When is a party a “major party”?
Posted by admin978 on May 17, 2023 · Leave a Comment
Many H&D readers will recently have received a fundraising email from Britain First, stating that they have been classed as a “major party” by the Electoral Commission and consequently must find £6,000 to pay for the auditing of their accounts.
Some might (wrongly) imagine that this “major party” status has something to do with election results or with the number of candidates that a party stands.
In fact it seems to be largely a financial matter. Any party whose income or expenditure (or both) is over £250,000 must file audited accounts, which are published on the Electoral Commission’s website.
The most recent accounts of this type relate to the year ending December 2021, when nineteen parties fell into this category.
Some of these are the obvious “major parties” but there were some interesting anomalies. For example, Traditional Unionist Voice (TUV), which by normal reckoning might be thought a “major party” in Northern Ireland, where its leader Jim Allister is a member of the Stormont Assembly, was not among the nineteen parties with turnover above £250,000.
However, a tiny vanity party – the London Real Party, formed to support the London mayoral campaign of American-born podcaster Brian Rose – had income of £280,114 and expenditure of £273,540.
Even a tiny Marxist sect, the Socialist Party of Great Britain, had income of £551,810.
But the most extraordinary anomaly is that the Reclaim Party, led by actor Laurence Fox, reported income of £1,850,002 – considerably more than Sinn Fein, Northern Ireland’s largest party, the long established political wing of the supposedly dormant terrorist IRA.
Sinn Fein’s reported income was £1,532,946.
Readers can judge for themselves which party’s donors (perhaps including unwilling donors in Sinn Fein’s case) obtained better value for money. Reclaim seems to have contested just three elections during 2021: receiving 1.9% in the London mayoral election, 0.3% in the Glasgow Pollok constituency at the Scottish parliamentary election; and a fraction under 1% at the North Shropshire parliamentary by-election.
