Electoral Funding: Unincorporated Associations
Debate between Martin Docherty-Hughes and Patricia Gibson(5 years, 2 months ago)
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Martin Docherty-Hughes
Perhaps I can remind the Chamber that my hon. Friend’s name is Brendan O’Hara. I totally agree with him and commend those who have assisted in exposing dark money to the light.
Why is all that relevant to a debate about unincorporated associations in the political process? Mr Cook is the poster boy for the way in which UAs have been used to funnel vast swathes of dark money into our political process. Even worse, the Electoral Commission allows fraudsters such as him effectively to mark their own homework. The Electoral Commission gave me a very informative briefing ahead of this debate, and I will use its definition of an unincorporated association:
“UAs are associations of two or more people, which do not fall into any of the other categories of permissible donors, are carrying on business or other activities wholly or mainly in the UK and have their main office here. They are permitted to donate money to political parties, non-party campaigners, individuals in elective office such as MPs, and referendum campaigners.”
The key phrase in that definition is,
“which do not fall into any of the other categories of permissible donors”.
That is what today’s debate is about. If the Minister answers only one question in this debate, I would like it to be this one: why, given all the ways in which individuals and organisations can donate money to political parties and groups in a transparent and straightforward manner, do we still allow this backdoor method, which seems to me to be easily exploited by those who would seek to obscure the provenance of funds?
Patricia Gibson (North Ayrshire and Arran) (SNP)
My hon. Friend is giving an excellent speech. Is he surprised and disappointed, as I was, to learn that when SNP councillors lodged a motion asking Tory councils in North Ayrshire to make a statement on dark donations to local Tory branches, the Labour councillors abstained? Does he, like me, suspect that that is not unrelated to the much-denied informal confidence and supply arrangement that exists between Labour and Tory groups across Scotland?
[Mr Ian Austin in the Chair]
Martin Docherty-Hughes
It sounds like “Better Together”.
The case that proves my argument beyond doubt is the unincorporated association that Richard Cook leads: the Constitutional Research Council, or CRC. He describes the CRC as a group
“to start promoting the Union in all its…parts”,
and while it is based in Scotland, critically, it has managed to spread its tentacles across the rest of these islands. The CRC is most famous—or should I say infamous?—for the £435,000 donation it made to the Democratic Unionist party during the Brexit referendum.