With the May 7th elections looming there’s a lot of noise about each party’s national policies, including hatchet jobs and scaremongering from all sides, most of which has little to do with local councils.

Every time public services deteriorate while taxes rise, the same question gets asked but are never properly answered: where is the money going?

Here are the facts.

Note on the diagram: the figures shown are illustrative ranges based on the best available public spending data. That the slices add up to more than £1 at their upper limits is not an error, rather it reflects the reality that the claims on every pound of tax revenue, combined, exceed what is collected. Frontline services receive what remains after the other claims are met.

What comes in

The UK government collects around £1.1 trillion a year in taxes via income tax, national insurance, VAT, corporation tax, and the rest. Council tax adds roughly £40bn more, collected locally.

Before a single teacher is paid, a pothole filled or a hospital appointment kept, significant portions of that money are already spoken for.

The first claim on your taxes: debt interest

The single largest non-negotiable outgoing is debt interest — the cost of servicing what the government has previously borrowed.

In 2022-23 it exceeded £100bn for the first time, reaching £120bn, a post-war record, equivalent to 10.8% of all government revenue. The OBR’s current forecast puts it at £111bn in 2025-26, representing 8.3% of total public spending. (OBR, March 2024 Economic and Fiscal Outlook; OBR debt interest page, updated 2025.)

For context: the entire schools budget for England runs to roughly £60bn. Debt interest costs roughly twice that before a lesson is taught.

The decisions that created this debt were made by identifiable governments at identifiable moments. Emergency borrowing after the 2008 financial crash was the Labour government responding to a global banking failure originating in the private sector. Debt continued rising through the 2010s under the Coalition and Conservative governments, not because borrowing increased sharply but because the growth forecast to service existing debt did not materialise. Covid required another borrowing surge in 2020-21 under the Johnson government, responding to a genuine emergency, albeit not in genuine ways. Then in 2022-23, interest payments tripled, which requires a separate explanation.

Why debt interest tripled

The UK holds an unusually high proportion of inflation-linked government bonds, called index-linked gilts. As of December 2025, 25.2% of UK wholesale debt is index-linked, which is roughly twice the proportion of the next highest G7 country. (DMO, Debt Management Report 2026-27.)

That structure means when inflation rises, debt servicing costs rise automatically and immediately. The OBR’s own figures show a 1 percentage point rise in RPI increases debt interest payments by £5.9bn in the same year. When RPI hit a 40-year high in 2022-23, payments tripled. (OBR, March 2024 EFO sensitivity box.)

Our inference: Brexit contributed to the inflationary conditions of 2021-23 through trade friction, labour market tightening, and a weaker pound raising import costs. The OBR does not isolate Brexit as the primary cause of that inflation spike, instead they attribute it primarily to global energy prices and supply chain disruption, but Brexit’s structural effects were running concurrently: a smaller economy, importing the same goods at higher cost through a weaker currency. No single mainstream news media source makes the full causal chain explicit. We are connecting confirmed OBR components, not citing a single document.

What is not inference is that the OBR has confirmed, and re-confirmed in 2023 and 2024, that Brexit reduces UK long-run productivity by 4% relative to remaining in the EU, reflecting increased non-tariff barriers on UK-EU trade. (OBR Brexit analysis page; OBR March 2023 EFO box.) In an economy the size of the UK’s, a 4% long-run productivity reduction translates to roughly £100bn in lost annual output. That is a derived calculation from the OBR figure, labelled as such.

The second claim on your taxes: a decade of spending reductions

Between 2009-10 and 2016-17, real-terms departmental spending per person fell from £6,460 to £5,460, a reduction of £1,000 per person. (IFS, Briefing Note 166, 2017.) By 2022-23, spending outside the Department of Health was still 21% lower per person in real terms than in 2010-11. (IFS, October 2022.)

These are measured outturns, rather than projections.

Those decisions were made by the Coalition government from 2010 and continued by successive Conservative governments. The stated rationale was reducing the deficit inherited from Labour. Whether that rationale was correct is contested, while the spending reductions are not.

Basically, two major financial reports show how government decisions significantly cut welfare spending:

• 2010–2016: The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) found that policy changes alone (ignoring things like an ageing population) cut spending by £16.7 billion.

• 2016–2021: The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) estimated that further Conservative policies cut another £11.8 billion.

What you get if you vote for each party

These are the economic directions each party has set out. The independent assessments noted are from the IFS, OBR, or Resolution Foundation unless otherwise stated.

Conservatives: Lower taxes and tighter spending — independent analysts assess this as meaning real-terms reductions to most unprotected public services.

Labour: Fiscal rules held broadly steady, limited new spending, slow incremental improvement to services — no major structural change to the spending envelope in the short term.

Liberal Democrats: Higher taxes on wealthier households and investment income, directed at NHS, social care, and housing — independently assessed as more fully costed than most party platforms.

Green Party: Large-scale public investment and green infrastructure funded by substantial tax increases on high earners and wealth — the most ambitious spending platform on offer; independent costing is partial.

Reform UK: Large income tax cuts and reduced regulation, funded by the party’s claim of eliminating government waste — the IFS and independent analysts have found the arithmetic does not currently add up without significant additional borrowing or cuts not yet specified.

SNP (Scotland only): Higher devolved social spending and alignment with EU single market standards — long-term economic prospectus tied to Scottish independence, which remains unresolved.

Independents: No unified platform — local track record and stated priorities are the only available basis for assessment.

Note on this section: these summaries describe what each party’s published position implies in practice. They are not endorsements. Voters in England will not see SNP on their ballot paper. Reform UK, the Greens, and independent candidates have variable local election coverage so check your specific ballot.

What this means when you vote on May 7th

Most of what we can see deteriorating, such as libraries, children’s services, social care, road surfaces, etc is delivered by local government.

Local authorities cannot borrow for day-to-day spending. They cannot print money or run deficits. When central government reduces grant funding, which it did substantially after 2010, councils either raise council tax, cut services, or both.

Voting on May 7th means voting for who runs your local council - what to prioritise within the available budget, how contracts are managed and how planning decisions are made. All are consequential choices that affect everyone’s daily life.

The problem is the budget envelope itself is set in Westminster. Councils cannot resolve a £111bn annual debt interest bill, they cannot reverse a decade of real-terms spending reductions and they cannot undo a structural productivity loss that the OBR has confirmed three times.

The local ballot paper does not contain the decisions that created the constraints but it does gives voters a chance to decide who manages them.

What to Watch

The most important thing to watch is whether any party canvassing before May 7th acknowledges the structural ceiling on council spending or campaigns as if councils hold powers they do not have. We recommend you check your local candidates campaign promises against their party’s actual stated policies and the party’s previous voting records on the subject as recorded on theyworkforyou.com.

We understand that, for many, there is no one political party that can deliver everything people need as well as want. Our recommendation is to use available online resources that help you chooses your voting direction in the broader sense by policy rather than party in the first instance, using sites such as I Side With or Vote Compass. This should also give you a clear indication of who you do not want running your local council, which may mean you’re best bet is to vote tactically. Online resources for your area are available, such as whocanivotefor.co.uk. We also reccommend you vet your candidates for yourself as best you can as it seems the parties don’t always do their due diligence.

Motion A105, titled “Zionism is Racism,” was proposed by Lubna Speitan for the Green Party England and Wales Spring Conference 2026. It defines Zionism as a racist, settler-colonial ideology underpinning Israel’s apartheid system and calls for the party to declare itself anti-Zionist, reject IHRA/JDA antisemitism definitions, support a single democratic Palestinian state in historic Palestine, affirm Palestinian resistance rights, Israel BDS/embargoes, de-proscribe Palestine Action, and release Palestinian prisoners.

The full motion with references can be read here: hurryupharry

Full Motion Text

The complete text, extracted from the official PDF version published by opponents (Harry’s Place/Hurry Up Harry blog), spans 22 pages including synopsis, resolves, actions, briefing, and references. Here’s the core excerpt:

Motion Text:

“Zionism is a political ideology which called for the creation – and, now it exists, the continuity – of an ethnonationalist Jewish State in historic Palestine to the exclusion and/or domination of the non-Jewish population. The real, material manifestation of Zionism has been the historic and ongoing dehumanisation, displacement, dispossession, disenfranchisement and destruction of Palestinians. This is based upon European settler-colonial systems of domination and oppression, which has also created racial hierarchies between Jews of different ethnicities in Palestine.

The practice of Zionist ideology, promoting ethnonationalism, privileges one ethnic group on the basis of the subjugation of others. Zionism is Israel’s foundational ideology. Zionism has created and seeks to maintain – and where possible – expand, an apartheid regime between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, designed to cement the supremacy of one group, Jews, over another, Palestinians. As such, Zionism is racist.

This motion is aimed at the political ideology and practice of Zionism, as defined, and not at the religious or ethnic background of those who may identify as Zionists. Not all Jews are Zionists and not all Zionists are Jews. Rejecting Zionism and supporting the liberation of the Palestinian people is not discriminatory against Jewish people. Nor is it discriminatory to support the establishment of a single democratic Palestinian State between the Jordan river and the Mediterranean Sea with equal rights for all.

Zionism is fundamentally incompatible with anti-racist principles, equality and justice.

CONFERENCE RESOLVES THAT:

1. The Green Party declares itself to be an anti-Zionist party.

2. The Green Party rejects attempts to normalise the racist subjugation and oppression of Palestinians; to equate anti-Zionism with antisemitism; to deny or minimise Palestinian human rights; to create hierarchies of racism; and to normalise or attempt to justify apartheid, ethnic cleansing or genocide. With this we reject the adoption or use in frameworks of the non-legally binding IHRA and JDA definitions of antisemitism (or alike), which have been weaponised to silence legitimate criticisms of the actions of the state of Israel. We affirm that definitions of anti-Jewish discrimination should not equate Jewish identity with Zionist ideology or political practice. As with any ethnicity or faith group, no single political ideology should be ascribed to an entire people.

3. Following from Motion E05, which affirmed that Israel is an apartheid State committing genocide, and Motion E07 supporting reparations and accountability, the Green Party supports the establishment of a single democratic Palestinian State in all of historic Palestine with Jerusalem as its capital, equal rights for all, and the right of return for Palestinians and their descendants.

4. The Green Party affirms the Palestinian people’s inalienable right to self-determination, including the right of the Palestinian people to resistance and liberation from Israeli occupation, domination and subjugation, and acknowledges that the struggle to achieve that liberation by all available means under international law is legitimate.

5. The Green Party heeds the call from Palestinian civil society to impose broad boycotts and implement divestment initiatives against Israel similar to those applied to South Africa in the apartheid era, and calls upon the United Kingdom Government to impose full embargoes and sanctions against Israel.

6. The Green Party calls for the release of all Palestinian prisoners of conscience (including Marwan Barghouti), the end of the use of administrative detention of Palestinians by Israel, and the treatment of Palestinian combatants in accordance with international humanitarian law, including in particular those provisions dealing with prisoners of war in the First Additional Protocol of the 1977 amendments to the Four Genevan Conventions of 1949 relating to the Protection of Victims of International Armed Conflicts.

7. The Green Party calls for the removal of Palestine Action from the list of proscribed organisations in Schedule 2 to the Terrorism Act 2000 (i.e. de-proscription).

8. The Green Party calls for the release of all prisoners detained for non-violent direct action in support of Palestinian rights and the end of the genocide, apartheid and the illegal occupation of Palestine and supports the demands of the Prisoners for Palestine.

ACTIONS FOR THE PARTY TO TAKE:

1. This motion will be incorporated into the Green Party’s Record of Policy Statements as appropriate and promoted in accordance with our rules and procedures.

2. Zionism, as defined above, will be treated as any other form of racism, and this motion will be implemented by the Anti-Racism Policy Working Group as appropriate and in accordance with its ordinary practice.

3. The positions on international policy within this motion will be implemented by the International Policy Working Group as appropriate and in accordance with its ordinary practice. We affirm our commitment to explicitly opposing Zionism in our internal and external communications going forward.”hurryupharry

Additional Context

The A105 motion's 22-page briefing paper (pages 6-22) cites Adalah's list of 65 discriminatory Israeli laws, ICJ findings on apartheid and genocide, various UN resolutions, and critiques the IHRA/JDA antisemitism definitions as weaponised to silence any criticism. It also supports de-proscribing Palestine Action. Backed by 170+ co-signatories including Palestinians, Global Majority Greens, and some Jewish Greens dissenters, the full text appears only on partisan sites like pro-Palestine Action Network and opponents such as Jewish Chronicle/Hurry Up Harry—no tier 1 sources (BBC, Reuters) have reprinted it, and official Green Party policy records remain unconfirmed.

On Easter Sunday 2026, the President of the United States posted on Truth Social demanding that Iran “Open the F***in’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell.” This came after weeks of threats to bomb power plants, bridges, and water desalination infrastructure, threats that more than 100 international law experts have formally warned would constitute war crimes under the Geneva Convention. It also came after a pattern that has become structurally familiar - set a deadline, miss it, extend it, reset and escalate.

Most news coverage has adopted one of two frames for Trump’s behaviour, either ‘strategic unpredictability’ or ‘cognitive decline’, but neither gets to the root of the real problem, which is the President’s underlying, lifelong psychopathy. A clinical psychologist who observed Donald Trump across five decades offered a precise account in 2020 but the findings were never properly reported.

Mary Lea Trump holds a doctorate in clinical psychology from the Derner Institute of Advanced Psychological Studies at Adelphi University. She has taught graduate courses in psychopathology, developmental psychology, and trauma. She has published academic work through Columbia University Press. She is also Donald Trump’s niece, which gave her something no other clinician assessing him can ever access - five decades of direct, longitudinal family observation across private settings unavailable to any outside researcher.

In Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man (2020), Dr Trump states her conclusion plainly. “I have no problem calling Donald a narcissist — he meets all nine criteria as outlined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders”, adding “This is far beyond garden-variety narcissism; Donald is not simply weak, his ego is a fragile thing that must be bolstered every moment because he knows deep down that he is nothing of what he claims to be.”

The developmental account she provides is specific. Donald Trump’s father, Fred Trump Sr., operated without empathy and treated emotional need as weakness. His mother was, in Dr Trump’s clinical assessment, unstable and self-absorbed, present when it suited her but absent when her children needed her. The household economy was simple - self-worth equalled financial worth, and there was only winners and losers. Donald Trump watched his father systematically destroy the spirit of his older brother Freddy, a more sensitive personality who didn’t fit what Fred Sr. required. Donald, however, learned to be what his father rewarded. “The only reason Donald escaped the same fate,” she writes, “is that his personality served his father’s purpose. That’s what sociopaths do: they co-opt others and use them toward their own ends.”

The result, in her clinical account, was a personality rigidified early on. “Donald today is much as he was at three years old: incapable of growing, learning, or evolving.” She raises the likelihood of additional diagnoses beyond Narcissistic Personality Disorder, pointing toward antisocial personality disorder, the formal category covering chronic disregard for others’ rights and what is commonly called sociopathy, as well as dependent personality disorder, characterised by the inability to tolerate being alone with failure and an excessive need for constant external validation.

The clinical picture she assembles with NPD as the foundation, antisocial traits, paranoid orientation, a zero-sum worldview of winners and losers formed in childhood and never revised, describes what clinicians in the tradition of Otto Kernberg identify as malignant narcissism. This is the most severe configuration of narcissistic pathology, incorporating NPD, antisocial behaviour, paranoia, and ego-syntonic aggression (aggression used when they think it will serve their immediate needs). Although she does not use that label directly, the picture she documents fits it quite precisely.

Yale forensic psychiatrist Bandy X. Lee, who edited The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump (a collection of assessments by mental health professionals) backed Dr Trump’s conclusions directly, saying, “Any honest and competent mental health professional has come to the same conclusion.” The word “has” carries a lot of weight in that sentence. It’s not an opinion that they would, it’s that they have.

Joshua D. Miller, a professor at the University of Georgia who researches personality disorders including narcissism said in a July 10th 2020 CBC News article on Donald, “’Prototypical’ doesn’t describe the degree to which [Trump] meets the criteria for Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Many of us who study it say that if we [described a character like his in a paper] other peer reviewers would say, ‘You’ve made up too cartoonish of a case.’ They wouldn’t believe it would be possible. That’s how incredibly well he fits those symptoms.” added that he had been using Trump as a case study in academic presentations since the mid-2000s, long before Trump entered politics. The CBC article is available to read here. Note the editorial framing.

Our inference: the behavioural pattern visible in the Iran crisis — the grandiosity, the rage when defied, the serial deadline extensions that sidestep the humiliation of an unmet ultimatum, the affective enjoyment visible in the language of the threats themselves — is consistent with Mary Trump’s 2020 assessment. We are not offering a diagnosis. We are noting that her framework has a precise explanation for what we are watching in 2026.

The American Psychiatric Association has a guideline, called the Goldwater Rule, to prohibit clinicians from offering professional opinions on public figures they have not personally examined. It exists for legitimate reasons and was introduced after the politically motivated smearing of a presidential candidate, Republican Barry Goldwater, by Fact magazine as mentally unfit, using anonymous psychiatrist quotes (New York Times, 18 October 1964).

Mary Trump has argued that a standard clinical intake would have given her less information than her decades of direct family observation. The Goldwater Rule was designed to prevent thin inference from public behaviour, but Dr Trump’s assessment was built on the opposite - direct, private access accumulated across a lifetime in a setting where Donald Trump was being himself amongst the family that shaped him, as opposed to sitting in a clinician’s office with Donald controlling the narrative.

This distinction was available to any editor commissioning coverage of the book but it was almost universally ignored.

The New York Times called the book a “revealing memoir.” The BBC called it a “tell-all book.” The LA Times acknowledged her clinical credentials in passing, then led with it being an “exposé.” The media framing of the book’s genre was as an exposé rather than a clinical insight. One of the NYT’s own reviewers noted, almost in passing, that the book contained a “psychologist’s vocabulary” and then moved on.

Genre assignment is not a neutral thing, nor is it an accident. It determines which desk handles the piece, which questions get asked and which aspects of the work get highlighted in the press coverage. A clinical assessment by a credentialled psychologist with five decades of direct access to the subject is primary source material on the psychology of one of the most powerful men on the planet. A “family tell-all” is a gossipy cultural event that can be dismissed almost out of hand.

As a result of the genre framing the inheritance dispute mentioned in the book was foregrounded consistently by the Times, Politico, the Washington Post and more, ahead of the clinical argument, with the reliable effect of activating the reader’s prior assumption that family accounts are little more than score-settling. The clinical substance became almost invisible once the disgruntled relative frame was established.

Our inference: this was not a coordinated editorial decision. It’s how political journalism handles uncomfortable conclusions. The disgruntled relative frame is familiar, manageable, and, critically, requires no engagement with the clinical substance. Engaging the substance would have meant either validating a serious account of a president’s psychology or dismantling Mary Trump’s clinical assessment on it’s merits. Given the Trump family’s history of litigation they took the most prudent option.

Before any of this reached readers, the Trump family went to court to stop it being published. Robert Trump filed for a preliminary injunction on June 23rd, 2020, in New York Supreme Court, Dutchess County, citing a non-disclosure agreement Mary had signed as part of the 2001 inheritance settlement. A temporary restraining order was granted that was narrowed on appeal and lifted on July 13th, one day before publication.

The injunction attempt was covered by the Times and the BBC but within days it had been absorbed into the book’s promotional narrative, with the legal drama of the injunction becoming a marketing angle.

Gap: no tier-1 outlet appears to have investigated the legal strategy and its implications for public-interest publishing as a standalone story.

Dr Trump’s clinical conclusions were never counter-argued on their merits and no peer-reviewed rebuttal was ever published. The book sold 1.35 million copies in its first week and was treated thereafter as a cultural moment, not a clinical document, and dropped out of serious political journalism almost entirely.

The media’s preferred alternative, Trump’s cognitive decline, carries a specific implication. It suggests the problem is recent, medical, age-related and something that happened to Donald Trump. A personality disorder however, is lifelong, structural and something Donald Trump fundamentally is. The distinction is important because one framing produces a question about capacity and the other produces a question about character. The decline frame is more comfortable precisely because it is time-limited whereas the bad character frame has no such comfort.

Our inference: the combination of editorial genre misclassification, motivated-source framing and legal pressure produced an outcome that served a specific interest in keeping a precise clinical account of a president’s psychology outside the register of serious political journalism. We hold that as inference, clearly stated. What is documented fact is that the account exists, that it has never been refuted, and that it has been consistently underweighted by the news outlets with the reach to put it in front of the public, where we believe it should be.

What to Watch

The problem being avoided is that the decline frame and the malignant narcissism frame are not competing explanations, they go hand in hand. Our inference is that understanding their relationship is essential to reading what comes next.

Malignant narcissism produces a specific and predictable response to what clinicians call narcissistic injury, or the experience of the narcissist being defied, humiliated or shown to be less than omnipotent. The response is escalation, reassertion, and the displacement of accountability onto the target. Iran shooting down a US aircraft after Trump declared air dominance is precisely this kind of injury. The serial deadline extensions follow the pattern. The malignant narcissist cannot back down as that would be submission, but equally they cannot follow through if the outcome is uncertain, because failure would confirm the unworthiness that their grandiosity exists to conceal, so the threat is extended, the language intensifies and the cycle repeats, otherwise the cover is blown.

Cognitive decline does not introduce this dynamic but it does exacerbate it. What the neuropsychiatric evidence suggests is that frontal lobe deterioration specifically degrades the executive functions, such as impulse control, social judgment and reality-testing, that would partially hold in check an underlying personality disorder. Our inference: what we are seeing is not a man becoming someone different through ill health, it is a man becoming more fully, and with fewer constraints, what he has always been through ill health. According to Dr Mary Trump what he has always been is a dangerous narcissist.

The paranoid component of malignant narcissism typically intensifies under sustained pressure and loyalty demands become more absolute. The circle of trusted figures narrows and perceived betrayal is met with disproportionate response. The sadistic component, the visible enjoyment of dominance and fear, does not diminish as other cognitive capacities decline. Indeed it can become more uninhibited.

In a military conflict without a clear resolution mechanism, such as the current war with Iran, these dynamics carry specific consequences. A commander whose psychology cannot tolerate the appearance of capitulation, whose cognitive constraints on impulsivity are weakening, and who has surrounded himself with figures who have learned not to say no to him is the configuration the clinical record of Dr Trump describes. We state clearly that this is inference from a documented clinical framework applied to observed public behaviour. We also state again that no serious alternative framework has been offered that accounts for the observed pattern more precisely.

Mary Trump’s assessment has been available since 2020. The media’s institutional preference meant it was never given the weight the evidence warranted and the cost of that preference is now being felt worldwide and at grave cost.

The Rycroft Review is an official UK government report that looked at how foreign money and big donors can influence UK politics, especially around elections and national security decisions. It was written by Philip Rycroft, who was a senior civil servant, and it makes 17 concrete suggestions for how the law and political‑finance rules should be tightened. The review informs part of the Representation of the People Bill 2026.

What the Rycroft Review is for

The review’s main aim is to stop foreign governments, shady companies, or very wealthy individuals from using big donations, crypto, or hidden structures to buy influence in UK politics. It wants to make sure political funding is transparent, fair, and harder to abuse, especially when it may affect national security.

What it recommends

1. Limit donations from British voters living abroad

   • The review says the UK should put an annual cap on donations from overseas voters (Brits living outside the UK).

   • This stops a small number of very rich expat donors from dominating party funding.

2. Change the rules on company donations

   • Currently, companies can give huge amountst of money to parties every year. The review suggests that companies should only be allowed to donate roughly what they earn in after‑tax profits, and not more than that.

   • In simple terms if a company makes £10 million in profit, it cannot give tens of millions in donations without breaking the rules.

3. Ban political donations made in cryptocurrency

   • The review wants the government to ban donations in crypto because they are hard to trace.

   • The ban would only be lifted if the government and the regulator are satisfied that crypto can be controlled and monitored properly.

4. Blood‑test the source of donations (the “know your donor” rules)

   • Parties would have to do proper checks on who is giving them money, very much like banks do customer‑due‑diligence checks.

   • The idea is to stop hidden money coming through shell companies, offshore trusts, or other complex structures.

5. Make non‑party campaigners follow the same rules

   • Groups that campaign around elections but are not officially parties, called “non‑party campaigners”, would have to use permissible donors and report their spending just like parties do.

   • This stops people using these back‑door groups to spend huge sums without being flagged.

6. Create a code of conduct for political parties

   • The Electoral Commission would work with parties to write a non‑binding code of conduct on how they handle money, foreign influence, and ethics.

   • This is more about political pressure and standards than hard law, but it sets clearer expectations.

7. Force parties to report in a standard, digital format

   • Parties would have to submit their financial returns in a standard digital format, so that the regulator and the public can easily compare where the money is coming from.

8. Give the Electoral Commission more power to ask questions

   • The review wants the Commission to be able to demand information from anyone who might hold data relevant to political finance, not just the parties themselves.

   • It would also be able to ask other agencies (like the police) for information more easily.

9. Create a special police unit for political‑finance crimes

   • The review suggests setting up a dedicated police unit that focuses on complex cases of electoral fraud and foreign interference in politics.

   • This would be a specialist team, not just ordinary police handling these cases when they have time.

10. Lower the legal bar and raise penalties for crimes

    • For some offences, the review says the court should only need “reasonable cause to suspect” that someone broke the rules, instead of needing very strong proof.

    • It also wants longer sentences and bigger fines, to make the rules more serious and to deter offenders. This would also unlock greater investigative powers.

11. Put hostile‑state online interference higher on the government’s list

    • The review says government should treat foreign‑state online interference such as fake news, bots, paid‑for ads etc as a top‑level threat, with clear responsibility for senior ministers and officials.

12. Tighten rules on online political ads

    • Foreign‑funded political ads on social media and websites should be banned outright, and all political ads should clearly show who paid for them and when.

13. Remove VAT exemptions for foreign‑based lobbying groups

    • The Lobbying Act should be changed so that foreign‑based organisations no longer get a VAT exemption, which currently helps them lobby more cheaply.

14. Widen the Ethics and Integrity Commission’s remit

    • The review says the Commission, which oversees lobbying and ethics, should also look at other channels for foreign money into the political system, not just formal lobbying.

15. Add a senior civil servant in charge of protecting democracy

    • One Permanent Secretary (a top‑level civil servant) should be put in charge of protecting UK democracy, coordinating the response to foreign interference, disinformation, and abuse of the political‑finance system.

What is likely to happen

• The most likely measures to be taken up by the government are the £100,000 cap on overseas elector donations and the ban on crypto donations, because the government has already said it will legislate for those.

• The tighter rules on company donations and the profit‑based test are popular with watchdogs but face political pushback, so they may be watered down.

• Stronger powers for the Electoral Commission, a special police unit, and lower legal bars for criminal cases are good chances, but they depend on Parliament agreeing to give the regulator and the police more money and authority.

The Rycroft Review

The Representation of the People Bill is a new UK government bill that aims to change how political donations and campaign finance work in UK elections. It is being introduced as part of the Rycroft Review, which looked at how foreign money and big donations can influence UK politics.

What the bill is for

The bill’s main goal is to make political donations and spending clearer, stricter, and harder for foreign or otherwise shady money to control UK politics. It focuses on:

• Who can give money to parties and candidates.

• How much they can give.

• How and when parties must report that money.

• How the Electoral Commission can check whether parties are following the rules.

What it proposes

1. Cap on donations from overseas voters

   • The bill would put a £100,000 yearly limit on donations from people who are British citizens living abroad.

   • This means no one voting overseas can give more than £100,000 per year to UK political parties, even if they are very rich.

2. Ban on crypto donations

   • The bill would ban political donations made in cryptocurrency.

   • The idea is that crypto can be hard to trace, so banning it reduces the risk that foreign or hidden actors can secretly fund UK politics.

3. Tighter rules on big-company donations

   • The bill would change the “corporate‑donor test” so that large companies can only give roughly what they earn in after‑tax profits, not whatever they want.

   • In simple terms: if a company earns £10 million in profit, it would not be able to give tens of millions in political donations without breaking the rules.

4. Stronger powers for the Electoral Commission

   • The Commission would get more power to ask questions and demand information from any person or organisation that may be involved in political funding.

   • It would also be easier for the Commission to open investigations and act faster when it suspects something wrong.

5. Better reporting and transparency

   • Parties would have to submit their financial reports in a standardised digital format, so the public and the media can read and compare donations more easily.

   • The Commission would give parties regular updates on the risks of foreign interference, so they know what to watch out for.

6. Harsher penalties for illegal donations and breaches

   • The bill would lower the legal test for some offences so that judges need less proof to convict people who break the rules.

   • It would also allow longer sentences and bigger fines, to act as a stronger warning to anyone trying to misuse political money.

7. Police unit for political‑finance crimes

   • The government is considering creating a special police unit that focuses on crimes linked to political donations and foreign interference.

   • This would be a dedicated team investigating dodgy money in politics instead of ordinary police dealing with it part‑time.

What is likely to happen

• The £100,000 cap on overseas donors and the ban on crypto donations are the most likely parts of the bill to pass, because the government has already publicly committed to them.

• The tighter rules on company donations and the profit‑based test face more debate, so MPs may change them or water them down before the bill becomes law.

• Enhanced powers for the Electoral Commission and the idea of a special police unit are widely supported by watchdogs but depend on Parliament approving the money and legal changes.

Representation of the People Bill 2026