Farage says a Reform UK government would stop unions funding Labour if they block £72m donations
Good morning. Ministers already think that the new laws on political donations, as set out in the version of the representation of the people bill which left the Commons earlier this month, will be enough to block some or all of the donations worth £72m to Reform UK announced at the weekend. But they are still planning further amendments to the legislation, when peers debate their own amendments to the bill, to make the restrictions even tighter. Pippa Crerar, Jessica Elgot and Kiran Stacey have the details here in our overnight splash.
Kiran and Henry Dyer also have written a good explainer about the rules.
Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader, has hit back. In an article for the Daily Telegraph, he claims that the proposed new laws – which are retrospective in the sense that they will apply from March 2026, when ministers first announced their intention to legislate, not from the moment when the bill gets royal assent, later this year or early next year – are unfair. If the crackdown goes ahead, Reform UK will stop Labour getting money from the trade unions if it wins the next election, he says.
The Unite union alone has given the Labour party over £50m over the course of the last few years. They’ve got the Employment Rights Act, not to mention big pay rises for bus drivers. If anybody is giving money to do political bidding, it’s the trade unions.
So I would just warn the Labour party here and now: If you try and ban our donors, we in government would certainly ban funding from the trade unions. I don’t want to go down that route. But it’s something we would be prepared to do.
Once again, let me be clear. Neither Ben Delo nor Christopher Harborne will be getting membership of the House of Lords. They won’t be getting favours, they won’t be influencing policy. It isn’t happening.
Because unlike the uniparty we are not for sale.
Until recently the trade unions were opposed to caps on the amount individuals can donate to political parties because they feared that would lead to a rightwing government limiting what unions can donate to Labour. The £72m donations to Reform UK have prompted a bit of a rethink, and union leaders are expected to issue a statement later.
Here is the agenda for the day.
Morning: Louise Haigh, the first secretary of state, chairs a political cabinet. Andy Burnham has cancelled engagements today following the death of his father.
9.30am: The Department for Work and Pensions publishes figures relating to personal independence payment claims and universal credit health claims.
11.30am: Alex Norris, the justice secretary, takes questions in the Commons.
Noon: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.
After 12.30pm: Yvette Cooper, the health secretary, is expected to make a Commons statement following the publication of the inquiry report into how the nurse Lucy Letby was able to repeatedly kill babies at the Countess of Chester hospital.
2.45pm: Shabana Mahmood, the home secretary, takes questions from the Commons home affairs committee.
3.45pm: Haigh addresses the TUC conference, standing in for Burnham.
Also today, in Piddlington, a small Oxfordshire village, residents are holding a symbolic independence referendum, as a protest against plans to house more than 1,000 asylum seekers in a former military base nearby.
I’m afraid we are no longer able to have comments open below the line every day on this blog. If you want to contact me, please email politics.live@theguardian.com. You can use this email to flag up corrections, comments for publication, questions or complaints.
Key events
According to Sky News, Paul Nowak, the TUC general secretary, is going to make a statement to the conference at about 10.30am explaining the TUC’s revised position on how party funding laws should be reformed.
Reynolds says people should not get ‘hyperbolic’ about risks posed by AI
Jonathan Reynolds has said that people should not get “hyperbolic” about the risks posed by AI. Speaking ahead of Louise Haigh’s speech to the TUC later, which will address the topic (see 9.31am), and in the light of the ongoing concerns expressed by AI experts about the risk of AI models posing a threat to humanity, Reynolds told the Today programme:
This is extremely powerful technology, and I think we should never be complacent or naive about the impact it might have.
People will be worried by some of the things they’ve heard in the last few weeks, and I think we’ve got to be careful not to get hyperbolic about this either.
Of course, there are risks, but let’s be frank: there are some tremendous upsides for people as well. Whether it’s public services, healthcare, the contribution to the economy.
If you regulate it in a way where you’re no longer having access to those frontier developments, that would obviously make us less safe. So I think you’ve got to be proportionate and understanding about this in how we seek to regulate going forward.
Reynolds also stressed that the UK is a world-leader in internet safety because of the reputation of the AI Safety Institute, set up when Rishi Sunak was PM.
When Justin Webb, the presenter, put it to Reynolds that people would not be impressed by ministers talking about the “upsides” of the AI given that the potential downsides, the elimination of humanity, are so much more serious, Reynolds replied:
Because of the power of this technology, I wouldn’t say I wasn’t worried.
What I would say is I’m clear-eyed about the best ways to keep the country safe, and that has to be using British innovation, British expertise, British specialisms in such a way that actually improves the position of the UK in terms of the safety.
Asked about the proposal from Jack Clark, one of the founders of Anthropic, for AI companies to have to install a “kill switch” held by a third party, Reynolds said:
I’ve got to be honest, I don’t think that it’s a particularly helpful way to think about how we manage the risks. I’m not really sure what that would actually mean in practice.
To state the obvious, these frontier models are in the main being developed in the US and in China. So exactly what would that mean? I’m not sure what the proposition is.
Jonathan Reynolds says it’s wrong to view union donations to Labour as equivalent to billionaire donations to Reform UK
Jonathan Reynolds, the business secretary, was doing a media round on behalf of the government this morning. Asked about claims that trade unions donations to Labour are similar to single, multi-million pound donations to Reform UK from cryptocurrency billionaires (see 9.09am), Reynolds claimed it was wrong to view them as equivalent. He told Times Radio:
When we talk, or people talk about union donations, that is not one entity. That is tens of thousands of ordinary people choosing to make that donation, and it’s bundled up and given from the union. But it’s very easy to opt out of that. There are rules governing political funds, political ballots.
I honestly think to take these mega, ultra crypto Reform donors and compare them to voluntary associations of working people choosing to give some money to the political system, I don’t think the two things are comparable.
Louise Haigh says UK must heed warnings from AI experts
Ministers must “heed the warnings” from industry leaders about the threat posed by AI as it looks to capitalise on the technology, the first secretary, Louise Haigh, will say in a speech to the TUC later. Jessica Elgot has the story.
Here is video of Pippa Crerar and Kiran Stacey talking about the £72m donations to Reform UK on our Politics Weekly UK podcast.
Farage says a Reform UK government would stop unions funding Labour if they block £72m donations
Good morning. Ministers already think that the new laws on political donations, as set out in the version of the representation of the people bill which left the Commons earlier this month, will be enough to block some or all of the donations worth £72m to Reform UK announced at the weekend. But they are still planning further amendments to the legislation, when peers debate their own amendments to the bill, to make the restrictions even tighter. Pippa Crerar, Jessica Elgot and Kiran Stacey have the details here in our overnight splash.
Kiran and Henry Dyer also have written a good explainer about the rules.
Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader, has hit back. In an article for the Daily Telegraph, he claims that the proposed new laws – which are retrospective in the sense that they will apply from March 2026, when ministers first announced their intention to legislate, not from the moment when the bill gets royal assent, later this year or early next year – are unfair. If the crackdown goes ahead, Reform UK will stop Labour getting money from the trade unions if it wins the next election, he says.
The Unite union alone has given the Labour party over £50m over the course of the last few years. They’ve got the Employment Rights Act, not to mention big pay rises for bus drivers. If anybody is giving money to do political bidding, it’s the trade unions.
So I would just warn the Labour party here and now: If you try and ban our donors, we in government would certainly ban funding from the trade unions. I don’t want to go down that route. But it’s something we would be prepared to do.
Once again, let me be clear. Neither Ben Delo nor Christopher Harborne will be getting membership of the House of Lords. They won’t be getting favours, they won’t be influencing policy. It isn’t happening.
Because unlike the uniparty we are not for sale.
Until recently the trade unions were opposed to caps on the amount individuals can donate to political parties because they feared that would lead to a rightwing government limiting what unions can donate to Labour. The £72m donations to Reform UK have prompted a bit of a rethink, and union leaders are expected to issue a statement later.
Here is the agenda for the day.
Morning: Louise Haigh, the first secretary of state, chairs a political cabinet. Andy Burnham has cancelled engagements today following the death of his father.
9.30am: The Department for Work and Pensions publishes figures relating to personal independence payment claims and universal credit health claims.
11.30am: Alex Norris, the justice secretary, takes questions in the Commons.
Noon: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.
After 12.30pm: Yvette Cooper, the health secretary, is expected to make a Commons statement following the publication of the inquiry report into how the nurse Lucy Letby was able to repeatedly kill babies at the Countess of Chester hospital.
2.45pm: Shabana Mahmood, the home secretary, takes questions from the Commons home affairs committee.
3.45pm: Haigh addresses the TUC conference, standing in for Burnham.
Also today, in Piddlington, a small Oxfordshire village, residents are holding a symbolic independence referendum, as a protest against plans to house more than 1,000 asylum seekers in a former military base nearby.
I’m afraid we are no longer able to have comments open below the line every day on this blog. If you want to contact me, please email politics.live@theguardian.com. You can use this email to flag up corrections, comments for publication, questions or complaints.
