Democracies have long wrestled with the question of whose money shapes whose politics, and Britain is now confronting that question with unusual directness. The UK government is moving to require that political donors prove at least 183 days of annual residency, a rule that would have barred the £72 million in cryptocurrency wealth recently channelled into Reform UK by two foreign tycoons. The proposed change arrives not in a vacuum but in the wake of the money itself, raising the older and harder question of whether regulation that follows consequence can ever fully restore the integrity it s