Labour Gets 14 Times More Large Donations Than UK Conservatives
(Bloomberg) -- Britain’s Labour opposition reaped at least 14 times more in large donations than Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s Conservative Party in the second week of campaigning for the general election.
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Official figures from the Electoral Commission showed Keir Starmer’s Labour hauled in £4.3 million ($5.4 million), excluding public funds, in the week to June 12. That compared with £300,000 for the Conservatives and £335,000 for Liberal Democrats.
Nigel Farage’s right-wing Reform UK took in £742,000, mainly from its chairman Richard Tice.
Sunak’s party is trailing by more than 20 points in opinion polls less than two weeks before the July 4 election. Data on donations shows the people supporting the opposition, including David Sainsbury, the former chairman of the supermarket chain that bears his name.
Lord Sainsbury as he’s known gave £2.5 million to Labour. Others who backed the opposition include former Autoglass Ltd. boss Gary Lubner and hedge fund manager and long-time Labour donor Martin Taylor, who gave £900,000 and £700,000 respectively.
The Conservatives have struggled to raise funds, with the largest donation in this round coming from a Conservative fundraising lunch which raised £50,000 for the party.
Reform received over twice as much as Sunak’s party, £500,000 of which came from Tice’s company Britain Means Business Ltd. British businessman David George Plumer Lilley gave Reform £100,000.
Farage’s announcement he would stand as parliamentary candidate has boosted Reform’s takings. Other Reform UK donors included:
Former pop star Holly Valance
Computacenter founder Philip Hulme
Robin Birley, owner of 5 Hertford Street private members’ club where Tory ministers like to dine
Birley, who gave £25,000, had previously donated £65,850 to the Conservatives between 2009 and 2016, with an additional £5,000 donation in January.
The figures are not an exhaustive total of sums received by the parties as only donations of more than £11,180 in value are reported.
(Updates with context from the first paragraph. An earlier version corrected a date in the second paragraph.)
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