Britain's Once-in-a-Generation Chance to Cap Donations

Last year, UK politics faced a game-changing scenario: the world's richest man, Elon Musk, floated giving £100million to Reform UK. The donation didn't go ahead, after Musk apparently fell out with Farage.

But there were rumours that he was planning to donate to Tommy Robinson's Advance UK party instead and he is now showing support for Rupert Lowe's Restore Britain party.

Many people were rightly horrified that a foreign billionaire could so easily make a donation that would completely distort the next UK general election - not to mention public political debate for the years running up to it.

The government is now introducing all sorts of measures to stop a Musk-type donation. And its Representation of the People Bill going through Parliament has a lot of decent measures, with the government promising to ban crypto donations (at least for now), and limit donations from overseas voters to £100,000.

But there is a central gap at the heart of the government's strategy. It's not just foreign billionaires' money we should be worried about. We live in a globalised economy.

Trying to close loopholes for foreign money is like playing whack-a-mole. Meanwhile there are plenty of billionaires here in the UK – over 150 of them at the last count – who could take Musk's place.

And right now with absolutely no upper limit on how much someone can donate, there is nothing in place to stop an individual in the UK with cavernous pockets essentially buying up a political party and its policies. This is how oligarchs do it in less democratic countries and we should be under no illusions that it can't happen here.

That should worry anyone who cares about how our democracy works. And poll after poll is finding that it does worry a lot of people. Just 13% of people polled last December thought that people should be able to give as much as they like to parties, while 63% of those polled last January thought the very rich have too much say in UK politics. The public are fed up with the voices of the wealthiest in society counting for more than those of ordinary people.

Attempts to get a cap a decade ago hit the buffers with party politics but with the government's new bill there is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to stop money dictating our politics rather than the public interest. One way to do this is to ensure the government's new bill contains clear language that there will be a donation cap in principle, and an agreed process to work out what the cap should be.

The public should have a big say in an independent review, and all options should be on the table, including introducing a state-funded system as many of our European counterparts and countries such as Canada already have.

This is a historic moment – and British democracy is at a crossroads. The question is whether the government is willing to seize it.