Left Foot Forward has reported:
The United Kingdom Indpendence Party’s dispute with the Electoral Commission over its refusal to forfeit more than £350,000 of impermissable donations has this week escalated to the Supreme Court…
A spokesman for the commission told Left Foot Forward that there had been 67 instances of UKIP not adhering to the laws on donations by failing to check whether donations of more than £200 were from people on the electoral register, over a period of a year, despite repeated warnings from the commission.
You can read the full piece here.
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4 Comments
From the Torygraph version:
One of those rare “I agree with UKIP” moments. They were in breach, but he’d donated before while on the register, and subsequently, while on the register, his registration had lapsed.
They should’ve checked, and were wrong not to, and should receive some punishment.
But to forfeit the entire donation just seems wrong to me. Return it to the donor, minus costs, would be fair, but just give it to the treasury? Think that’s a daft way of doing things; undoubtedly there were reasons for it, but it’s still daft.
Still precedent setting case, if the Supreme Court rules, then that’s it, we know what the law’s meant to be. Even if the law’s wrong.
Also, they’d be “ruined” in the same way the LDs would if the large 2005 donation had been ruled inadmissable; with the number of MEPs they’ve got, combined with some fairly wealthy backers, they’d raise the money with an emergency appeal, same as we would. And even without that, borrowing a single years income wouldn’t be that hard for a fairly good bet repayer.
(It’s very weird when the comment submit takes you from ?p=XXX to /article-title when it’s an election law post BTW, the completely different format is a bit disconcerting, some way of getting the election law layout to apply regardless of the post URL?)
Mat: I think the important distinction is that UKIP repeatedly failed to check donations against the register. This wasn’t a one-off mistake, but rather systematic and repeated failure.
Never mind the 2005 donation, Mat, what about if they fail to retain Short money? 🙂
It’d be interesting to see if UKIP were prepared to take this to EU courts.