Nigel Farage is just one strand in the tangle of rightwing politicians and crypto investors | John Harris

This coming Tuesday, the government’s representation of the people bill comes back to the House of Commons for its third reading. It bundles up a multitude of measures, including an extension of the franchise to 16- and 17-year-olds and welcome changes to voter registration. But thanks to the continuing furore around Nigel Farage and his extremely wealthy friends – such as the Thailand-based crypto-investor Christopher Harborne, who gave Farage a £5m “lottery win” personal gift and has donated in excess of £22m to Reform UK – the aspects of the legislation that have suddenly become its headline measures are focused on big-money donations.

The government has already implemented a moratorium – but only a moratorium – on political donations in cryptocurrencies, the encrypted digital assets that, to quote the Electoral Commission, “present particular challenges and risks in meeting electoral law requirements in identifying donors and ensuring they are permissible”. There is a new annual £100,000 limit on donations from British citizens living abroad. Other legislative moves will now take the form of amendments to the bill: they include new checks on whether companies making donations are above board by measuring their profit as well as their revenues, and a requirement for parliamentary candidates to declare any donation above £2,230 (although “personal gifts” will continue to be exempt).

There is also to be a somewhat pathetic cap on donations from people who have recently moved to the UK and become eligible to donate, which will limit them to £100,000 for their first year of residence. Labour backbenchers are reportedly poised with stronger amendments: Stella Creasy wants a universal cap at the same level, while others think it should be pegged at a million, and the Birmingham MP and Labour chair of the business select committee, Liam Byrne, is proposing a permanent ban on crypto donations.

Which brings us to the kind of people who Farage spends a great deal of time with: that increasingly powerful class of high-rollers, often positioned on the hard and far right, who deal and invest in crypto. In the more exclusive corners of London and New York – and such jurisdictions as Montenegro, El Salvador and Hong Kong– one or two may just glimpse a headline about developments in parliament on their phones and cackle at the parochial smallness of it all.

Their world, after all, threatens to dwarf most political developments on a small couple of islands off northern Europe. At its core is the support – and brazen personal enrichment – of the Trump administration, the constant hum of online transactions whose sheer scale is mind-boggling, and the sense of scores of countries rapidly reaching a political and economic fork in the road.

Last week I spoke with Oliver Bullough, the London-based writer and journalist whose most recent book is titled Everybody Loves Our Dollars. We talked first about Tether, the vastly lucrative operation – 12% of which is owned by Harborne – that specialises in so-called stablecoins, their value pegged to the dollar to avoid the wild price swings of regular cryptocurrencies. In 2025, it reported profits of more than $10bn. As Bullough puts it, it is now “the most profitable company per-employee that there has ever been”, busy “steamrolling the world” and increasingly amounting to “a private central bank”.

This is the bigger picture that is still overlooked: in the long wake of western governments handing the private sector whatever it fancied, cryptocurrencies simply represent the next step. “After electricity or water or whatever,” Bullough told me, “crypto is just the next one. It’s just money being privatised.”

This is one of the reasons why a man who could still be the next prime minister lionising the company and revelling in the generosity of one of its biggest investors is remarkable. “Tether is about to be valued as a $500bn company,” Farage enthused last year. “Stablecoins, crypto – this world is enormous. And I’ve been urging for years that London should embrace it.”

But Farage is only one small fish in the big pool where much larger politicians and crypto insiders both swim. Last year alone, Donald Trump raked in more than $1.4bn from crypto dealings. In the 2024 US election cycle, when Trump opened his campaign to donations in crypto and put out a press release claiming that Maga supporters would “build a crypto army moving the campaign to victory”, the crypto industry spent more than $245m. Once again favouring Republicans over Democrats, it has so far found around $190m to influence this year’s midterm elections, which (obviously) includes opposing anti-crypto candidates. That amounts to over a third of total corporate election spending.

Another exemplary story, closer to home: Ben Delo is the highly influential co-founder of BitMex, a crypto exchange and derivatives trading platform. Like Farage’s embattled de facto chief of staff George Cottrell, he has a colourful history: in early 2022, Delo and his BitMex co-founder both pleaded guilty in the US to failing to establish and maintain an anti-money laundering programme. As well as having to pay a $10m civil penalty in connection with a parallel case, Delo was sentenced to 30 months’ probation, but last year, he became one of a long line of crypto insiders to be pardoned by Trump.

He has a tangle of links to rightwing UK politics, and earlier this year made a £4m donation to Reform. His self-professed target is political correctness, but he also fits snugly into that light-footed international elite who lobby extremely hard for politicians to open their gates to the anarcho-capitalism that crypto and digital currencies embody. Just as Farage claims the government’s new donation restrictions are the stuff of a “communist country”, Delo damns them as “tinpot” – and has pledged to move back to the UK from Hong Kong (Harborne has made similar noises) to get around them. He wants others with “deep pockets” to rally round. “Let’s build a war chest and win back our country,” he says.

In the midst of the farce of the looming Clacton byelection, fresh allegations over the weekend about Cottrell personally meeting some of Reform’s office costs without his contributions being declared, and police questioning him and his mother about donations to Reform, it is easy to think that Farage’s political stock is plunging. But whatever happens, the new British right will survive in some form, and its ties to the crypto world point to the kind of UK it would try to create, given the chance. Particularly on matters of finance, the state would hugely shrink, and the reinvention of London as a crypto capital could threaten to erode the barrier between crime and business. If it all ever happens, it will make rightwing Brexiters’ visions of London as “Singapore-on-Thames” look like the dream of moderate centrists. And crypto donations, if they were ever allowed, would make that kind of country much more likely.

Right now, in fact, that prospect is one small part of a perfectly possible and completely nightmarish future for economies and societies across the world. And contrary to the Faragists’ habitual implication that they are involved in some kind of huge anti-establishment jape, it is deadly, deadly serious.

John Harris is a Guardian columnist

This post was originally published on this site.