Questions over UKIP's accounts

According to The Telegraph here and here, the Electoral Commission is looking at UKIP's accounts, which were submitted six months late.

The paper highlights donations from Alan Bown - which it describes as perfectly legal. It seems rather exercised by the fact that he is an ex-bookie, but given the company that other parties keep I don't see why this should be a cause for concern.

The Electoral Commission "says that it is concerned that (UKIP's) most recent accounts were filed more than six months late. It is also investigating a series of "separate issues"."

So - pace Tim Worstall - the issue is not that UKIP was raising small amounts from the citizenry.

UKIP has some 18,000 members. The large sum of some £280,000 was apparently donations - not subscriptions, therefore - to one of UKIP's regional branches (the Region controlled by Nigel Farage) - a figure far outstripping donations to all other UKIP regions combined.

How so? Was this, as some claim, to do with contributions made through the national Ashford call centre, an operation run with minimal transparency through a separate private company with which Alan Bown was involved? David Bannerman said during the UKIP leadership election that only 15% of the money contributed through Ashford had reached the party. So where did the rest go?

And how did South East Region spend the money it received? The accounts are far from clear.

Nigel Farage is quoted as saying

"We are discussing three or four other compliance issues with the Electoral Commission, concerning the validity of donors and how we have listed them. I am confident we can resolve these issues."

So these "separate issues" may not have anything to do with Alan Bown at all.

The Chairman in his statement pretends, however, that it is about Bown. He says of The Telegraph piece

"They claim an 'investigation' found that Alan Bown has donated over £1million - yet the next paragraph accepts that he has done nothing improper. I can't see much need for an 'investigation' as all his funding has been openly declared."

The UKIP chairman has a brain, so he will realise that he is deliberately ignoring what his own leader has said.

The Telegraph did say that the Commission was investigating "a series of separate issues". Presumably The Chairman knows what they are, but he pretends that the investigations all refer to Alan Bown's prefectly legal donations.

If all the electoral commission's concerns were about Alan Bown's perfectly legal donations, surely one exchange of letters would have closed the matter.

One poster on The British Independence and Democracy Forum calling himself arden forester opines

I wouldn't be too bothered. This newspaper was run by a crook, namely Lord Black. ... It is now feathered nicely by snobs and snooty people.

Well, Black owned it (he didn't run it, as his editors have made clear). When his dealings emerged, he was forced to sell. It has many more readers than UKIP has members. But hurling low quality insults rather than trying to win people over appeals to a certain bunker mentality. Maybe that's why UKIP gathered all of 8 votes in a recent local election.

What UKIP should be talking about is the revelation by Booker that the Commons EU Scrutiny committee considers papers submitted to it secret. And -

The farce does not end there. It has long been scandalous how often British ministers and civil servants do approve laws in Brussels, either before the Scrutiny Committee has had time to study them at all, or in defiance of its considered views. Lord Pearson recently asked how many times ministers have overridden the wishes of the committee in this way. The shocking answer given by Lord Triesman for the Foreign Office on January 30 was that, in the latest period for which figures are available, between 2003 and 2006, it happened on no fewer than 180 occasions.

Or UKIP could highlight the complaint of an MEP picked up by Dr North that he and his colleagues do not have enough work to do to keep them busy over the forthcoming year.

This is attributed, according to Watson, to the commission "pushing ahead with efforts to slash business red tape" and its attemps to "cut the burden of regulation for European companies". "We have all these people, and the commission has taken its foot off the accelerator," Watson complains. "There are very few substantial pieces of legislation this year."

But UKIP are too underpowered to run effectively with these issues, since their intellectually challenged leader won't tolerate anyone who won't kowtow to him.