01/12/2025
“£8.4 million — it was the biggest ever political donation in British history, and made by an insurance salesman made uneasy by immigration and who opposed Britain’s membership of the European Union. Arron Banks gave this enormous sum of money to the 2016 Brexit campaign.
If that money came direct from Banks’s bank account, then it was perfectly legal. (Banks has not been found to have breached electoral law). Foreign donations to elections and referendum campaigns have to be declared and identified. One of the biggest failures of the 1997 Labour government was not to adopt clear laws limiting political donations. Britain failed to ban donations by rich individuals or rich trade unions who want to buy influence.
Instead money continues to flow into political parties from the super rich, in exchange for access, peerages, and contracts.
Banks’s close associations with the Russian government are not disputed. His own published accounts of his involvement in the Brexit campaign recorded meetings with the Russian ambassador Alexander Yakovenko, a close Putin associate.”
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