Top UK lawmakers push to ban political donations made in crypto

Seven senior UK lawmakers have urged Prime Minister Keir Starmer to ban the use of crypto for political donations, arguing the assets help obscure foreign interference.

Labour Party MPs who chair various parliamentary committees asked the government in a letter on Sunday to include a ban on crypto donations in an elections bill set to be introduced later this month, according to reports in The Observer and The Guardian.

Business and trade committee chair Liam Byrne, one of the letter’s signatories, said that political financing “must be transparent, traceable and enforceable,” arguing that crypto is not.

“Crypto can obscure the true source of funds, enable thousands of micro donations below disclosure thresholds, and expose UK politics to foreign interference,” Byrne said. “The Electoral Commission has warned that current technology makes these risks exceptionally hard to manage.”

Liam Byrne addressing the House of Commons in December. Source: YouTube

Reform first to solicit crypto donations

The push comes ahead of local elections in May, but The Guardian reported that government officials think a crypto ban won’t be workable to be included in the elections bill, which will lower the voting age to 16, due to the complexity of cryptocurrency.

“Other democracies have already acted,” Byrne said. “The UK should not wait until a scandal forces our hand. This is not about opposing innovation. It is about protecting democracy with rules that work in the real world.”

The ban could be a setback for Reform UK, which said in May that it would be the first political party in the UK to accept crypto, as leader Nigel Farage kicked off the party’s pro-crypto policy position that included pushing for a Bitcoin reserve. Reform’s website says that it doesn’t allow anonymous donations in crypto.

The party also received a record 9 million British pounds ($12 million) donation in cash from the early crypto investor Christopher Harborne in December, the largest single political gift ever made by a living person in Britain.

Senior Labour MP Pat McFadden first floated a crypto donation ban in July, saying the “funding of democracy is often a controversial area, but I think that it’s very important that we know who is providing the donation, are they properly registered, what are the bona fides of that donation.”

Advocacy groups, such as the UK Anti-Corruption Coalition, said last month that it supports a ban as “allowing crypto donations sits uneasily alongside the Government’s own warnings about foreign interference, illicit finance, and hostile actors seeking to exploit democratic systems.”