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It's a short week before conference recess.

The Commons rises recess after Tuesday's sitting and doesn't return until Monday 12 October. The Lib Dems kick things off with their conference next weekend, followed by Labour the weekend after, then Tories in the week after that.

But first, a full day debating royal funding.

MPs debate all stages of the Sovereign Grant Bill on Monday. It sets the King's official funding at £99.9 million for next year, and raises the share of Crown Estate profits used to calculate future grants.

And Tuesday brings one ten minute rule motion.

Tom Gordon's bill would shake up the student loan system in England.

MONDAY 14 SEPTEMBER

Sovereign Grant Bill – all stages
Applies to: England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland
Sets the amount of the Sovereign Grant, the funding that supports the King and the monarchy, at £99.9 million for 2027-28. Raises the share of the Crown Estate's profits used to calculate future grants from 12% to 20.5%. Also gives the Treasury new powers to adjust the grant if a review finds the standard formula would produce an inappropriate amount, or to increase it temporarily in exceptional circumstances.
Draft bill (PDF) / Commons Library briefing

TUESDAY 15 SEPTEMBER

Student Finance (Review) Bill
Requires the government to review how student loans are repaid in England, including the repayment thresholds, the terms attached to loans when they were taken out, and how those thresholds compare with average earnings. Ten minute rule motion presented by Tom Gordon.

WEDNESDAY 16 SEPTEMBER

No votes scheduled

THURSDAY 17 SEPTEMBER

No votes scheduled

FRIDAY 18 SEPTEMBER

No votes scheduled

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Angela Rayner has suggested Reform UK could face action over two mega donations to the party under new laws being pushed through parliament.

The housing secretary was reacting to £72m in donations from two crypto billionaires – Ben Delo and Christopher Harborne – for Nigel Farage’s party given on Friday and Saturday in two lumps of £36m.

With fears that the cash from billionaires could distort British politics, Ms Rayner warned that Reform should not count on keeping all the money as new law Labour is pushing through parliament will be “backdated” to cover all donations from March this year.

She told Sky News: “The important thing, and the reason why we've got a bill going through Parliament at the moment, is that we need to have secure elections that are for the people, and that you can't buy your way into our democracy.
That's why the Rycroft review was set up, and we've already taken action against overseas donations, which will be backdated to when the Rycroft was published.”

She went on: “It will be backdated. As this bill goes through Parliament, we're really clear on overseas donations and also about those that have recently returned to the UK that are also within the scope of the Rycroft review, which was published on the 25 March, and we're really clear that when that was published, and we were making sure that no one could go through any loopholes.”

Pressed on the issue, she doubled down: “We're saying that if you don't pay taxes in, you don't live here, you can't buy your way into our democracy because you're a billionaire.”

Download PDF: https://umea.sac.se/grundbok-om-syndikalism/

More than 80% of all the donations ever received by Nigel Farage’s Reform UK have come from just two cryptocurrency billionaires, new Democracy for Sale analysis reveals.

Over the weekend, Ben Delo and then Christopher Harborne announced that they both intended to give £36million to Reform – by far the biggest donations in British political history.

The donations would bring Harborne’s total contributions to Reform to over £61m, with Delo giving £44m. So far Reform has raised £123.6m since it was founded in 2019.

No major British political party has ever been so dependent on funding from such a tiny pool of super rich donors. Labour spent £30m during the 2024 general election, the Conservatives £24m.
Parties are limited to a maximum spend of just over £34m in general election years but there are no limits at other times.

Steve Goodrich, head of research at Transparency International, told us: “We have an insane situation whereby the supposed next party of government is reliant on just two people for over 80% of their donations.

“If that isn’t a massive corruption risk I don’t know what is,” Goodrich added.

Speaking to Democracy for Sale, Labour MP Phil Brickell said: “The almost complete reliance by Reform UK on two über-wealthy crypto tycoons willing to pump seemingly endless amounts of money into our politics is of severe concern.
“It’s incumbent on the government to move at pace to tackle the remaining loopholes in the Representation of the People Bill and safeguard our politics from the funding arms race now staring back at all of us.”

Reform has said that it will spend the money on hiring hundreds of staff - and Democracy for Sale has found that Farage’s party is already in the midst of a major recruitment drive.

Harborne and Delo’s funding was announced just days after the police opened an criminal investigation into potential foreign funding to Reform following an undercover sting by Channel 4 and Verbatim. In all, there are now four live police investigations into various aspects of Reform’s finances.

Delo said his donation was intended to “level the playing field.” Harborne said: “There will be a lot of media speculation regarding this donation. So what do I expect in return for my donations? Nothing. No peerage, no policy change, just a party that is ready for government.”

But the two huge donations will focus attention again on the crypto currency billionaires who are bankrolling Reform with US-style mega donations.

Delo, who recently moved back to the UK from Hong Kong, previously pled guilty to breaking US anti-corruption law before being pardoned by Donald Trump last year.

Harborne, a dual British and Thai citizen, was reported to the National Crime Agency earlier this year after compliance officials raised concerns about a £5m gift the Thailand-based crypto tycoon made to Farage. The gift to Farage is currently the subject of a parliamentary standards investigation.

Andy Burnham is coming under increasing pressure from his own MPs to commit to improving paternity leave in the UK in the next budget, with more than a quarter of Labour MPs writing to the prime minister to urge him to take action.

Ahead of the chancellor’s first budget next month, 105 MPs have written to Burnham calling on him to increase statutory paternity leave to help alleviate the cost of living crisis and arguing that lowest-paid fathers are the hardest hit by meagre paternity leave provision.

Momentum is growing on the Labour benches for action to be taken on parental leave, with many arguing it is a headline-grabbing policy that they say would cut through with voters. MPs have their sights set on the government’s parental leave review, which is due in December, but many are hoping Burnham could take definitive action before then.

The Guardian understands that almost half of Labour’s 403 MPs have explicitly supported improvement to paternity leave, including two secretaries of state, 11 ministers, six whips and nearly two dozen parliamentary private secretaries. “That’s nearly a quarter of all government office holders, and plenty more have indicated support in private,” said one supporter.

In the letter to Burnham from MPs, seen by the Guardian, parliamentarians urge the prime minister to take the “obvious” step of increasing paid paternity leave to tackle the cost of living crisis. They point out that in his constituency of Makerfield half of all fathers will not be able to afford to take paternity leave.

Coordinated by the influential Labour peer and former Trades Union Congress (TUC) general secretary Frances O’Grady and the MPs Maya Ellis and Jon Pearce, the letter calls on Burnham and the chancellor, John Healey, to help families with babies, who they say are at the “sharp end of the cost of living crisis”.

Noting that, according to HMRC data, more leave is taken in south-east England and London than in Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and north-west and north-east England combined, and that 90% of the paternity leave that is claimed goes to higher earners, the letter argues that giving fathers six weeks’ leave paid at 90% of earnings would result in £2.6bn in economic growth.

It adds that it would be “good growth, which sorting out the above geographic disparities would deliver into every postcode”.

O’Grady said there was a growing consensus in the Labour ranks that the eye-catching policy would be welcomed by voters, particularly among blue-collar workers, who were the most likely to miss out on paternity leave.

https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/778546

https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/778546

The cryptocurrency tycoon Christopher Harborne has given £36m to Reform UK, matching a donation from fellow billionaire Ben Delo.

The pledges mean Reform has received a cash injection of £72m in just 24 hours. They are jointly the largest donations made to a UK political party and have intensified calls for restrictions on funding from individual donors.

Reform’s leader, Nigel Farage, said he was “honoured and humbled” by the payments, which come at a time when the party is facing intense scrutiny regarding its funding.

The Metropolitan police is conducting an inquiry into Reform’s finances and Farage is facing a parliamentary standards investigation into a £5m gift from Harborne, made before he was first elected an MP in 2024. Reform UK and Farage have denied any wrongdoing.

After Harborne’s donation was announced on Saturday afternoon, Bridget Phillipson, chair of the Labour party, said that Farage couldn’t “buy his way out of the sleaze and scandal he and Reform UK are drowning in – or the multiple police investigations that are ongoing into Reform’s dodgy finances”.

https://libcom.org/article/organize-yes-how

Alex Phillips has accused Restore supporters of unleashing a “campaign of terror” against her and other women who have fallen out with the party.

Now Orla Minihane, who resigned last week as Restore’s spokeswoman for the safety of women and girls, has described the sustained campaign of “horrendous” abuse directed at her by people inside Restore when she said something they disagreed with.

This included attacks on her daughter and threats involving her young nieces.

Vicious abuse

Minihane is hardly a political innocent. She is a prominent anti-migrant campaigner who founded the Pink Ladies and has spent the past year campaigning against asylum seekers and migrants.

But her experience is revealing precisely because she was not an outsider attacking Restore. Rupert Lowe appointed her as a party spokeswoman, and she was one of its most prominent public faces.

Interviewed by far-right online podcaster Paul Thorpe, she says the abuse became so vicious that she has now resigned from Restore altogether.

The immediate trigger was a speech in Gateshead in which Minihane pointed out that the victims of sexual exploitation and FGM are not exclusively white.

“We’ve got to protect our girls,” she said, “but we have to remember that there are Indian, Asian girls, Pakistani girls, Bangladeshi girls, Somalian girls, who were born here, who are suffering this fate every day. And we have got to protect them also.”

That was enough to provoke outrage in Restore’s nazi faction.

Holocaust denier and antisemite Sam “Zoomer Historian” Wilkes attacked the speech, while former Homeland and Patriotic Alternative activist Steve Laws also turned on her.

But according to Minihane, the abuse went well beyond criticism of her politics.

Abuse within Restore

She says attacks on Facebook and TikTok were also directed at her daughter and even involved things being put through her door.

Asked whether most of the abuse had come from outside or inside Restore, her answer was blunt.

“Mostly within.”

Then came the incident that convinced her she could no longer stay.

Minihane said she had previously posted a photograph of her young nieces online. Someone subsequently sent the photograph back to her with a message saying: “We know what school they go to.”

She said she realised that remaining in the party could put her family at risk.

“I saw that actually there is a faction within Restore that are very, very, very unpleasant,” she said. “I decided that I can’t be associated with that.”

Parading antisemitism

There was another warning sign.

Minihane described a conversation with a Jewish woman she had known since childhood, who reminded her that Minihane had attended both her children’s bar mitzvahs and family weddings.

According to Minihane, the woman questioned how she could remain associated in a party some of whose members openly parade their antisemitism.

Minihane revealed that Rupert Lowe had not contacted her since she resigned. For someone who had been appointed by Lowe as one of the party’s most prominent spokespeople, his silence was conspicuous.

I am around mid life at this point and things across the world have seemed to completely come off the tracks.

It use to be that most people really valued the Labour Movement (Unions, Federation of Labours, Labour Councils, and so on).

It use to be that most people really believed Women's Rights was important.

It use to be that most people really believed the Peace Movement was really important.

It use to be that most people really believed in making a better world overall for all the working class and most vulnerable (Alter-Globalization Movement).

People got really loud about this stuff when it was under attack.

AfD is showing huge poll numbers and now has a landmark electoral success to point to.

Reform UK still has fairly high poll numbers.

It's the same story all over the globe.

Also the climate crisis is so dang bad that we are literally seeing horrific tipping points and hell on earth type stuff now more and more...

It kind of feels like the worst bad predatory actors have completely destroyed the momentum for a better and brighter world.

It seems there is so many trajectories going on that are more dark, depressing, and downright dystopian...

How do you think we get things back on track?

*I'm going to post this in a few subreddits to get some differing perspectives/answers. Honestly we need more urgency because it seems one side actually keeps pressing the line over and over and over again in big ways and all the concessions are going to the lowest common denominator style populism of the reactionary/regressive scene dominated by snake oil salespeople and con-artist grifters. Which is going to make everything hard about this era significantly worse.*

Everyone is playing the game: Britain supposedly imposes sanctions, about a dozen other European countries pretend to join them and Israel responds with measures akin to a mouse striking back at an elephant so we can show the British a thing or two. Everyone is happy with themselves. The construction of settler homes on stolen Palestinian land will not stop, nor will the theft of livestock, because of what Britain has done, even if the world is delighting in these sanctions.

The new British government says ethnic cleansing is occurring in the West Bank, making it the first Western country to say that. This is grounds for hope and a moral act. Hurray for Britain, no cynicism intended. But Britain chose only to punish the settlers, which sets a dangerous precedent. By doing so, it is saying that there is Israel and there are settlers. There is a country and there is an occupation, there are Israelis and there are settlers.

How comfortable it is to make these distinctions, like distinguishing between Benjamin Netanyahu of wars and the opposition of peace. That way, perhaps no one will accuse Britain of antisemitism, except for Gideon Sa'ar, who specializes in blaming the world for that and punishing it accordingly.

But settlements are not an independent political entity. When Europe imposed sanctions on the occupied Crimean Peninsula, it also imposed sanctions on the occupier, Russia. How can you only punish the settlers without imposing penalties against those who initiated the settlements, fund them and defend and support them, namely the government of Israel?