Inspired by Phil's post on minor parties election spending I thought I'd geek it up and take a dip into the third party election spending for the European elections earlier this year.
Third Parties are organisations or individuals who incur spending during the election but are not running candidates that can back or oppose specific candidates but usually raise specific issues. The summary of the spending is as follows;
| Name of Third Party | England (£) | Wales (£) | Scotland (£) | N. Ireland (£) | Total Expenditure |
| Board of Deputies of British Jews | 30,656.27 | 2,066.72 | 1,722.26 | 34,445.25 | |
ANIMALS | |||||
| League Against Cruel Sports | 865.8 | 144.45 | 288.8 | 144.45 | 1,443.50 |
| Vote Cruelty Free | 1,629.20 | 181.02 | 181.02 | 181.02 | 2,712.26 |
ANTI-FASCIST | |||||
| Searchlight | 134,469 | 1,720 | 1,220 | 137,409 | |
| Unite Against Fascism | 77,176 | 3,303 | 6,508 | 86,987 | |
UNIONS | |||||
| USDAW | 3,028 | 187 | 389 | 3,604 | |
| National Union of Teachers | 25,194 | - | - | 25,194 | |
| Public and Commercial Services Union | 57,357 | 5,308 | 7,364 | 4,765 | 74,794 |
So if we look at the breakdown a bit the teachers union made £ 6,450 of donations to UAF plus a token £ 65 to Searchlight for their anti-fascist campaigns whilst the PCS union declared £ 16,400 expenditure on Love Music Hate Racism and a more modest £ 346 donation to its parent organisation, UAF.
Another point of note on the anti-fascist spending is that the Mirror, who helped fund a vast number of anti-fascist leaflets, chipped in to the tune of £ 24,122 and 50 pence. Kudos.
Annie Leonard and co. (
Adrienne Mayor (
Ed Howker and Shiv Malik
Floella Benjamin (
Mark Watson (
Tim Jackson (
David Wilson (
Clive Lord (
Nickie Roberts
7 comments:
The other story to this is the spending of the minor parties and how it paid off vote wise. Here it goes, most expensive first for those I could be bothered to work out (or Phil had done already);
Mebyon Kernow
13,886 GBP 14,922 Votes
93 pence per vote
Socialist Party of Great Britain
3,760 GBP 4050 votes
92 pence per vote
Christians
222,251 GBP 249,493 Votes
89 pence per vote
No2EU
118,326 GBP 153,236 votes
77 pence per vote
Scottish Socialist Party
4,733 GBP 10,404 votes
45 pence per vote
Animals Count
4,512 GBP 13,201 Votes
34 pence per vote
Scottish Greens
11,108 GBP 80,442 Votes
14 pence per vote
English Democrats
37,500 GBP 279,801 Votes
13 pence per vote
Socialist Labour
5,354 GBP 173,115 votes
3 pence per vote!
Oh - and the winner is... Libertas whose expenditure of 98,050 (not including 45,000 lost deposits) compared to their vote of 73,544 makes an impressive 1.33 GBP per vote.
Do we think the anti-fascist campaigning worked at all? It looks like it might have got the fascist vote out that might otherwise not have bothered.
I still can't get over the SLP's 3p per vote. What's their secret? :P
The SLP's secret is not to have a campaign and therefore spend very little money then plonk the word socialism and arthur scargill on the ballot paper. Cunning strategy but not sure I want to copy it!
Did the anti-fascist campaigning work? Sadly I think the explicitly anti-fascist organisations tend to only have a resonance with those who already oppose fascism (which, granted, is most of us).
There's an ongoing reassessment of the tactics and how we deal with the BNP and I don't think it can be left to the usual suspects to make those decisions.
Some parts of the strategy I think work better than others. Exposing the BNP members - their convictions (both criminal and ideological), their uselessness as councillors, etc. Name calling and throwing our hands up in horror every time one of these saddos appear is less useful to my mind.
Craig Murray calculated on his website (sorry, can't find the link) that his Norwich North independent campaign in June cost him around £GBP40 per vote - and that was to him personally, as he had no other funding!
He was suitably philosophical about it.
I did feel sorry for Craig, he's a good guy who has been noticeably depressed ever since which is a real shame as I miss his blog contributions. His vote was actually respectable for what his candidacy was but I know he had his sights set far higher.
We did try to warn him but obviously as people who were standing ourselves it's difficult to appear unbiased.
He may well have the record of pounds per vote - I'd certainly like to hear about it if there are others with an even higher ratio.
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