Nigel Farage has been in the news again this week, denying that he said anything racist when he was schoolkid but somewhat suspiciously not rebutting the specific allegations against him. More seriously, the disappointment and intense criticism of Labour’s budget from both left and right has allowed Farage to join in the attacks, boating that he and reform are ready to takeover when the Starmer government inevitably falls. Open Britain has been warning for years about the dangers of Farage’s outfit. It’s a threat to democracy of the type the architects of the British constitution did not envisage. Reform aren’t a party, but a company, with real power centralised in a few company directors. It also benefits from the soft corruption of secret dark money from donors. Here’s the message I got about their threat a week or so ago from the pro-democracy organiation.
‘David,
Most political parties in Britain are run in broadly similar ways. Labour, the Conservatives, the Liberal Democrats, the Greens, the SNP, Plaid – they are all member-run organisations. Members elect their leaders, help shape policy, oversee the rules, and ultimately hold power.
Reform UK is something very different.
Farage’s latest venture isn’t structured like a political party at all. It’s structured like a private company. And that single decision quietly rewrites how power, money and accountability work inside a political movement.
This isn’t about policy. It’s about the health of British democracy, and the risks created when a party chooses a corporate shell over a democratic structure.
While most parties are unincorporated associations, Reform UK is built on two linked companies. A legacy company once privately owned through shares, and a newer company that now sits above it. On paper, the company lists no people with significant control, a technical classification that makes it harder for the public to see who is actually in charge.
In practice, decisions are concentrated among a small group of directors operating behind closed doors.
Companies operate on a different logic to political parties. Directors hold power, not members. Constitutions can be changed in private. Assets, including cash, belong to the company, not the membership. Transparency requirements are weaker and easier to route around
Nigel Farage has built something Britain has never seen at scale before. A political party run like a private business. And that should concern all of us.
There are three key risks with the corporate, non-democratic approach Reform UK is using.
Risk 1: Money in the Shadows
Yes, Reform UK reports donations to the Electoral Commission. But everything around those rules is harder to see:Money can move between its two companies before reaching regulated accounts. Revenue from merchandise, events or media can sit outside political rules.
Company donations can hide beneficial ownership.
Loans and services-in-kind face far less scrutiny.
The law was written for political parties, not corporate groups acting like political parties. Even the Electoral Commission admits the rules haven’t kept pace.
This structure doesn’t break the law. It exposes where the law is weakest.
Risk 2: Power Without Accountability
Inside Reform UK, members cannot meaningfully challenge or remove the leader. Constitutional changes do not require grassroots approval. A handful of directors can shape policy, select candidates, and control governance. Internal checks simply don’t need to exist.
The way the party is structured gives us a warning about how it would operate from Downing Street. Concentrated power, no guardrails, and a deeply worrying authoritarian drift.
Risk 3: Who Owns a Political Party?
In a normal party, members collectively own the institution. Data, branding, assets and funds belong to the movement.
In a company-based party, they belong to the company. And therefore to its directors.
If Reform UK were wound up, rebranded or merged, supporters would have no rights to the data, the campaign infrastructure, the brand, the merchandise income, the assets, or even the cash in the bank account.
Everyday donors are told they’re funding a grassroots rebellion. In reality, they’re sending their hard-earned cash to a private corporate structure controlled by a small, wealthy inner circle.
The truth is, this isn’t just a personality cult built around one figure, it’s a corporate venture that puts the control and money squarely in the hands of Nigel Farage and his business partners.
Electoral law wasn’t designed for companies posing as political parties, with opaque ownership and corporate revenue streams.
The Electoral Commission can barely regulate political parties, but corporate entities like Reform UK Party Ltd tests its ability to breaking point.
Reform UK isn’t breaking the rules. It’s ruthlessly exploiting the flaws in our democracy.
This is not a left-right issue, and the other parties aren’t without their faults. But the strength of British democracy depends on political parties that are accountable, transparent, supporter driven, and democratic from the inside out.
Reform UK’s model is an experiment in removing those safeguards. If we do nothing, the precedent will spread.
If Britain wants to stop this model spreading, we need urgent action. Close dark-money loopholes with real “Know Your Donor” checks. Full transparency on who funds our politics.
Shine a light on party-linked companies. If it’s part of a political operation, it should meet political transparency rules.
Guarantee basic internal democracy in all parties. Clear constitutions, accountable leaders, real member rights.
Use consolidated accounting for whole political groups. One organisation, one transparent set of books.
Strengthen an independent Electoral Commission. A watchdog with the power to follow the money and enforce the rules.
This is about ensuring our democracy cannot be quietly hollowed out.
Reform UK has chosen a structure that is less democratic, less transparent and more vulnerable to outside influence than anything we’ve seen in modern British politics.
If we care about transparency, accountability and the resilience of our political system, this model cannot be ignored.
Once political parties become businesses, democracy becomes a transaction. And none of us have a right to a refund when it goes wrong.
Like the West, India and many other countries outside Europe are struggling and debating the issue of gay relationships and marriage. This video comes from the Indian YouTuber Keerthika Govindhaswamy, responding to the arguments of the conservative Indian right that legalising same sex relationships and marriage will somehow destroy Indian culture. As Indian culture goes back millennia, and the country has more than a billion inhabitants, I think it’ll take more than gay marriage to destroy its culture. Govindhaswamy herself has some extremely provocative views. In one video, for example, she blames the horrendous pollution contaminating the Ganges on Hindus no longer feeling any connection, and therefore any need to care for their immediate natural environment. A change of attitude which she blames on British colonialism. Another video talks about how Gandhi slept with two of his nieces as part of a supposed experiment to test his celibacy, while another one suggests Nehru may have been a British agent. Obviously highly contentious subjects.
In this video, she goes through the deeds and epics about the Hindu gods to show that several of them had relationships with deities of their own sex. This includes a transgender warrior, who was born a girl but brought up as a boy and had a wife. She notes that the Kama Sutra discusses the existence of of strong, independent women who pursued relationships with others of their sex. She also talks about the possible gay relationship between one of the Muslim rulers of Delhi and one another prince or official.
She ends thee video with a plea for gay marriage and marriage equality, so that gay couples would have the same legal rights and privileges as heterosexual couples.
Clearly, this is an argument for the Indians themselves, but I do find it very interesting that this subject is being tackled and discussed in the world’s largest democracy, and how there are voices in favour of it in what I always thought was an extremely conservative society.
A few days ago Justice Secretary David Lammy took it upon himself to suggest removing trial by jury for most offences on the grounds that this would cut the court backlog that has built up since Covid. It’s been widely criticised as an attack on one of the fundamental principles of British justice and liberty since the Middle Ages: the citizen’s right to a trial by a jury of his or her peers. A number of right-leaning YouTubers have put up videos condemning it, including Jacob Rees-Mogg. This may be one of the few times he’s put up something that actually makes sense and is for the good of the British people, rather than just his own corrupt class. I’ve seen one argument that removing juries won’t make any difference to the backlog, as the trial would still take time even if they weren’t involved.
But perhaps even more ominous is the fact that this comes at the same time secret courts may be used to try members of Palestine Action. These are courts set up by Blair and David Cameron, in which, in the interests of national security, the trials are held in secret and in which evidence may be withheld from the defendant. It’s the perverted system of the Nazis and Stalinist Soviet Union, predicted in the novels of Franz Kafka, The Trial and The Castle.
The pro-democracy group Open Britain sent me this message about the threat the removal of trial by jury poses to democracy. My only quibble is that their writer seems to believe that we don’t yet have an authoritarian government, but that this would aid one in the future. The attacks on free speech show, by contrast, that we do already have a very authoritarian mindset among our politicians and that these attacks on democracy are part of a programme of gradual authoritarianism that nevertheless threatens British liberties today.
‘Dear David,
Justice Secretary David Lammy has put forward a proposal that would remove the right to a jury trial for most offences in England and Wales, keeping juries for only a few of the most serious crimes.
They’ve framed it as a common sense cost-cutting reform, a way to speed up the courts or clear backlogs, but changes like this are exactly the kind we need to pay close attention to.
They may not look dramatic today, but they create the infrastructure future governments can abuse tomorrow.
I grew up in Northern Ireland during the troubles. When I heard of these proposals my mind went straight to the Diplock courts: judge-only trials created to handle a backlog and deliver faster outcomes, but which became a symbol of state overreach that only fuelled greater division in communities.
And around the world we see how leaders push the boundaries of legal power once those boundaries have been quietly shifted.
In the US, we watched Trump try to install loyalists in the Department of Justice and use legal threats to intimidate political opponents. In Russia, the courts routinely remove anyone seen as a threat to authority with spurious allegations.
We’re not there. Not right now, at least. But the line between a healthy democracy and authoritarianism is crossed long before anyone even realises.
The danger isn’t necessarily what this government might do with judge-only trials, it’s what an authoritarian government could do. And with the far-right rising in strength, we have to be honest, powers created today are more and more likely to be exploited tomorrow.
Many still cling to the idea that “it couldn’t possibly happen here,” but political reality is rapidly unravelling that line of thinking. We should be putting more checks and balances in place, not fewer.
Your support helps us expose threats to democratic safeguards, push MPs to oppose dangerous changes, and make sure the public sees these proposals for what they are. So, THANK YOU.
More in the corporate destruction of British democracy. As Open Britain and other pro-democracy groups have made it abundantly clear, British democracy is under severe attack from dark money and the parties taking their cues and orders from the mega-rich corporate donors, rather than Mr and Mrs severely normal British public. They’re following Reagan’s America in this. Sometime in the 1980s the American Supreme Court or some other judicial body ruled that corporate donations constitute free speeches. Thereafter, the parties have eagerly gone after the rich donors giving to their parties and sponsoring individual politicians.
It’s undermined American politics to the point that a Harvard report declared that the Land of the Free was no longer a proper democracy. It was a quasi-oligarchy, because of the way the wishes and needs of ordinary American voters were ignored by the parties in favour of the big donors. And the voting American public know it. They found that while Americans overwhelmingly vote at elections, they very much are aware that it’s all ‘election promises’ as Mike Yarwood called political lies, and that the moment their man or woman gets in, they’d all be dumped in favour of what the money men and women want.
And even Republicans are disgusted with it. Over a decade ago a Republican businessman in California campaigned for politicians to be forced to wear sponsorship badges on their clothing like sportsmen and women.
Well good. Then we’d know who owned them. Perhaps it should be like the rings Roman slaves have to wear around their necks, giving the slave’s owner and directions for returning them. Among the slaves that worked in the fields and waited on their masters and mistresses, there were also public slaves serving as navvies, but also performing clerical work on cities’ public finances. Our politicos were fit in with the latter. Wouldn’t that be great! Starmer and Badenoch standing there at question times, thrall rings for the energy, water companies, private healthcare companies and big oil glinting in the lights.
Of course, where America leads, Britain has to follow. Tony Blair took it up with a vengeance, and the results were that British taxpayers were paying over the odds for much needed public works, as well as the construction of supermarkets that communities up and down the country didn’t need, and which would ruin the small business people at the heart of them.
Now Kemical, sorry, Kemi Badenoch has gone further and set up a ‘top table’ giving the biggest Tory donors increased access and influence with the party.
Tory Party PLC meeting its shareholders, perhaps.
Ordinary Tories don’t want it. From the ’90s onwards the Tory party, once easily the largest British party with something like a quarter of a million members, was shedding their grassroots membership. They resented the way they were being ignored in favour of the corporate donors.
Tump and Farage owe some of their success in having persuaded the American and British electorates that they stand outside this network of soft corruption. In fact, they epitomise it. Trump is corrupt, corporate America personified. One American official tasked with creating democracy in Afghanistan has written a book describing how she came back from that thankless, impossible task to find all the monumental corruption she’d had to fight there back in America in Trump’s White House.
Farage is Trump’s lickspittle and British counterpart. Whatever he says, Reform isn’t a political party. It’s a private company, though he’s no longer majority shareholder. As a plethora of internet commenters, including our own Mike at Vox Political, his bold plans for the economy actually won’t benefit it and the British public in the slightest. But it will benefit his corporate paymasters. So he’s another candidate for wearing sponsorship logos and a thrall ring.
More power to cross party groups like the All-Party Groups campaigning for PR and electoral reform, and down with the corrupt servants of corporate power.
This to express my deep appreciation of the great gesture towards peace and a genuinely united Ireland made by Ulster First Minister Michelle O’Neill today by her laying a wreath in commemoration of the brave men and women who made the ultimate sacrifice for British and European freedom. This is the second time in as many years that she’s done it.
It’s a gesture I could not imagine anyone from her party making when I was growing up in the ’80s and in the 90s before the Good Friday Agreement. Nationalists hated Britain to such an extent that they very definitely did not celebrate Remembrance Day and you could be treated as persona non grata or worse if you wore a poppy. One British comedian on one of the chat shows recalled the difficulty he had getting a taxi after he’d finished a gig in Belfast. There’s a memorial cemetery to the Irish soldiers who fell in the First World War in Dublin, and I’ve been told that it’s got the unofficial name of Traitors’ Gate or something like it.
But Britain benefited immensely from the covert aid given to us by Eire. Premier de Valera secretly supplied us with information on Nazi plans and movement, even though his country was officially neutral. The BBC a few years ago also did a programme on Radio 4 on the many Irishmen who secretly joined the British army in order to fight the forces of Nazi brutality. It had to be done secretly, as if there neighbours and fellow countrymen found out they would be traitors. Yet these talked with pride about the comradeship they found among their fellow squaddies in the north. It didn’t matter which part of the Island of Ireland you came from, everyone was ‘Paddy’. And some subversively taught their loyalist friends the old rebel songs.
These immensely courageous men played their part in creating a free Europe, like everyone else in our countries who gave their lives. We need to remember them.
Sections of the Loyalist community are responding and reaching across the barriers of ethnicity and language. A group dedicated to encouraging Protestants and Loyalists to take up Irish Gaelic produced a list of Protestant Gaels who fought in World War I. A Presbyterian group staged an exhibition of Gaelic translations of the Bibles made in the 19th century. Part of MA in History at UWE was on European contact with the wider world from the 16th to the 18th century. It dealt with contact with the Indigenous Americans in the 15th and 16th centuries. One of the remarkable fact was that British ethnologists saw the Scots and Irish Gaels as the equivalents of indigenous Americans because of their very distinctive dress and hairstyles. Gaelic men worse the glib, a forelock dyed orange, which recalls some of the distinctive hairstyle of Amerindian tribes. The early descriptions of these people and their folkways purposefully did not mention their religion, as at that time several of the Gaelic clans in Ireland were Protestant.
First Minister O’Neill tweeted on X this morning that she intends to be the First Minister for everyone in Ulster, while working, of course, for a united Ireland. I believe this may eventually become a reality. The Irish border as it stands makes zero sense. One section of road criss-crosses it four times in very few miles and it cuts through people’s gardens. Obviously, you can’t stick a check point down at the bottom of Mrs. O’Grady’s cabbage patch! Brexit threw a real spanner into the relationship between North and South, so that there was talk of an Irish backstop in the middle of the Irish Sea, for heaven’s sake. This annoyed the Loyalists, despite all the right-wing yak we’ve been subjected to about how wonderful Brexit has been and how it’s worked wonders.
Pull the other one. It’s got bell’s on.
Sinn Fein has already succeeded in passing a motion in the Dail in the south stating that the Irish state should begin preparations for a move to Irish unity within the next ten years. As with their counterparts in Ulster, they are trying to move away from purely sectarian politics. Mary Lou MacDonald, their chief woman, condemned the sectarian abuse meted out at the head of the Alliance Party because she had a Presbyterian husband who had, fifty years ago, been a member of the Orange Order.
There are dissident elements in the nationalist community who resent this. There have been a few posts on the Internet about the emergence of a dissident nationalist group, the New IRA. The gardai are keeping an eye on them and passing information to Ulster’s finest. There was enough hate and bloodshed in Ireland and Britain when I was growing up. There is nothing romantic about the killing of ordinary people because of their religion. All it created was hate and more hate.
So I have the deepest respect for Michelle O’Neill for her efforts to go beyond sectarian and community divisions. If anyone can create a genuinely united Ireland, where Roman Catholic and Protestant, Loyalist and Nationalist, can live together in peace, it will be through the efforts of women and people like Michelle O’Neill and Mary Lou MacDonald.
I therefore salute her for her participation at the Remembrance Day service, and hope she will be able to continue working for all the great people of the Six Counties.
This short video from RoboPhil’s channel on YouTube came up in my YouTube feed today. It’s a brief report about the creation of what Phil describes as the world’s first pedal war robot. It’s about five feet tall, can go at four miles an hour and 44 pounds of payload. It’s been created by the private American company Fountain. At the moment it’s rather like a drone, in that it’s remotely controlled by a human operator through Virtual Reality. RoboPhil is really enthusiastic about this, and says that this technology, although at present confined to the military, will percolate down and be used in other industries and sectors of the economy. He ends by promoting his other site, which gives more information on robots and AI to interested businessmen wishing to use it in their firms.
For many people, the immediate image this brings up is of Arnie as The Terminator. But Marvel Comics got there first. There was a story in one of the British Marvel Comics, I think it was HulkWeekly, appropriately enough, in which Banner stumbles upon a secret military research base. The base has been creating remotely controlled robot warriors, but their human operators are plagued by feelings of dehumanisation. One of these soldiers reveals these feelings to Banner when he enters the psychiatrist’s office and mistakes Banner for him. Banner is absolutely appalled, but the soldier, despite his mental discomfort, doesn’t feel Banner’s dislike of the project. He believes in it. And so the stage is set for a massive fight between the war robot and its human operator and old Green Skin.
It also reminds me of the 2000 AD strip, ABC Warriors. These are a collection of former war robots who roam the galaxy fighting evil and oppression. They were created to fight a future war against the Volgans, when it had become too hot for human soldiers. The strip first appeared in the late ’70s-early 80s, and still continues today. In recent editions of the story, the Volgan War has erupted because the world has reached peak oil and the west is trying to steal the Volgans’ oil fields. There’s always been a powerful element of satire and social comment in 2000 AD, and the strip’s writer and co-creator, Pat Mill, isn’t afraid of making the odd explicit political comment. In one very early ABC Warrior strip, the Warriors are under the command of human officers who have absolutely no regard for their lives. Told to advance, Hammerstein, the leader, and his team are attacked with corrosive gas. This mortally wounds one of the new recruits. Hammerstein states that he can’t cure the stricken machine, but he can stop the pain. The human officers are connected electronically to the robots so they feel some of what the robots experience. However, the system has a ‘pain barrier’ that ensures that they don’t feel the full pain experienced by dead and dying robots. Instead, they just get a tingle when one of them dies. Hammerstein takes out a combat knife to give the dying robot a merciful, swift death. He goes straight through the pain barrier, killing the officer in charge.
It was a powerful story, informed by the common view of the conduct of the First World War in which British squaddies had their lives and limbs squandered by incompetent, upper class officers. This view of the War, shown in plays like Journey’s End, filmed as Oh What A Lovely War, has been challenged in recent years. The ABC Warriors story nevertheless shows how it still has power to inspire powerful anti-war messages, and that Mills’ own sympathies are very much for ordinary people against the uncaring and exploitative upper classes.
We are now fighting a war in eastern Europe, Ukraine, against Russia, using war robots. At the moment they’re drones, though these have been developed into remotely operated tanks and ships as well as aircraft. This bipedal robot really does sound like something the Hulk fought against in that long-ago strip, and the murmurings about the possibility of developing human level AI raises spectre of the emergence of Schwarzenegger’s Terminator or the ABC Warriors.
As for RoboPhil’s enthusiasm for the potential of these robots to revolutionise industry, I really don’t share it. AI is expected to result in the lay off of millions of workers. There was one prediction that a third of low paid jobs could go in the next twenty years thanks to this technology. It might result in increased profits for the companies, especially as Amazon are looking to lay off 6,000 staff in America and replace them with robots, but for the people who’ve lost their jobs to these machines it will bring nothing but hardship.
Here’s a bit of fun news for comics fans. The video below is a report from CBS New York about the move to rename East Street on the Lower East Side after the great comic artist and creator ‘Jolly’ Jack Kirby.. Jolly Jack was born in that part of New York, and advocates of the change want the street called instead ‘Jack Kirby Way’. Kirby was the creator along with Stan Lee, of many of Marvel’s best-known and loved superheroes, most notably Captain America. The report states that he got death threats because the first issue showed the good Captain giving Hitler a punch in the kisser. I think the comic was published before America had entered the Second World War, and the comic, not surprisingly, angered the American Nazi party. Well, annoying and upsetting Nazis is itself a good and holy project. Both Kirby and Lee were Jews, so they had a perfect right to show an all-American hero beating the living daylights out of Adolf.
The report mentions that Kirby grew up in dire poverty. The backbone of the American comics industry were eastern European Jewish immigrants, living in overcrowded, squalid conditions/ Kirby, who always wanted to be an artist and signed on to an art course, said that when he was growing up the highest a man could aspire to in his neighbourhood was as a mechanic. The streets were occupied by gangs, and there were frequently fights between Jews and Italians. Kirby said that his art and career in comics were what stopped him getting drawn into the mob.
His real name was Kurzberger, but he drew for the comics under a number of different pseudonyms to give the impression that Timely, as Marvel’s predecessor was called, had more staff than it really did. Kirby was just one of them, but one that was his particularly favourite. He liked it because he thought it sounded similar to the surname of James Cagney, one of his heroes. In fact he used the name ‘Kirby’ so much that even his wife started calling him it and eventually someone persuaded him to change it formally.
The report describes the various bureaucratic steps the move has to go through before the authorities make a decision on it. I hope it will go through, and Jack KIrby will be suitably commemorated in the part of NYC where he grew up.
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