Uh oh. As election campaigns kick off, a number of nationalist politicians have had a rather rocky start. The SNP has already gone into election season on the back foot as polls consistently predict the party is likely to lose around half its Westminster MPs in the next election. To make matters worse the SNP is also having trouble attracting investment while the police probe into party finances hangs hangs over it. The latest accounts show the Nats saw an £800,000 financial loss as membership numbers fell and donations dried up. Now it transpires that Scottish National party candidates have had to resort to launching Crowdfund pages to try and pull together funds for their campaigns.
But it turns out that begging voters for money isn’t always a surefire way to garner support. SNP candidates are looking for around £60,000 in all to help the Nats fight for seats, with politicians individually asking for between £1,000 to £10,000 of extra cash to campaign. Alba and Labour party candidates have also opted for similar methods of fundraising to varying degrees of success. Yet the response to the Nats from the Scottish public has been rather lacklustre to say the least…
Stephen Gethins, standing for the Nats in Arbroath and Broughty Ferry had only managed to raise, er, £45 by Sunday afternoon. And things aren’t looking much better for long-standing SNP MPs either. Tommy Sheppard, SNP MP for Edinburgh East, had racked up a mere £70 by Sunday — despite being a Member of Parliament for over nine years. Anum Qaisar is hoping to defend her Airdrie and Shotts seat, but has raised only a little over 10 per cent of her £2,000 goal. And former BBC presenter John Nicolson, who has been an SNP MP since 2019, is hoping for donations of a whopping £10,000 — yet has only received £1,145 so far. Oh dear…
Figures from the SNP’s Holyrood group have defended the use of donation pages however, and SNP MSP Kevin Stewart told the Scottish Daily Mail that there are ‘hundreds of thousands of pounds in reserves’ for candidates, adding: ‘It looks good that we’re not in the hands of people giving millions of pounds.’ That’s one way to spin it…
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