment of our political system. After all, what do these large donors expect to see for their money if it is economic and social policies that support their business interests? Some countries ban large donations and fund the political parties in their societies directly from their taxpayers but there are so many vested interests to suggest that would never even be on the political agenda in the UK.