QUESTIONS are piling up over the funding of the far-right Reform UK. So far, Nigel Farage and Robert Jenrick have managed to answer none of them.

There is the undeclared five million pound donation from Thai-based crypto billionaire Nigel Harborne. There are the personal “gifts” from convicted fraudster “posh George” Cottrell. The loans swilling around deputy leader Richard Tice.

And now there is the news that Fiona Cottrell, mother of “Posh George,” received around two million dollars from her Montenegro-dwelling son just days before handing over one million pounds to Reform.

The police and House of Commons authorities are investigating many of these gifts, loans and donations. Reform denies any wrongdoing and there have as yet been no findings that rules or the law have been broken.

Farage is, however, staging one desperate diversion after another to distract from the scandals, which have coincided with a drop in the party’s polling figures. One is a concocted row involving Green leader Zack Polanski, a T-shirt, Instagram and the Metropolitan Police, a compendium allegory for culture-war Britain.

Another is his absurd by-election stunt in Clacton, in which he is hoping that re-endorsement by his constituency will somehow trump the probes into his lucre. It will not do so, and in any case Clacton may prefer to turn to Count Binface, the Reform boss’s main rival in the vote.

However, there is real substance behind all the froth. It is this: the shadiest elements of international capitalism are shovelling money at the project of securing an authoritarian and racist government in Britain.

Crypto grifters. Gamblers and fraudsters. Big tech barons. Often based abroad in jurisdictions which protect their worst instincts, they want to manipulate British politics while paying little or no tax.

The irony of supporting a party which rails against immigrants while themselves dwelling in foreign countries appears lost on them.

They represent the most sordid and least democratic elements in the capitalist class, anxious to remake Britain in their own image.

Reform is not supported solely by their money. It is also backed by the algorithms of X, Elon Musk’s debased cesspit of a plaything.

Musk is more taken by the fascists infesting Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain, but his social media vehicle is central to propping up the whole hard-right ecosystem.

They want power to open up the country to still greater opportunities for personal enrichment, taking as their model Donald Trump’s US.

They cynically exploit people’s anxieties to win votes for an agenda which would never gain support sailing under its own colours.

It is overdue that serious sanctions were imposed on dirty money washing into British politics. As with so much else, Keir Starmer’s efforts were hesitant and half-hearted.

But the matter cannot be left to government. The movement must use every opportunity to expose the real nature of Reform, and the threat it represents to democracy and our communities.

Its present polling difficulties should breed no complacency. The power and the money behind it will ensure that Reform remains central to the political agenda up until the next general election at least.

Working people must be told that Farage and Jenrick are using dodgy money to persuade voters to extend the 40-year “wrong turn” Andy Burnham has pledged to reverse. 

They are Thatcherites in populist garb, willing to use authoritarian politics to impose on society their own freedom to make as much cash as they can however they like.

Burnham may deliver or he may disappoint. Judgement must presently be reserved on that. But the verdict is in on the Reform scam – bent cash for bent politics.