The Open Democracy website reports that the Electoral Commission is investigating Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party’s (DUP) ability to spend what appears to be in the region of £250k on pro-Brexit campaigns; given that in 2015 the party reported a total income of little more than £500k it is a surprisingly large amount. It is worth noting that unlike mainland-UK political parties, those based in Northern Ireland do not need to declare where there money came from. This is perhaps not a surprise given (that in the interests of fairness) the citizens good state of New York were famous for donating to charities connected to the IRA. I guess when all sides face potentially inconvenient stories about where their money came from it is best to pass a law which exempts all sides. The Democratic Unionist Party is of course no stranger to financial scandals, having had more than it’s fair share of issues with loans and dodgy environmental schemes in recent years. Indeed the Northern Irish Assembly recently collapsed due to corruption allegations surrounding the Democratic Unionists.
Over the weekend and since the first draft of this article was written the DUP have indicated that they have provided the names of the donors to the Electoral Commission but are so far refusing to say exactly who was kind enough to donate the funds. In a moment of honesty Aaron Banks who famously funded the unofficial Leave campaign alleges that the DUP had previously demanded money from his team in exchange for supporting them. Banks quite rightfully turned this down.
It is worth noting that many leading Brexit politicians also received money to support the leaving of the EU from wait for it, the campaigns themselves. So while the good people of UK who may have legitimately believed in leaving the EU donated some of their hard earned cash to these campaigns their money was being used to pay some of the largest blood sucking lying parasites in recent British political history.
The sources for Brexit funding and in-direct support have also come under increased scrutiny recently, especially given that many leading lights in the UK Conservative Party have accidentally taken money from Russian backed organisations (Source: The Times). Some have even gone as far as to be quite positive of Russia’s invasion of Crimea and have been talking up closer economic ties with Russia post-Brexit. Meanwhile across the English channel, Russian media outlets are now on the rise in France and are supporting Le Pen. Allegations have also been made of strong links between the BNP (British National Party) and leading Northern Irish Unionist politicians.
If the Democratic Unionist Party does not name who provided it’s funding for Brexit and indeed in general then we will only have to assume (perhaps wrongly) that it continues to receive funding from lapsed terrorists and Russia.
For more information on the DUP please check out the following links:
For the record I have no opinion on whether Northern Ireland should be part of the UK or the Republic of Ireland. That is a decision for the people of Northern Ireland.
This article was initially published on February 19th, 2017. You can check this out on web.archive.org. In the spirit of transparency, my position on Northern Ireland has now changed. I support reunification if most of the people of all of Ireland vote for it. It is up to them.