30.07.2026
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Sleaze at the seaside
Can Farage get out from under the mounting corruption allegations against him and his party? As bad as it looks, don’t bet against him, warns Paul Demarty. For certain, negative SWP campaign won’t make an iota of difference
It seems that, for now, the shine is very much off Nigel Farage’s privately-owned subsidiary, Reform UK.
While Reform has been leading the polls for over a year, recent surveys tend to find a very close three-horse race, with Labour and the Tories nibbling away just behind in the mid-20-percentage range. On Monday, a poll by More in Common found Labour in the lead, for the first time since 2024.
Some of that is outside Farage’s control, of course. We are now in the Andy Burnham honeymoon period, with the new PM giving out a few freebies and generally looking like a man with the rudiments of a plan. That would be tolerable from the Reform point of view: honeymoon periods do have a tendency to end, and - as Mike Tyson famously said - everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.
Yet most of Reform’s troubles are self-inflicted. A series of damaging revelations about Farage’s financial relations with dubious businessmen have rocked his pseudo-party. There was the case of the £5 million donated by Christopher Harborne, a tax-exiled crypto billionaire, just before Farage announced his return to front-line politics, and undeclared by him to the responsible authorities. (Farage asserts that this was not for political operations, and therefore fell outside the rules.)
Later, it was reported that Farage had received benefits in kind, including security and social media staff, from his chum, ‘Posh’ George Cottrell - a young spiv who was convicted of charges related to money laundering in the US in 2017. Since his release (for time served, the lucky boy), he has served in various roles for Farage’s successive political vehicles, and recently co-wrote a book called How to launder money. (Though there has been much mockery on this point, the book sounds mildly interesting and received an approving review from the LRB’s in-house finance bro, John Lanchester.)
The Guardian then discovered an even more tangled set of donations, with the name ‘Cottrell’ all over it - but this time it was Posh George’s mother, Fiona, apparently at the start of the chain. She had donated £1 million to Britain Means Business - a company controlled by Reform’s deputy leader, Richard Tice. £500,000 of that money was donated shortly afterwards to Reform itself. All this set off alarm bells: the transactions were reported by banks under standard anti-money laundering policies, and George and Fiona were interviewed under caution by the Metropolitan Police. Over the weekend, the BBC was able to confirm that there is still an active police investigation into the Fiona Cottrell donation. Unlike Burnham’s honeymoon period, this one could run and run.
Fighting playbook
The response of Farage and Reform has been to come out fighting. This is typically described as the Trump playbook” in the liberal press and, while this is rather tediously one-eyed framing, there is no doubt that this old tactic of crooked demagogues has enjoyed a distinct revival since its spectacularly successful deployment by the crooked demagogue in chief, again and again, over 10 years in and out of government.
With Farage facing a parliamentary investigation, he resigned his position as an MP, hoping to fight and win a by-election to clear his name in the court of public opinion. But canny heads at the top of the mainstream parties (and of the even more far-right splinter, Restore Britain) conspired not to stand, and so now Farage is left cruising around Clacton campaigning against the prankster, Count Binface, and the swivel-eyed failed actor, Laurence Fox - to say nothing of the 29 other timewaster candidates taking the opportunity for a good laugh by the seaside. Farage will win, of course, but has been denied the opportunity to humiliate his enemies.
The “people vs the establishment” framing was also in evidence over the weekend. Asked about the police investigation into the Fiona Cottrell donation, Tice denied all knowledge and barked: “Why are the Met police briefing the BBC before contacting interested parties? Is the Met leadership now engaged in the widespread, politically motivated smear campaign against Reform and its leaders?”
Dare we take such accusations seriously? We are, of course, no fans of the Met round these parts, but frankly we suspect its leadership could do without being dragged into a very tense political bunfight, especially given that its rank and file is likely chock-full of Faragists, and the general rightwing line of attack on ‘two-tier policing’ (they don’t go after black recipients of huge political donations from the mothers of convicted money-launderers, we suppose). Is the AML department of Fiona Cottrell’s bank also part of this calculated smear campaign? Or the National Crime Agency, which receives those reports? I think we should be told.
In any case, it seems to me that Tice could have avoided such a ‘conspiracy’ quite simply. He is the sole director of Britain Means Business. In that capacity, he could simply have refused or returned the donation from the generous Mrs Cottrell. He could have knocked two brain cells together and seen, immediately, how this would look: both in the public gallery and to the people whose job it is to ask questions about where large sums of money actually come from.
Conspiracy theory
The appearance of such a conspiracy is not wholly unfounded, however, which surely factors into Farage’s and Tice’s guess that they can style this one out. Much political effort in the post-Brexit era has been expended on shoring up the range of ‘acceptable’ politics - both by the Labour right’s immune response against Corbynism and the attempts to keep Brexit sentiment safely in the Tory fold. These efforts have largely received the backing of the press, although frankly that part of the line has begun to collapse, with the Telegraph titles drifting steadily Reformward, among others.
Moreover, it can hardly be seriously argued that those mainstream parties are clean-looking operations. The last Tory government, especially under Boris Johnson, was dogged relentlessly by accusations of cronyism and corruption. No sooner had brave Sir Keir Starmer got his feet under the table in 2024, on the other hand, his whole front bench - including himself - suffered a wave of unflattering stories about freebies. Starmer’s receipt of expensive designer clothes from donor Waheed Alli became emblematic of the whole affair.
Starmer huffed that he had reported everything properly; and so, today, Farage insists that no rules were broken in his case. Yet a simple fact is embarrassingly obvious to an increasingly cynical and nihilistic electorate - if these things are allowed by the rules, it is because the rules defend corruption, as it is properly (morally and politically) understood. Reform’s vote has stalled because it is starting to look a lot like all the people it is promising to throw out on their ears, both in its curiously cosy relationships with donors and even in its habit of recruiting damaged goods from the Tories.
It is the universal presence of corruption in British politics - the fact that corruption, in properly dignified and legalised forms, is simply how business is taken care of in Westminster - that should warn us against too easily writing off Farage and friends. After all, except in the very worst case, the likely chain of events going forward will be something like the following: Farage will beat Binface; parliament will find the Harborne donation breached rules, and suspend him from the Commons for some token period; he may then face a recall process, and have to fight another by-election, and he could well win that one too.
A true finding of large-scale fraud by the police will lead to charges and a trial, which will last a long time and take place under a media blackout. In the meantime, history will continue, and Labour and the Tories will have ample opportunities for scandal. The reality principle will bite down on Burnham - guns, not butter, truculent obedience to Trump, and so on. The recent pattern of British politics, under such circumstances, could well reassert itself.
Anyone but Nigel
This should call into question the usual routine of ‘anti-racist’ politics on the left, exemplified by the Socialist Workers Party and its Stand Up to Racism front. That is to pick an enemy of the day, and engage in relentless and purely negative campaigning against that person or party. A Socialist Worker report of SUtR’s ground campaign in Clacton is more interesting than such reports usually are, albeit perhaps unintentionally.
For once, the vox pops are not universally sympathetic. One person ‘snaps’ at them: “Stand up to racism? I stand up for racism. And Nigel stands up for us, when no-one else does.” Probably not a winnable vote on the required timetable; and, we are told by reporter Pat Meusel that “some reactions were even more hostile”. However, some do take the leaflets: they wonder what Farage has done for Clacton after all; he seems just to be “lining his pockets”. This goes with a general cynicism about politics in general, however. “So what if he took some money?” another local says. “They all do.” Don’t they just …
The optimistic summary comes down from “Julie Sherry from SUtR” (Socialist Worker readers are, per usual, denied the pertinent detail that comrade Sherry is an SWP lifer): “There are people in this town who are angry, disaffected and frustrated. But, when you have conversations with people, sometimes very difficult conversations, you can start to shift their ideas to win them to our side.”1
This would be a perfectly defensible - if slightly banal - statement if it was being made in the name of the SWP. Then there would be some meaningful content to “our side”: socialism from below, workers’ power - however they want to put it. Winning people over to “our side” by talking to them and trying to convince them, moreover, would be a more honest way of proceeding that the usual SWP method of trying to engineer ever bigger protests and expecting socialism to spontaneously grow in the hearts of the participants like wildflowers.
As a policy for SUtR, however, it is utterly comical. SUtR does not have an “our side”. Who should people in Clacton vote for? Probably not Laurence Fox. Maybe that other guy who dresses up as a fox? Count Binface himself? (Beneath the silly costume, of course, he is simply a basic-liberal comedy writer.) There is no answer. In more usual contexts, with meaningful rival candidates, one answer at least springs immediately to the mind of the leaflet recipient: vote whoever is most likely to beat the racist of the day. That could be Labour, Green, Lib Dem or even Tory. The pattern of recent by-elections suggests, at least, widespread and canny use of tactical voting on the part of anti-Reform voters.
In failing to pose a positive substantive alternative, SUtR inescapably aligns itself with the mainstream immune response. In doing so, it cannot fight the nihilism embodied in the statement, “So what if he took some money? They all do.” Corruption is built into bourgeois politics: it is a matter not of failing civic virtue, though civic virtue certainly is degraded, but of political economy.
A positive socialist programme represents a real alternative, because it presents an alternative political economy, and an alternative set of political institutions to go with it. The value of single-issue anti-racism, on the other hand, may be judged by its recent results.