2:30pm Wednesday 10th March 2010
By Andy Tate
CONSERVATIVES in Swindon have rebuffed calls to return political funding linked to controversial donor Lord Ashcroft.
Tory Robert Buckland, who is to challenge Labour MP Anne Snelgrove in South Swindon at the general election, confirmed his local party had received “thousands of pounds” from a central election fighting fund, to which the Conservative deputy chairman has been a major contributor.
Lord Ashcroft announced last week that he enjoyed non-dom status – enabling him to legally avoid paying UK tax on his extensive overseas earnings – apparently at odds with Tory assurances when he was given a seat in the House of Lords a decade ago.
The peer, pictured, who has donated £4.5m to the Tory Party and plays a key role in its election strategy, has been accused by opposition politicians of avoiding £100m of tax in the UK.
Accounts filed by the Swindon Conservatives to the Electoral Commission suggest they received a total of £31,592 from Tory central office between 2007 and 2008.
Mr Buckland accepted that the party’s campaigns in both south and north Swindon had received “thousands of pounds” for leaflets and newspapers from a central fund to which Lord Ashcroft had contributed a “tiny fraction”.
The disclosure prompted Ms Snelgrove to demand Swindon Tories “pay back” any campaign money linked to Lord Ashcroft.
She said: “I am glad that Mr Buckland has come clean about how he is paying for his glossy leaflets with donations from Lord Ashcroft. He needs to know that the people of Swindon will not let this election be bought by someone who avoids paying tax.”
North Swindon MP Michael Wills called on the Tories to say exactly how much they had received from Lord Ashcroft's fund for marginal seats.
He said: “I have always been led to believe that all the [Tories’] money was raised locally and this now appears not to be true. We now know that instead of Lord Ashcroft paying a full amount of tax in this country, which could have funded schools and hospitals in Swindon, he has been funding Conservative Party propaganda in the town.”
But Mr Buckland said the donations simply went some way to “off-setting the huge financial advantage enjoyed by incumbent MPs” through the £10,400 publicly-funded annual communications allowance.
And he insisted everything the party had done locally in the past couple of months had been funded locally and accused Labour of “hypocrisy” because some of its own donors – including Lord Paul – were also non-doms.
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