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All parties declared more than £93m in total compared with £52m in the previous year.
The Conservatives received the most donations by far, raking in £44.5m in cash, compared with Labour’s total of £21.6m, £6m for the Liberal Democrats, £610,000 for the Green Party and £255,000 for Reform. The SNP registered only £76,000 cash donations in 2023.
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Of the £21.5m in cash received by Labour in 2023, just £5.9m came from the trade union movement, compared with £14.5m from companies and individuals – a huge increase on the previous year, and indeed more than in the three previous years of Keir Starmer’s leadership combined.
As trade union contributions have dipped slightly, from around £6.9m in 2020 and 2021 to £5.3m in 2022, donations from businesses and individuals have soared: they totalled £2.3m in 2020 and rose to £3m in 2021 and £7.6m in 2022 before nearly doubling last year.
Around £10m of this total comes from just four sources: Gary Lubner (£4.6m), David Sainsbury (£3.1m), Fran Perrin (£1m) and Ecotricity (£1m). This means that just two individuals gave the Labour Party more money last year than all the trade unions combined.
Very concerning… but also not surprising.
I do wonder if this being an election year has an effect? Maybe there’s a trend if you go back far enough.
Of the £44.5m in cash received by the Conservatives last year, more than £20m came from two sources: John Sainsbury and Frank Hester, an IT entrepreneur from Leeds who has given £5m personally and another £5m through his firm, The Phoenix Partnership. Hester’s firm has profited from public sector contracts and his ties with the party are under heightened scrutiny following the publication of an investigation by the Guardian that revealed he had said former Labour MP Diane Abbott made him “want to hate all black women” and should be shot.
A further £11.3m came from five individuals:
Mohamed Mansour, Egyptian-born billionaire who controls the behemoth conglomerate Mansour Group, which has interests in real estate, finance, retail and tech: £5m Graham Edwards, co-founder of one of the largest private companies in the UK, Telereal Trillium, which owns thousands of properties and approximately 60 million square feet of land: £2m Amit Lohia, son of billionaire petrochemical and fertiliser tycoon Sri Prakash Lohia, chair of Indorama: £2m Christopher Barry Wood, founder of biotech firm Medannex: £1.3m Alan Howard, hedge fund manager who co-founded Jersey-based Brevan Howard and has significant interests in crypto-currency: £1mAnd which of these individuals / companies have been awarded government contracts? Funneling public money into the Tory party coffers is par for the course for these leeches.
I’m sure every single one of them would have benefited more than the sum of their donations. The rich very rarely give their money away for nothing in return.
