If the independence referendum is transforming Scottish politics in unpredictable and far-reaching ways, it is changing one other key area of party politics too – fundraising, an area once best known for its black tie dinners, constituency raffles and bankrolling millionaires.
Crowdfunding is now emerging as one of the Scottish National party’s newest tools in the general election campaign: there are now 20 fundraising schemes either live or just past on one crowdfunding site alone, Indiegogo, raising cash for SNP constituency campaigns.
Lifting a technique straight out of the yes campaign handbook, it has 16 active campaigns, from Dumfries and Galloway up to Dundee. Some are working well: a bid to raise £5,000 to “unseat” Scottish Labour leader Jim Murphy is only a few pounds short of hitting its target, just a few hours before it ends at midnight.
And Glasgow North West, where the SNP hopes to overturn Labour MP John Robertson’s 38% majority, it has already hit 151% of its £1,000 goal with 11 days of fundraising left.
Others fared not so well: the Fife SNP “general election fund to oust Gordon Brown” managed only £107 when it closed on 7 January – very far short of its ambitious £25,000 goal.
The first stage of an SNP branch fundraising campaign for Glasgow South East – currently held by Labour MP Ian Davidson with an apparently unassailable 46% majority, raised only £450 of its £2,500 target when it ended in February 3. Undeterred, the second phase of that fundraiser by Greater Pollok and Craigton SNP is underway, but with a far less ambitious £500 target.
Crowdfunding became a key fundraising tool for the yes campaign during the referendum, and for pro-independence websites such as Bella Caledonia and Wings Over Scotland, whose founder Stuart Campbell was famously able to pay himself a wage from the proceeds and pay for his own opinion polls.
The Scottish Greens are also active on Indiegogo, with several underway, including a modest £750 target to fund its East Dunbartonshire candidate Ross Greer, formerly an official with Yes Scotland.
The Scottish Greens were faster to set up an Indiegogo campaign for the general election, with co-convenor Patrick Harvie launching its quest for £5,000 on 11 October. It closed on 10 December having raised £6,461 – exceeding its goal by 29% and subsequently raised another £5,243 for its campaigning.
But the SNP’s use of crowdfunding is intriguing for another reason: the party is arguably already the wealthiest of any in the UK on a per capita basis, and certainly the richest in a Scottish context.
While the Tories may hope to spend several tens of millions in the 2015 campaign, that will be UK wide, covering twelve times’ Scotland’s population. Already the least reliant of any major UK party on loans and overdrafts, the SNP’s coffers are being swollen by membership fees and frequently regular monthly gifts, from its near 100,000 party members.
In the closing days of the referendum campaign, the SNP also took in another £1m gift from Euromillions lottery winners Chris and Colin Weir, and a further £400,000 from the Stagecoach founder Sir Brian Souter.
The party isn’t terribly keen to discuss this new strategy, offering a single line statement about these campaigns:
Local candidates are using a range of online and offline tools to help raise campaign funds. All donations over £50 are checked against the electoral register.
So are these donations likely to get the victory the donors want? In Murphy’s seat, it’s a tall order, even with the SNP’s remarkable 20 points or more lead in recent opinion polls.
In his East Renfrewshire seat, the SNP has never polled higher than 9% in recent elections and routinely comes fourth. This was a Tory stronghold before Murphy won it in Tony Blair’s 1997 landslide and he has a 41% lead over the SNP to cushion him from 2010.
Even so, the SNP are likely to contrast this highly visible grassroots activism with the little which is known about fundraising for Scottish Labour’s election campaign. The financial gap between the two parties is unnerving senior Labour figures: “with money, it’s a challenge. We know it is,” said one MP privately.
One of Jim Murphy’s first targets as he sought the leadership was to build up a Scottish party warchest, deliberately funding his campaign independently of UK headquarters for the first time.
So far, the most known about that is the controversy over a pledge by once-Tory donor Sir David Garrard to give “tens of thousands” to the Scottish party, and his help facilitating £1,570 in expenses from the Israeli International Institute of Counter-Terrorism for Murphy to attend a conference in September 2012.
SNP MP Angus MacNeil has written to the Electoral Commission questioning Garrard’s eligibility after it emerged in the Sunday Times that Garrard, whose withdrew his nomination to join the House of Lords during the 2005 cash for honours row, had used offshore trusts for shares in his property investment firm Minerva. Garrard’s lawyers are adamant his transactions were fully declared to the UK tax authorities.
• This article was amended on 19 February 2015. An earlier version said Sir David Garrard had donated £1,570 to Murphy’s leadership campaign. In fact that sum was given by the International Institute for Counter Terrorism in September 2012 for a trip Murphy made to Israel to give a speech on counter-terrorism. Garrard facilitated the funding, but was not the donor.
