The Electoral Commission have now published details about the 2012 accounts for all local political parties. Smaller parties with income and expenditure less than £250k were released in May and the larger parties today.
This is a quick post to highlight the numbers with a variety of charts. I’ll leave it to others to start to tell the stories behind the figures … perhaps starting with the size of Sinn Féin’s legal fees and the continued lack of transparency around party donors. It would be interesting to model the size of parties (elected representatives, constituencies and members) against their income and expenditure.
(Note that in the tables and charts below, I’ve used the “Central party” figures and not included Westminster or smaller local association accounts reported to the Electoral Commission. You also need to factor in the cycle of elections which tends to boost party fundraising efforts … as well as their expenditure.)
The first table allows a comparison to be made between the UK-wide parties, SNP and Plaid Cymru and the local Northern Ireland parties.
Financially Sinn Féin operates on a par with UKIP.
For the last two years, the DUP income has greatly exceeded it expenditure and its liabilities have come under control.
Ulster Unionist finances are stable. Locally they’re the only party with more than a £1m of assets, though are also the local party with greatest liabilities.
You can compare how each of the main party’s income has varied over the last eleven years …
as well as see how relative party income has varied.
The full raw historical account data is available from the Electoral Commission website.
The IRSP seem to gone from declaring £0 assets in 2011 to over £22k in 2012. Very odd.
What do you make of Sinn Féin’s high-earning/high-spending approach compared with the DUP’s more modest accounts?
Alan Meban. Tweets as @alaninbelfast. Blogs about cinema and theatre over at Alan in Belfast. A freelancer who writes about, reports from, live-tweets and live-streams civic, academic and political events and conferences. He delivers social media training/coaching; produces podcasts and radio programmes; is a FactCheckNI director; a member of Ofcom’s Advisory Committee for Northern Ireland; and a member of the Corrymeela Community.