Labour’s plan to restrict overseas political donations and apply the changes retrospectively could breach human rights law, former attorney general Sir Michael Ellis has warned.
The proposed measures could affect two £36 million donations made to Reform by crypto-billionaires Ben Delo and Christopher Harborne, which the party announced last weekend.
Downing Street has confirmed that the new restrictions will be backdated to March 25 this year. Ministers intend to cap donations from British citizens living abroad at £100,000 a year and require donors to show that they have been registered to vote in the UK for at least 12 months.
Sir Michael said the retrospective element could conflict with both the European Convention on Human Rights and Labour’s own Human Rights Act.
“It is patently obvious that Labour are trying to move the goalposts” to restrict donations to Reform, he said.
He added: “The retrospective nature of this is offensive to English law and the rules of natural justice. But it is also banned by the ECHR.
“There have been some exceptions in the past when it comes to the civil law, but not in relation to matters that carry criminal penalties, which most election law does.”
Sir Michael said it was “not clear that this legislation can be signed off as compliant with the Human Rights Act”, adding that “Labour could come a cropper on their own legislation”.
Reform donations and proposed residency test
No 10 has also announced a new “strengthened” residency test, although officials have not set out precisely how it will work. Donors may be required to demonstrate an “ongoing presence in the UK”, potentially by showing that they pay tax here.
Reform leader Nigel Farage has insisted that the two donations were “100 per cent compliant with the law today”. The party has already begun spending the money, including on a recruitment drive and plans for a new television channel.
Zia Yusuf, Reform’s home affairs spokesman, accused Labour of “creating retroactive laws to try and bankrupt a political opponent”.
“Once the principle of legal certainty is sacrificed to naked partisan expedience, there is no stopping point,” he said.
“Politics ceases to be a contest of persuasion under reasonable and predictable rules. Instead it becomes a game of raw power where the winner simply changes the laws to destroy the loser’s capacity to compete.”
Mr Delo, who spent years in Hong Kong, said in an interview in April that he intended to return to Britain early so he could contribute more to Reform’s finances.
Official records indicate that he has been registered to vote at a property in Oxfordshire since 2022, which could mean he is not affected by the proposed 12-month requirement.
Mr Harborne, who also spent years abroad in Thailand, appears to have been registered to vote in Hampshire intermittently since 2020. Last year, he was registered in a constituency where he owns a property under the category “other electors”, which can include overseas voters living abroad.
However, the records indicate that he was not registered to vote in the UK in either 2021 or 2024.
