Reform UK's opaque finances: Now the Lib Dems raise questions

Lisa Smart, the Liberal Democrat cabinet office spokesperson, has referred Richard Tice to the parliamentary standards commissioner over an undeclared loan of nearly £80,000 from Nigel Farage’s aide George Cottrell.

The Guardian reports that Tice, the Reform UK MP for Boston and Skegness, received a loan of nearly £80,000 from Nigel Farage’s aide George Cottrell some months after he was elected parliament.

This transaction, says the newspaper's report, caused bankers to raise concerns with authorities.

In her letter to the commissioner, Lisa Smart wrote:

"Mr Cottrell is not merely a private acquaintance of Mr Tice, he is an official adviser to Reform UK and Nigel Farage (demonstrated by his use of Reform UK business cards).

"It is highly implausible that the loan would have been negotiated without their party political connection, given this is the central basis of their relationship."

The Guardian has also reported today that George Cottrell transferred $2m to his mother days before she made large donations to Reform UK.

Bankers have raised potential money-laundering concerns over transactions involving senior Reform UK figures

The Guardian reports that a host of transactions involving Reform UK's most senior figures, and some donations to the party, have led bankers to report potential money-laundering concerns to the National Crime Agency (NCA).

According to the newspaper, finance industry figures have raised at least four suspicious activity reports (SARs) relating to transactions involving senior figures in Reform. It names them as:

• One relates to a £1m donation made to Britain Means Business, a fundraising organisation for Reform UK, before the last general election. Half of the £1m was then transferred by Tice, as director of the company, to Reform UK. Renamed from Leave Means Leave, Britain Means Business is a company that is used to help fund Reform. The £1m seemingly came from the aristocrat and Reform UK donor Fiona Cottrell. In this instance, the Guardian understands bank staff were not satisfied that the funds had ultimately come from her. The NCA has sought help from a foreign partner agency to trace the original source of the funds.
• Two other SARs relate to a loan from George Cottrell to Tice. The loan was made shortly before Tice finalised a property purchase and made a party donation, and was not repaid until after those two transactions were completed, according to sources. George Cottrell is the son of Fiona Cottrell, and is a convicted fraudster, former deputy treasurer of Ukip and close associate of Farage.
• A fourth relates to the £5m gift from the Thailand-based businessman Christopher Harborne to Farage, which was first revealed by the Guardian in April.the 

The Guardian says Richard Tice, Reform's deputy leader, has declined to answer any of the questions put to him and, via lawyers, threatened to injunct the paper prevent the publication of these details.

Earlier this week, the same paper the Guardian revealed that the undisclosed and much-discussed £5m gift to the Reform's leader, Nigel Farage, from a cryptocurrency billionaire shortly before the 2024 general election had been reported to the NCA.

As far as Farage is concerned, this week is resembling the scene late in Shakespeare's King John where messengers arrive from all directions with bad news. And it's only Wednesday.

Later. The Guardian has published a second article with more details of the transactions in question.

Now Leicestershire Reform want to get rid of their Private Pike

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When Reform UK formed a minority administration at Leicestershire County Council last May, 22-year-old Joseph Baum was made deputy leader and the cabinet member for adult social care. He had lost both roles by August.

Now comes news that Reform's council leader, Dan Harrison – who has to play Captain Mainwaring to Boam's Private Pike – wants him out of the party altogether and has written to Richard Tice to that effect.

BBC News reports:

In a letter seen by the BBC, Dan Harrison criticised his former deputy council leader Joseph Boam over a social media post in which he stated "I stand with ICE" hours after federal immigration agents fatally shot nurse Alex Pretti in Minneapolis last month.

In his letter, Harrison said that 79 complaints had been made against Reform UK councillors since the party took control, of which 40 were about Boam:

"What has been Joseph's reaction?" Harrison added. "He blamed it all on the woke left-wing, fake news or political smears.

"I was appalled at his lack of ownership of the problems he created."

Harrison said the ICE post was "the final straw", prompting him to contact Tice.

He added: "I know other party members will be writing to you to urge you to kick Joseph out of the party. 

Leicester Gazette reminds us that another Leicestershire Reform councillor made pro-ICE comments, but has since withdrawn them and apologised.

Boam himself claims to be well thought of at Reform head office. Which may, of course, be true.

Reform and The Man Who Was Thursday

If you believe Reform's leaders, then its activists and candidates are either plants or actors. At least, that's the leadership's defence whenever a new piece of controversy about the party hits the headlines.

It reminds me of the way conspiracy theorists of the left look at the news media. If a story's being covered, that proves it is a dead cat to distract us from something more damaging to the authorities. And if it's not being covered, that proves that someone powerful has taken out a super-injunction.

Perhaps Farage and Tice fear Reform will turn put to be like the Anarchist cell in G.K. Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday. In the course of the book, it's revealed that the cell's members are all police agents, there to keep an eye on the others.

The British right is increasingly attracted to the idea of forced labour

Isabel Oakeshott published an article in the Telegraph this morning under the headline:

Get benefits claimants back to work - cleaning our filthy streets

That article is behind the paper's paywall, but Vox Political has a few quotes. If they give a fair representation of the piece, it is designed to evoke disgust, not just of dirty streets, but of the people who live in them.

But Oakeshott's partner Richard Tice was in no doubt of its quality, retweeting it with the words:

Let’s make Welfare work…..

Let’s get Benefits claimant’s cleaning Britain….

Let’s ignore the howls of woke lefties….

And his deputy as leader of Reform UK, Ben Habib, chimed in:

Absolutely right Richard. 

The human condition requires work to be settled. It is good for the people and good for the country.

I like clean streets too, but I like them to be cleaned by people who are paid a good wage for doing the work and who belong to trade unions.

But this hankering after an army of unpaid workers is creeping in on the right of British politics.

When I saw tweets about Oakeshott's article, I was reminded of a an article by my own MP.

Blogging is what Neil O'Brien seems to do most of the time these days, which pleases me as a fellow exponent of a dying art. But this was not on his own Substack but Conservative Home.

And there he wrote:

In the 1990s, the visionary New York police chief, Bill Bratton, put Broken Windows policing into effect, and crushed crime. It has two elements: creating orderly places, and making sure lower level crimes get swift and certain punishment.

To create orderly places, community payback offenders shouldn’t simply beput (sic) into charity shops. Instead, they should be helping deliver a massive national drive to reduce graffiti and tidy town centres.

So there's another reserve army that can clean up Britain while undercutting council workers: prisoners.

What will be suggested next? Making this free labour available to private companies? That's what already happens in the vast US prison system - see this article from the American Civil Liberties Union.

And you could read Crime Control as Industry by Nils Christie, which long ago alerted me to look for this trend. It's one we should all fear.

Reform thinks the Tories are bound to lose the next election

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Richard Tice announced yesterday that his Reform party would put up a candidate in every constituency at the nest general election. 

There will, he said, be no deals with the Conservatives, even where a sitting Tory MP holds similar views to Reform.

From which we can conclude that Tice thinks the Tories will lose that election, with or without intervention from Reform. 

So his best bet of being relevant afterwards is if disappointed Tory members decide they lost because of Reform and then demand that their party moves further to the right to attract Reform voters.

But it's far from clear that, without the issue of Brexit, Reform will be able to attract enough voters for that strategy to work.

And there's another problem. The voters Reform could attract will probably be looking for some protection from the market, whereas the party's leadership wants to give them more market and give it to them good and hard.

If Labour thinks it worth exposing this contradiction, the electorate may be more willing to listen than they were in the Ukip days, even though that party was similarly broken backed.