Network mapping: Reform and surrounding infrastructure

Cryptocurrency, fossil fuels, mining and metals, the dark money ATM and aristocracy

Conclusion of the last mapping exercise

Stripped away, added in Paul Marshalls Marshall Wace which holds £1.8billion in fossil fuel shares.

Reforms largest donor is Christopher Harborne, in fact his donation of £9million was the single largest living donation ever made to a UK party. In total he has provided over £13million to Reform. Harborne owns QinetiQ and is involved in cryptocurrencies.

It should be noted that crytocurrencies were one of Epstein and Thiel’s shared goals that they collaborated on, with the apparent aim of replacing central banking. Epstein also discussed with Bannon how cryptocurrencies could be used to conceal donations to political allies.

Property developer Nick Candy, Reform’s treasurer and a long time associate of Farage appears in the Epstein files, emails reveal discussions about meetings in regards to property deals.

Through his venture fund, Candy Ventures Candy has invested in various technology and digital media companies, which often intersect with fintech and emerging digital assets. In 2021, Nick Candy announced he would accept cryptocurrencies for a £175 million penthouse he was selling at the One Hyde Park development in London.

Zia Yusuf has made embracing cryptocurrencies a key Reform policy with ideas around creating a sovereign wealth fund that would include cryptocurrencies. Reform is also the only political party to allow donations in the form of cryptocurrencies.

David Lilley and Mark Thompson are large Reform donors who are actively engaged with Reform and have set a fundraising target of raising £25million to support. Both have considerable business interests in mining and metal trading.

Lilley and Thompson are also also funding the Centre for a Better Britain (CFABB), a new right wing think tank modelled on the Heritage Foundation. The Heritage Foundation is one of the most influential right wing think tanks in the US, often described as a key pillar of the Koch Network its leadership including it’s president Kevin Roberts were instrumental in the writing of Project 2025. Roberts is also heavily involved in the National Conservatism movement.

CFABB is being led by James Orr.

Its starting to look like Orr will be driving Reform’s policy platform. While Farage is willing to play to the Christian Nationalist crowd, Orr is a fully signed up ideologue as a core organiser of NatCon and board member of the Edmund Burke Foundation.

The Edmund Burke Foundation's funding comes from the Donors Trust, the infamous “dark money ATM” of the radical right. Hedge fund manager and leading Republican donor Thomas D Klingenstein is another funder, he is also chairman of the Claremont Institute, a think tank associated with some of the more extreme elements of the MAGA movement, and one of the key organisations behind Project 2025. The Claremont Institute was heavily implicated in efforts to overturn the 2020 US Presidential Election results and the storming of Capitol Hill.

Charles Haywood, formerly a shampoo magnate turned far-right blogger, is chair of the Edmund Burke Foundation and has appeared on a number of Claremont Institute podcasts.

The Edmund Burke Foundation has also recieved funding from the Common Sense Society (CSS) a US organisation with lots of Hungarian ties and European chapters. The CSS is led by Marion Smith, formerly of the Heritage Foundation, James Orr and Douglas Murray are also involved as is Sophie Scruton. CSS has gone quiet in recent years, its last accounts filing was in 2023, however the role the CSS fulfilled seems to have been taken up by the Roger Scruton Legacy Foundation (RSLF) which is funded by Viktor Orban's MCC think tank with money raised through MOL Group from Russian oil. RSLF has provided funding to Toby Young's Free Speech Union.

The map is starting to get a bit overly busy so i’m taking away a few points to make space. One of the issues with mapping the radical right is that there are so many connections between individuals and organisations that exercises like this have to be simplified for the sake of clarity.

The map allows us to see how money from fossil fuels and raw resource extraction, and from anonymous right-wing trusts, are used to develop the infrastructure of think tanks, media, and headline grabbing legal challenges. While helping to amplify and build on messaging, these organisations provide positions and platforms for those involved. Organisations like the Roger Scruton Legacy Foundation, Common Sense Society and the Edmund Burke Foundation also offer training and education camps and courses to create a conveyor belt of commentators, contrarians and culture warriors.

Reform sits in the centre of a web, howver much of this infrastructure wasn't built specifically for Reform, it was built to create the policy space that Reform is moving to inhabit. This is why Farage has flirted with anti-vaxxers and started questioning abortion limits, he might not believe in these policies but he needs to play to the radical right agenda or risk some of this infrastructure turning its support towards the stalking horse of Rupert Lowe's Restore which sits further to the right of Reform and has the backing of Elon Musk.

James Orr taking up the role of head of policy will go a long way to shoring up support from the radical right infrastructure, as he is likely to seek to create the UK equivalent of Project 2025.

There are other points around Farage that I haven’t added to this map, such as Reform's former Welsh leader Nathan Gill who is now living in a prison cell for taking bribes from Russians, or Sasan Ghandehari the Irainian businessman who spent £50,000 to send Farage to Davos as their personal advisor.

Or Fiona Cottrell, the aristocrat who donated £750,000 to Reform, and whose son George Cottrell is a close associate of Farage as an advisor and fundraiser for Reform, while being a convicted felon for money laundering.

Further Reading