Does £72m win you an election?

0:01Evening. Buyer's remorse. Buy a new car? I'll be moving in. Let's get started. Uh, sorry, I think there's been a mistake. I bought it from Carvana. You what? Yeah, great price. I even have seven days to love it or return it. So there's no... No, no buyer's remorse. More like buyer's rejoice? I guess I'll let myself out. Congratulations. I mean it. Buyer's rejoice. Buy your car today on Carvana. Limitations and exclusions may apply. See our seven-day return policy at Carvana.com. This is a global production. If you were a crypto billionaire, why might you give to the Reform Party? They're probably copying the playbook from America.

0:43When the money goes into the politics like that, the middle, lower class, working class people get destroyed. You've got to pass legislation to stop it from happening. If I was a crypto billionaire, I would not be giving money to Nigel Farage. Why not? Dangerous guy. He has this form of nationalism that's pernicious. If you're looking at people who've got so much money that they can throw 36 million pounds at a party pretty much overnight, then there is a suggestion that something is nefarious. Is it right that two cryptocurrency billionaires, two individuals can effectively swing the election?

1:23Isn't it fantastic that a new party that can compete with the existing main parties can attract the... You're comfortable then? You're comfortable? I'm comfortable. I think we should celebrate the fact that brilliant entrepreneurs can decide to try and invest and grow a struggling UK economy and back people like Nigel Farage and the leadership team to create the right policies to get this country back on track because we are in serious financial and cultural and societal problems. And that's why we exist, because we're the disruptor. Competition is a good thing. Keeping everybody on their toes.

1:58The others are responding accordingly. That is great for democracy and we're very grateful. It is great for democracy when two cryptocurrency billionaires can donate£72 million to one party. Reform has backed every crypto policy demand, even threatening to sack the governor of the Bank of England. Is our politics for sale? Welcome to The News Agents.

2:29The News Agents. It's John. It's Meatless. And you wait all day for a£36 million donation to come along and then two come along at once. It's like London buses for the Reform Party over this weekend. It was jaw-dropping. It was astonishing that, first of all, comes one£36 million And then another billionaire says, I'll see that, match it. And here's another one, too. And you're wondering, well, that's pretty damn impressive that 72 million pounds has come in over the course of a weekend. But is it cynical? Is it sceptical to follow the money and say, what are they getting in return? Yeah, it's also just delicious that a party that frames itself as the People's Party actually gets almost nothing from individual party subs, from individual party members, and instead has to find itself breaking through by attracting two crypto billionaires to the table.

3:34after it has, we know, already promised, pledged a policy that would see crypto being taxed at just 10%. So if you're trying to put some of the pieces together, here are the things that don't add up. Reform thinks it is anti-establishment, thinks it is the party of the little person, thinks it is breaking away from all the bad and the elite and the evils of the traditional parties. And yet what are they doing? They're essentially agreeing to be funded by just two people. I don't know what you'd call that. Is it a kleptocracy? Is it a broocracy? It's two people who would essentially have so much sway over one party that it doesn't really matter what anyone else would want.

4:27Look, the funding of politics is murky. Do you remember the fuss, the outrage, the fury that reform showed at the time of the general election when it turned out that Keir Starmer had had a couple of pairs of glasses bought for him and a suit? I mean, how outrageous. Went to Taylor Swift. Went to Taylor Swift. God, your nose is in the trough. And here we are. You know, this comes on top of Nigel Farage already having accepted a£5 million personal donation. From the same guy. From Christopher Harbaugh. And I do think you make an important point, Emily. If you look at the Conservative Party, yes, there are very wealthy donors who have given money over the years to the Conservative Party.

5:13But there's also an awful lot of money raised from bring and buy sales and whatever else that goes on, where the Tories have kind of tried to stay in touch with their grassroots. Similarly, with the Labour Party, yeah, there are a handful of wealthy donors, but there is the relationship with the trade unions and people can say that is a kind of relationship that is antiquated. But the Labour Party was born out of the trade union movement and there are kind of fundraising drives. The Reform Party, I've never seen a party with such a gap between those who own the party, the two crypto kings, and the Red Wall voters in constituencies around the Midlands and the North West who vote for them?

5:54Okay. Fraser Nelson's done an amazing bit of work on this. Tangible data. He's looked at gifts of under£10 ,000 as a share of all donations, just from January to June of this year. The Liberal Democrats earned 36 % of their donations from that. Conservatives are about 10, Labour's about six. If you go down to reform, gifts of under 10 ,000 are a share of all donations. Reform gets 0.3%. In other words, anything that you would consider small. I mean, I think 10 ,000 is quite a lot to donate to a party, but in donation terms, I guess it's not. The Lib Dems are way, way above who they talk to, who they get money from.

6:37And if you look at what happened in 2024, the Lib Dems spent, I think it was£5.6 million. They got 72 seats from that. Right. Which is an incredible return on investment. It's an extraordinary return on investment. You know, helped by, obviously, Davey leaping off a canoe and all the rest of it. But I think this takes us to the central question. There are a lot of central questions in all this. Some of them are technical, which involve whether they should be allowed to keep the money, whether Labour's going to change the rules, whether you have to be living in the UK in order to actually be able to give these size of donations.

7:13We can come on to that. But I think the central tenet is, is it actually going to pull more people into voting for the party? That is a big unknown, right? Because on one hand, 72 million probably gets you a lot of good technology, a lot of good staff. It sort of, you know, bumps up people's wages if they were getting pissed off and they're about to leave. It helps you sort of professionalise the places where you want to fight your battles against other parties. Maybe it buys you a helicopter to get to places more easily. Maybe it buys you a couple of nice dinners and all the rest of it for your other donors.

7:48But does it actually, would it actually work on the British public? Would it actually be the thing that brought the public to vote for a party? Just two very, very rich men putting their own money into it. Look, money helps. Money is the engine oil that keeps the, you know, the internal combustion engine turning and you can't run political parties without money. No, but momentum is important. And what we've seen from like the Bernie Sanders campaign and the Trump campaign is it's the noise of having a lot of people that are interested rather than just. Of course. But if you want to kind of, you know, so obviously in the UK, unlike the US, you cannot buy television advertising.

8:29But does television advertising count that much in Britain anymore when you can get digital ads and you can pay for digital ads because that is an unregulated space for political parties. They can put up digital kind of ads wherever they want to on whatever platform they want. You can buy buses, you can buy taxis. Exactly. And so suddenly all that money is now available to reform to get their message across in a way that hitherto wouldn't have been possible unless you had a very broad base of support like the Liberal Democrats, where you get an awful lot of people who are prepared to donate money.

9:05With reform, what you have now is two donors in the same industry, in the same bit of space in crypto. One of whom, Ben Dello, has a conviction in the United States of failing to implement adequate anti-money laundering controls. He was pardoned last year. Oh, don't tell me. No, let me finish because you're never going to guess. You're never going to guess who pardoned him. Yeah. OK, you had guessed it was Donald Trump. And so you've got these questions over. So hang on. What are these guys getting in return? And the short answer to that is everything they ever wanted in terms of crypto policy in the UK, even down to Richard Tice going to meet the governor of the Bank of England and apparently a threat being issued, say, unless you change your policies towards crypto, if we come to power, We're going to sack you as the governor of the Bank of England and we'll put someone who is more sympathetic in.

10:04Yeah, I mean, I guess what the crypto industry really wants is respectability and legitimacy. I mean, that's the sort of the broad sweep of it. Certainly, we know now we've seen the minutes of the meeting between the governor of the Bank of England and Joe Powell, a sort of anti-corruption Labour MP, has talked about this on the newsagents, saying that Farage was basically trying to get the Bank of England to drop their own Bitcoin idea, Britcoin, to open the field to other people. Now, I guess if you're trying to be really fair, you have to say, well, maybe it was the same in every single industry.

10:46Right. Maybe there are always people who are at the forefront of a new industry saying we have to deregulate. We have to make it easier. We have to, I don't know, level the playing field, whatever that means. But the reason why crypto, I think, raises such alarm bells. And I mean, later we're going to hear from somebody who is big on crypto, Anthony Scaramucci, who will sort of make the case for why it could be great for the country. But the reason why I think it is so often seen as quite a nefarious financial service is because it doesn't really produce anything. You know, if you buy shares in a company, you own part of a business producing goods and potentially profits.

11:27But this generates no earnings, no dividends. It's extraordinarily speculative. So, you know, you can see crypto rise and fall without understanding anything as to why that's happened. There is very little consumer protection. And frankly, you get a lot of fraud and a lot of scams because there is virtually no transparency. So to sort of to put that into context, why is Nigel Farage, why are Richard Tice so excited about receiving money from this particular sort of area of industry? Because crypto has virtually no checks and balances on it. You don't know where the money is coming from. You don't know what it was used for.

12:11You don't know how it's been potentially laundered. You don't know if it's coming overseas. We know virtually nothing about it when it kind of enters the monetary food chain here. And yet you are still seeing a party that's already said we're going to make regulation on crypto negligible much, much easier. Look, Jamie Dimon, who is the chief executive and chairman of the biggest bank in the world, JP Morgan, called Bitcoin a fraud and spent years comparing it to Pet Rock, suggesting that its primary purpose is to serve scammers and money launderers, which speaks exactly to your point about you don't know where the transactions are.

12:47And if you are a con man or you're a crook, how do you want to deal in the money that you've gathered? You want to deal with it in crypto because it's so hard to track down where the origins of it are. I mean, Jamie Dimon obviously is a traditional banker. So there is this whole kind of clash go on at the moment between, let's call it, the new money people and the old money people. But I guess if we want to go back to the question at the centre of this, which is reform and the donation, what we are wondering now is whether, I mean, how, for example, the other parties respond to it, because Philip Rycroft was the one who was sort of commissioned, ex-civil servant, was commissioned with looking into, you know, political donations.

13:31And he came to a conclusion in March of this year that overseas political donations should probably be capped at around 100 ,000. The government then said, yep, we're going to take that forward. It doesn't include money from residents, from UK residents. So what we now have with both Christopher Harbourn and your guy, Ben Dello, is this question of whether they have now sort of relocated. I mean, this is never about your geography, it's about your tax. But if they have relocated to the UK, which would make them legitimate UK donors. And what was fascinating was Richard Tice was asked about this this morning on the BBC and actually couldn't answer it.

14:14He couldn't really tell you whether they were now residents, how long they'd been here for. There is some question about whether it would have to be retroactive. In other words, you'd have to be living here as a UK citizen for at least 12 months before you were able to donate sums of more than£100 ,000. We still don't know about that. So there is every chance that the government could say to reform, you have to hand back the money. And there is also every chance that reform will go no fucking way. Well, look, reform have said that these donations are being declared. They comply with all the rules as they currently are.

14:50And I think they would have a decent argument if, you know, it looked like they were trying to be punished by retrospectively taking the money off them. The rules they saw, these two guys have donated the money, the donations have been declared. And I think, you know, the danger for the political elite, let's say the Conservatives and the Labour, that if they move against these donations, it will look like they're ganging up against them if they have followed the rules for these particular gifts. So what do they do then? I mean, I saw Bridget Philipson put out a sort of urgent email asking for, you know, party member donations, right?

15:26Well, I suppose that Labour and the Conservatives will try and say, look what's happening. Look what's happening over there. Reform have got this mountain of cash from two crypto billionaires. We can't be left behind. And it's probably not a bad way of raising money off the back of it if you're the Labour Party. So does 72 million win you an election? Is that the question? Does 72 million win you an election? You've got to have policies and ideas, but it doesn't half help if you've got the money that can do everything else. You know, just think about, you know, we talked about Holborn and St Pancras and why Labour should win it, because they've got much better data.

15:59They've got much better kind of materials, you know, the machinery to win an election. Well, with 72 million, you can start really investing in the constituencies that if your reform think that will really matter to target the right people, to get to the right addresses, to make sure you're targeting your messaging to the people that matter. And if you've got that sort of money, you can have build the software and do all the rest of it. That is how, you know, election campaigns are fought these days. Joining us now is Anthony Scaramucci, the Mooch, who was, he's just reminded us, the very first guest on our podcast on the very day that we launched, right?

16:36Very proud of that. Yeah, very proud. Four years ago. I feel like I'm a good luck charm for you guys. We are. We lost without you. The good news is that you're still here and we're still here. So something went right. And he's brought out a book called All the Wrong Moves. It's permanent friendship, unfortunately. You're stuck with me. I will not diss that. We will come on to some of the wrong moves. But I just want to stay with this whole question of crypto donations. If you were a crypto billionaire, why might you give to the Reform Party in the UK? What might you be thinking? Well, I mean, it's a hedge.

17:10Let me talk very cynically for a second. If I was a crypto billionaire, I would not be giving money to Nigel Farage for many obvious regions. But if I was more cynical, I would want to hedge myself. I'd want to have his support should he rise to the prime ministership or that party take power in some way. And so they're probably copying the playbook from America, the sort of post-Citizens United America, where since January of 2010, when Justice Scalia rendered that decision, we're nine to one on political donations into political action committees, candidates to support policies. You know, it's the reason why we have chlorinated chicken, because they pay the money, right?

17:54You know, the chicken takes us back to another time, another decade. But just to say, but you understand my point. OK, so just to say this is a pay for play. Yeah, just to say the Citizens United, there was the Supreme Court judgment, which meant that there were no limits on donations to political parties. Your First Amendment right to dump as much money as you'd like to do a candidate or a policy. So just go back to the thing that you skirted over. You said if I was a crypto billionaire, I wouldn't be giving money to Nigel Farage. Why not? But dangerous guy. He has this form of nationalism that's pernicious.

18:29If you really study history, when countries move towards nationalism, it's usually a precursor to mass violence and war. And what we find is that we are way better together. But as we lose our living memory of war, you could read Barbara Tuchman's book, The Guns of August, or others. We go through cycles where our politicians don't remember the war or they weren't in the war and they don't remember why we have all of these great institutions that we set up after the war. And that leads to long term division. But if you're not thinking if you're a crypto billionaire who's not thinking about the war and nationalism, but you are thinking he's just offered a 10 percent tax rate to crypto, then it does become a whole lot more attractive, right?

19:15it does but again you got to be very careful about all that stuff because what's happening same thing is happening in america right there's an oligarchy circling around the trump administration they're feeding the trump administration and then they're getting back exactly what they want from the trump administration in terms of tax breaks and corporate subsidies and corporate welfare and things like that you know the great irony is the socialism is okay if it goes to the wealthy if it goes to the man on the street in America it's not okay so but yes if I'm super cynical and I want that 10 percent tax even though the society is under duress from a health care perspective social services and infrastructure perspective if I'm that cynical I want that but I'm I'm more in the Jensen Wang category uh Wong category from the Nvidia I'll pay the taxes no problem I'm a New York resident um I pay the highest taxes other than California and the country and don't I don't mind doing it.

20:09Can I just ask you something else on the crypto front? Because I've heard the leaders of reform going on the radio today talking about how with our tax regime for crypto, that will bring a very important industry to the UK. And I'm thinking I can I can picture a car plant with thousands of people working on a production line and all the rest of it. Yeah. If crypto is in the UK or crypto is in the Philippines or crypto is in wherever it happens to be. There's no industry that comes to Britain with it, is there? There is though, yeah, because you would pick up the tokenization, you'd pick up the transaction fees, it's the financial services economy.

20:49Think of sort of the growth that happened in the City of London after the Wall Streeters sort of... Big Bang. You had the Big Bang. So is he right then? So it is beneficial. Is Richard Tice right when he says they're giving to Britain because they see us on the verge of bankruptcy and they want to make it rich. I mean, is there an argument that, you know, legitimizing crypto and becoming more crypto friendly as a country would massively expand our growth? Okay, so here's the problem. I think, you know, remember, I'm in the crypto industry. So what I would say to you is that there's some nefarious elements to the crypto industry that give the whole industry a bad rap.

21:32But if you really want to understand what's going on, we're going to move to 24-7 markets, and the securities are actually going to be tokenized on the blockchain. So meaning you're going to trade stocks in the FTSE or the S &P 500 that are going to be linked and layered on the blockchain, so they'll have almost instantaneous transaction. As an example, if I go to sell my Bitcoin, it settles in a minute, and then the money is wired from my Bitcoin broker into my JP Morgan account in less than 10 minutes. That doesn't happen on Wall Street. It doesn't happen in the city of London. And so that's it.

22:08So the whole bells, the whole like start the market, close the market is gone. That would be gone. And you would have what's called perpetual trading. You'd also have lower fees for people. And you would also provide billions of people outside of the UK and the United States in other markets. If they don't have access to brokers, the opportunity to participate in the capital market. So if you're telling me that Great Britain wants to lead that, that's going to be very good for the financial services industry in Great Britain. But there are nefarious elements of the crypto industry that give it a bad name.

22:40But that's the part of the industry that I participate in. And I see that future. So, yes, it's not a car plant, but you'll have, you know, tens of thousands of people working in the United Kingdom. And they'll probably be working remotely, frankly, because they'll have that capability. Yeah. And when you look at Great Britain and you look at us in terms of crypto, are we lagging behind everywhere else? No, I wouldn't say that. I would say that your 60-year-olds in the country that are running the country from a financial and regulatory perspective don't want it because the banks don't want it because it's a threat to the banks.

23:16If I told you, you know, when I started on Wall Street in 1989, it was trade date plus five days. It's now trade date plus one day. What does that mean? If I buy a stock from Emily's account, it takes one day to settle before it arrives in my account. 37 years ago, it took five days to do that. If you want to tokenize that security, it'll take 10 minutes. And it'll also be done at a way lower cost. So this would be a tantamount to what happened in long distance, right? When I was here in the 80s at the London School of Economics to call my parents, it was$3 a minute. I could talk to them for five minutes for$15, 1985, which were worth more than today's dollars.

23:56Today, I can log into any internet cafe and I can call them for no cost. And so that's what's happening. I'm not sure when the last time you went to an internet cafe was. All right, well, I'm making the... Yeah, but you could have a WhatsApp call or a FaceTime call. Okay, so what we haven't really talked about is the nefarious side. But you're not that far behind, which is good news for the UK. Listen, I don't know what happened with this whole nom-dom thing. I don't know where you guys stand on it. And I don't want to opine on British politics because I'm not an expert. But what I generally find is when you're taxing super wealthy people, they have happy feet.

24:31They move around. You know, when they raise tax, I'll talk about America, when they raise taxes. You mean they're leaving? They leave. They leave. And so I'll give you an example. 2017, Trump cut the state and local income tax deduction. New York City and the surrounding area lost 500 ,000 people over a nine-year period of time. And where did they migrate to? They went to Texas, Nashville, Tennessee, and they went to Florida. Well, you've got a socialist mayor now in New York. You've got Mondani. People aren't leaving in their droves now. It's a separate topic. So Mondani is actually doing a reasonably good job.

25:06OK, I'm an objective person. And Mondani is doing what Mario Cuomo would have liked him to do. He campaigned in poetry and he's governing in prose. And so he's been very, very practical. The streets are clean. He gave Tisch, who's the commissioner, kept her on. The crime rates are very low. He's filling the potholes. He's a very practical politician. And so he has a 68, 69 percent approval rate. I mean, he's like Mark Carney. I mean, this guy is very popular and he deserves to be popular. And me as a New Yorker who did not support him because of the whole socialist rap, he's done a very good job of running things from the center.

25:48So let us just go back, because you talked about the nefarious side to crypto. And I guess why it's nefarious is because there is so little transparency. We don't see how the money changes hands. We can't trace it. It can work behind or subverting government policy. And that is a big deal. So let me push back on that because that's actually a misnomer. And you can, if you go to Mike Morrell, the former deputy to the CIA, he may remember Morrell, he carried the briefing book on 9-11 for George W. Bush. He wrote a white paper three years ago trying to dispel that misnomer. You can totally track it.

26:24If I have your wallet address, I can probably get access to your crypto. And in more than one occasion, the FBI has found the quote-unquote ransom money by just tracking it. It's easier to track it than cash U.S. dollars. So that's number one. That's the misnumber. But where I'm upset with the industry is what Trump did. Okay, so what Trump did was he created a meme coin, which is completely worthless. It's effectively a gambling token. And he rug-pulled his constituents, but then he also probably accepted money from foreigners through the coin. Rug-pulled means he charged people money to buy it.