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In the past couple of years, Reform UK has had a meteoric rise, rising from 14.3% of total votes in the 2024 election to leading the polls, consistently hovering between 27 and 23%, and becoming a party that is widely slated to become the next party of Government. At every Reform rally, the message is the same. Farage promises to give power back to the people, stoking class and ethnic divisions within Britain, telling voters there is a “uniparty” and that the old parties have failed them. The Conservatives sold them out. Labour abandoned and betrayed them. This is a convincing pitch and supports voters own reality, under both parties their living standards have stagnated and elite interests have become stronger. He insists that only Reform can fix the underlying problems within Britain and deliver. This is, however, a deception.
Beneath the populist performance lies a political project whose funding base, internal staffing and ideological architecture are shaped not by the struggling voters that Reform courts, but rather by a network of wealthy donors, fossil fuel investors, libertarian think tanks, and elite figures that are drawn from the same City of London class that has influenced policy for decades in a direction that has consistently hurt these very same voters. To understand what Reform actually stands for, the starting point is not its manifesto, but rather the Electoral Commission donation records, Companies House filings and staffing choices that are made behind closed doors, all of which tell a story that Farage’s rallies don’t.
The scale of the funding problem is stark. According to journalism by DeSmog, Reform received more than £2.3 million from oil and gas interests, highly polluting industries, and climate science deniers between the 2019 general election and the start of the 2024 campaign, amounting to 92% of its donations during that period. The New York Times subsequently found 38 financial backers who stand to profit directly from Reform’s anti-climate policies if the party enters government. Chief among these are Chris Harborne, a crypto trader and aviation fuel supplier who has donated over £9 million to the party and has structured his affairs to minimise exposure to the very HMRC that Reform’s working-class voters cannot escape. Harborne’s business interests, in aviation fuel distribution and fossil-fuel adjacent infrastructure, align precisely with Reform’s pledges to scrap net zero, energy investment and restore North Sea extraction. Alongside this, the party has received £125,000 from Jeremy Hosking, whose investment firm held over £263 million in fossil fuel assets, and more than £1.1 million from former party leader Richard Tice, who has dismissed net zero and called climate science “garbage”. In 2024, over half of Reform’s total donations came from individuals in low-tax jurisdictions including Monaco, Switzerland and the UAE.
This stands in direct contradiction with what Reform voters actually support. Polling shows 61% of Reform voters support a one-off tax on UK households with a net worth above £10 million. In addition to this, 59% of Reform voters believe that energy companies have a negative effect on the UK, and 77% of them support regulating water companies to clean up rivers, lakes and seas in the UK. Yougov has also found that 73% of Reform voters support a windfall tax on high bank profits. These are not the voters funding Reform. They are the voters being asked to endorse a programme designed by and for those who fund it.
This picture of disconnect is reinforced by the party’s internal structure. Reform operates as a private company, with Farage and Zia Yusuf as its directors. As a result, members cannot vote on new policies, which are determined by its leadership and ratified solely by them. This system stands in stark contradiction to other parties, whose membership-run parties require policies to be subject to internal democratic challenge and conference debate. The platform its voters are being asked to endorse was written by figures whose professional backgrounds are drawn almost entirely from the financial and media establishment.
The single most important figure after Farage in the party’s rise was the intellectual mastermind behind the party’s success, its former chairman Zia Yusuf, a former Goldman Sachs executive director who sold his company Velocity Black for £233 million, netting himself an estimated £31 million. He was the architect of the party’s professionalisation, expanding its membership, overhauling its vetting processes and establishing its internal Department of Government Efficiency, explicitly modelled on Elon Musk’s DOGE operation in the United States. In his own words, a Reform Cabinet would look beyond its own staff to “entrepreneurs, financiers and business owners” to become ministers being appointed from those selected without needing to be MPs. This amounts, in effect, to a corporate restructuring of the state, without democratic accountability to Parliament or the people.
The intellectual scaffolding for the movement is provided by the Tufton Street network, a network of opaque, undisclosed-donor think tanks including the IEA, Taxpayers’ Alliance and the Adam Smith Institute, the same organisations which wrote the economic logic behind the Truss mini-budget and which have received millions from American fossil fuel interests. The IEA has explicitly acknowledged that its “principles coincide with the interests of our donors”. This is the apparatus shaping Reform’s programme: the same institutional establishment, that, in the eyes of Reform voters, has caused Britain’s decline.
The voters who would bear the cost of all this are precisely the people turning to Reform. Reform voters are disproportionately older, working-class and concentrated in areas devastated by deindustrialisation, declining public services and decades of wage stagnation, with the impetus for the policies that have caused these conditions engineered by the very same Tufton Street think-tanks that have provided the intellectual backbone for the Reform movement. The IEA is the very same think tank which supported the Truss mini-budget which led to mortgage prices rising, disproportionately affecting Reform voters. Similarly, the Taxpayers’ Alliance pressed for austerity, which stripped public services of key resources, another aspect of British life which Reform voters disproportionately rely on. Independent fiscal analysis for Reform’s tax and spending commitments implies deep cuts to public services that the party has refused to quantify openly. The NHS that its voters depend upon cannot survive what Reform’s budget demands of it. The green energy jobs which anchor post-industrial communities and ensure they don’t fall behind even further are the jobs which Reform’s fossil fuel donors are paying to prevent.
Structural comparisons can be drawn with Trump’s campaign in the United States. Trump ran in 2024 on an explicitly anti-establishment platform, promising to drain the Washington swamp, end foreign adventurism and deliver for the working-class voters who felt left behind by globalisation. Less than a year into his second term, the administration was dominated by billionaires and former financiers, with cabinet appointees whose combined wealth dwarfs any previous American administration. The economic programme which involves mass deregulation, sweeping tax cuts designed to encourage growth amongst the wealthy and the gutting of federal agencies enforcing labour and environmental protections, is the programme designed by the very donor class “swamp” that Trump claimed to be fighting. Elon Musk’s DOGE, framed as a war on government waste, has functioned in practice as a demolition of the regulatory infrastructure that protects workers and consumers. The mechanism is consistent: populist rhetoric, which deceives voters, creates a mandate and the donor-class infrastructure, which fills the policy vacuum that the mandate creates. The voters who believed that they were getting economic nationalism received deregulation. Those who believed that they would see a crackdown on corporate power received corporate tax cuts. A similar template appears to be operating in Britain, with a comparable range of ultra-wealthy individuals who wish to restructure the state in their favour using this populist mandate. Farage’s relationship with Trump is not merely personal affection, but also ideological alignment and an ambition to replicate his populist template in Britain.
Reform’s domestic media infrastructure is also necessary to examine. GB News, the broadcaster that provides Farage, Tice and numerous Reform figures with their most prominent platforms, is itself funded by figures with ideological sympathies to the Reform project. The Daily Mail, The Telegraph, and The Sun, which have between them amplified Reform’s immigration messaging while largely burying the fossil fuel funding story, are all controlled by billionaires resident in low-tax jurisdictions. News Corp, the parent company of The Sun is incorporated in Delaware, known for its tax-efficient corporate structuring laws.
Reform voters have been sold a revolt. What they are actually buying, without their knowledge, is a further transfer of power to precisely the class of people who have spent decades extracting value: repackaged in the language of their own popular grievance and delivered with the backing of the media.
The deception Reform has sold to the British people is not merely rhetorical. It is structural, and if realised in government, the consequences would be severe. The party that promises to dismantle the establishment has openly stated that it will staff its ministries with ultra-wealthy individuals and those very same financiers whose sector contributed to the 2008 financial crisis. The party that promises to save the NHS will implement the policies of the IEA and Taxpayers’ Alliance the very same organisations which have repeatedly weakened British public institutions. The party that promises to put Britain first is funded overwhelmingly by individuals resident in the UAE, Monaco, Switzerland and Thailand. What Reform will actually deliver in power is not a fix to the failures of the Conservative and Labour years. It is, instead, their logical endpoint, a state further hollowed out, public services further degraded, and working people exposed even further.
The question that now remains is whether any of this will reach Reform’s voters before the next General Election. Research suggests that when voters are informed about who funds the party, support drops significantly. If this information does not reach them in time, Britain may find itself having traded one set of elite interests for another, a more aggressive set of interests, and one less constrained by the conventions that have previously governed it.
Image: New Member group photograph – 2024 Parliament 09/07/2024 // CC BY 3.0
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