Is the Electoral Commission picking on UKIP?

UKIP's incompetent handling of money (whoops, now where did that cheque go?) and Nigel Farage's smugness (see smug picture selected from thousands) are two reasons why sympathy with them over their financial problems is slow to come to me.

There are lots of other reasons.

But actually, I am a little worried about the way the Electoral Commission appears to be dealing with the donations from the bookmaker Mr Alan Bown.

The Commission intends, it seems, to confiscate Mr Bown's £360,000 of donations because he was not on the electoral register when he paid up.

If Mr Bown was not eligible to be on the register then the decision is fair enough. But if Mr Bown was eligible to be on the register and simply failed to fill in the paperwork, then retrieving the money and bankrupting the party is very heavy-handed. The Commission may be bullying UKIP because they are the smallest child in the playground.

This isn't pleasant to see, even though it is hard to better David Cameron's description of UKIP.

Comments

[Les]

Of course the commission is picking on UKIP, Mr Brown was registered to vote up to December 2004 and again registered (I assume after realising the error)in Jan 2006. So the commission are not taking a realistic view of this matter, that due to some clerical error Mr Brown was removed from the electoral register for a period of 12 months. The law they are using was to stop foreign money from being used to fund political parties, they are misusing the law and consequentially interefering with democracy by bankrupting UKIP.

[Will Pontlin]

Danny,

Perhaps you're a little too credulous in asking "if Mr Bown was eligible to be on the register and simply failed to fill in the paperwork".

I smell another of Nigel "I'd been up since 3am but, even though I was knackered as a result, I just chose to make a late night visit to a bar anyway*" Farage's increasingly absurd excuses here.

(* for that previous gem, btw, see http://news.independent.co.uk/people/pandora/article2290021.ece )

This time round, Farage is claiming that the donor in question made a simple error in falling off the electoral register between December 2004 and January 2006. A reasonable oversight, one might think at first glance (as indeed you seem to do, Danny), but wait a minute - slap bang in the middle of that period was an event which would have alerted most absentees from the register to their "oversight", i.e. the 2005 General Election.

True, this would not have alerted anyone not wishing to vote in that election, but presumably this particular man, in the course of a year in which he apparently made 68 donations to UKIP* which are now under investigation, would have been sufficiently motivated to want to vote for them during that year too?

(*http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/02/24/nukip24.xml )

But, strangely and more strangely, I find the very last line of this Guardian piece on the matter intriguing too:

http://politics.guardian.co.uk/otherparties/story/0,,2020092,00.html#article_continue

If the link doesn't work, the intriguing line states "Electoral Commission sources told the Press Association news agency that the Ukip donations in question dated from 2004".

UKIP themselves say this guy was on the register till December 2004; could this all revolve, in fact, around donations given whilst he was not absent from it, after all?

In which case, is this actually an even bigger porky from UKIP than their absurd defence anyway suggested?

[Devil's Kitchen]

Fink,

How odd that you would link to a story about a missing £118k that the EC's investigations have conclusively shown to be untrue.

It makes you look like a politically-partisan amateur.

DK

[Gabriel]

Fruitcakes and loonies, is that not the exact way people like you used to refer to Thatcherites? In any case, either Britain rolls back the welfare state (and leaving the EU is essential to do this) or we are all in for decades of serious trouble.

So I guess, the efforts on the part of the state to crush anyone who dares to stand up to it and ts lies notwithstanding, we'll see you on the trash-heap of history one way or another.