Big money, the far right and the US empire

Editorial / 13 September 2026 Rebuilding Britain: pointers and pitfalls at TUC 2026 13 September 2026 Editorial / 11 September 2026 Unions must rediscover their power to change this country 11 September 2026 Editorial / 10 September 2026 Burnham must be bold in budget 10 September 2026 Editorial / 9 September 2026 Incensed reaction from Israel apologists shows new British sanctions really matter 9 September 2026 Editorial / 8 September 2026 Mosley’s heirs must be confronted 8 September 2026 Editorial / 7 September 2026 Healey’s prescriptions for growth are familiar — and wrong 7 September 2026 Editorial / 6 September 2026 Farage is dripping in sleaze – but the rise of the right won’t defeat itself 6 September 2026 THE escalating scandal over the record-breaking £72 million handed to Reform UK by sinister billionaires is an opportunity to expose the far-right party as the plaything of the super-rich.

But it also — as TUC general secretary Paul Nowak rightly stresses — forces us to recognise the geopolitical context of these donations.

The “nasty politics that links Nigel Farage, Tommy Robinson [and] Rupert Lowe with Trump, Maga and the US white supremacist movement” is an existential threat.

As the black-clad balaclava-masked thugs mobilising in Dover and Portsmouth remind us, we have an organised and often violent far-right street movement — one which raised its head in racist riots over the summer of 2024 and can summon significant numbers at short notice to terrorise communities.

As Diane Abbott said in a message to the Morning Star’s TUC fringe meeting on the 90th anniversary of the Battle of Cable Street, this is not new — but it is now tied to factors we have not seen since the 1930s.

One is the serious electoral threat of the far right, in Britain and across Europe. Reform UK has spent most of the time since the 2024 election in first place in the polls, and while Labour has recently pushed it into second place amid the Burnham bounce and question marks over Farage’s finances, it remains competitive.

Another is the support the weekend’s donations show the far right enjoys from super-rich individuals “competing with each other to buy reactionary, racist influence in British politics,” in Abbott’s words.

Labour now scrambles to look at capping political donations, at least from people based abroad as Reform’s two mega-donors are or have been until recently, but it is not as if it had no warning. Elon Musk was publicly mulling a $100m donation to Farage back in 2024; the Keir Starmer government, itself courting donations from the wealthy, talked about reforming donations but did not.

And the third is the link between the emerging far right and a global movement backed by the government of a great power.

Oswald Mosley’s links to Nazi Germany made him dangerous. But the fact today’s far right is sponsored by the US government is arguably a bigger problem for British politics.

Britain appeased and at times collaborated with Nazi Germany in the 1930s, but it was not subordinate to it. It is very much subordinate to the United States today.

Its troops are on our territory (from which they bomb third countries with impunity), our armed forces are locked into a Nato hierarchy with the Pentagon at the summit and every prime minister for decades has prioritised the US relationship above all others, an approach summed up in the infamous injunction to our ambassador to Washington by Blair’s government — “get up the arse of the White House and stay there.”

That junior status is now compounded by a US administration which intervenes openly in our domestic politics, imposes unequal treaties as readily on allies as adversaries and uses its economic clout to inflict severe punishment if they resist, as Canada is now experiencing. One whose National Security Strategy declares its active support for what it calls “patriotic” forces in Europe, whose Vice-President JD Vance hosts far-right British politicians under our government’s nose and whose closest allies include tycoons with huge influence over the way artificial intelligence is currently reshaping work.

Opposing the far right without a decisive break with the Trump administration is to fight with our hands tied. But the implications of that for British foreign policy are still taboo subjects at Westminster.

A labour movement that rightly demands legislation to stop rich expats trying to buy elections needs to be ready to extend that to a campaign to end the “special relationship” and our toxic alliance with the most dangerous and destructive state on Earth.

TUC Congress 2026 / 14 September 2026 Farage is ‘a politician for sale’ who will ‘sell our country down the river’ 14 September 2026 TUC general secretary Paul Nowak says Reform's billionaire funders pose a ‘crisis for our democracy’