We were a little perplexed by this story.
Because, for startlingly obvious reasons, even the SNP hasn’t had the brass neck to do a general fundraiser for this election, with the police’s inquiries still going on into the whereabouts of the cash from their last big appeals.
But in fact the party has managed to wring over £100,000 from the most gullible of its remaining supporters in the days since the election was announced. It’s just been a bit more subtle about it.
Because SNP candidates are left to secure their own financing for elections, and most of them have been doing it through Crowdfunder.
So let’s do some Fun Facts!
There are 10 out of 57 seats where, so far as we’ve been able to ascertain at the time of writing, the SNP candidate isn’t running a formal fundraiser (though some do solicit ad-hoc donations). If you spot one we’ve missed, let us know.
Those who appear to be funding their campaigns primarily out of their own pockets, though, are these brave souls:
Tracey Little (Dumfries & Galloway)
Naz Anis Miah (Dunfermline & Dollar)
Joanna Cherry (Edinburgh SW)
Chris Stephens (Glasgow SW)
Ronnie Cowan (Inverclyde)
Drew Hendry (Inverness, Skye & West Ross-shire)
Alan Brown (Kilmarnock & Loudon)
Patricia Gibson (North Ayrshire & Arran)
Robert Leslie (Orkney & Shetland)
Martin Docherty-Hughes (West Dunbartonshire)
For the rest, some number-crunching.
(NOTES: The most ambitious candidate is Martyn Day, the only one who set a target of infinity, so we’ll exclude him from most of these tables. Some candidates closed their fundraisers early after hitting their targets and we can’t tell what the targets were – in those cases we’ll assume £2,000 as that’s the most common figure. Some candidates – Lyn Jardine, Tommy Sheppard, Jacqueline Cameron – have for some reason done more than one fundraiser, which we’ll count together.)
TOTAL AMOUNT SOUGHT
£124,000
TOTAL AMOUNT RAISED SO FAR
£100,615
HIGHEST TARGETS
1. John Nicolson (£10,000)
2. Lucy Beattie (£8,000)
3= Amy Callaghan (£5,000)
3= Richard Thomson (£5,000)
3= Pete Wishart (£5,000)
*one candidate asked for £4000, five for £3000, all others £2500 or less
MOST SUCCESSFUL (cash terms)
1. David Wilson (£5,800)
2. Tommy Sheppard (£5,561)
3. Glen Reynolds (£5,511)
4. Brendan O’Hara (£5,462)
5. Lucy Beattie (£5,050)
MOST SUCCESSFUL (percentage terms)
1. David Wilson (193%)
2. Grant Costello (189%)
3. Stuart McDonald (185%)
4. Glen Reynolds (183%)
5. Kirsten Oswald (164%)
*Wilson, McDonald and Reynolds all set targets above the £2000 average, Costello’s was below, and Oswald’s was £2000.
LEAST SUCCESSFUL (cash terms)
1. Anne McLaughlin (£180)
2= Steven Bonnar (£300)
2= Anum Qaisar (£300)
4. Marion Fellows (£457)
5. Hannah Bardell (£570)
LEAST SUCCESSFUL (percentage terms)
1. Anne McLaughlin (9%)
2= Steven Bonnar (15%)
2= Marion Fellows (15%)
2= Anum Qaisar (15%)
5. Hannah Bardell (28%)
6. John Nicolson (29%)
7. Katy Loudon (43%)
8. Amy Callaghan (44%)
9. John Beare (44%)
10. Gavin Newlands (48%)
*We’ve made this a top 10 since the top 5 was the same as in cash terms.
[EDIT 5pm: in fact Ross Clark is another who’s on his second fundraiser. We’ve adjusted the charts accordingly.]
The central party appears to be somewhere close to flat broke. As Wings told you a few days ago it isn’t running any Facebook election ads at all:
And its overall online spend has been microscopic, with Scottish Labour splashing out almost 25 times as much and even the Scottish Tories spending more than 10 times as much despite most of their voters being 85 and actively frightened of computers.
Wings would like to take a moment to salute the sheer blind doggedness of anyone still donating money to the SNP at this point, let alone with any confidence that it’s going to further the cause of independence. That the party’s managed to scrabble up a six-figure sum at short notice despite everything that’s happened is definitely testament to something.
But with the SNP’s normal spend on a Westminster election somewhere in the region of £1.5m, they’re going to have to squeeze those pips even tighter yet.
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