Addison Lee founder helped Conservatives build election war chest
A large sum from the founder of the Addison Lee cab company helped the Conservative party pull in 50 per cent more in donations than Labour in the run-up to the election, figures show.
The Tories received £15.4m in total in the first three months of the year, the Electoral Commission figures show, bolstered by regular donors such as Addison Lee’s John Griffin and Michael Gooley, the founder of the Trailfinders travel company.
Other parties also fared well as a closely fought election encouraged individuals and organisations to give large sums. These totalled £30.6m in the first quarter, the highest quarterly sum since records began in 2000.
Mr Griffin gave the Conservatives more than £660,000 in March, according to the commission, just as the battle for London’s taxi services was heating up. This adds to the £1m he has previously given during the last parliament, while Addison Lee as a company donated a further £100,000.
Black cab drivers brought parts of central London to a halt earlier this week as part of a long-running dispute about whether taxi app services such as Uber should be allowed to continue unlicensed. Downing Street said at the time that the prime minister “wanted people to enjoy the longstanding tradition of high-quality black cab service and to make use of the emergence of new technology”.
Apps such as Uber threaten to take business from established private hire companies including Addison Lee. Liam Griffin, the company’s chairman and son of the founder, last year attacked Transport for London for not forcing Uber to comply with the same regulations that apply to other companies.
Boris Johnson, the London mayor and Tory MP for Uxbridge, recently entered the dispute, saying Uber’s app should be treated as a meter, potentially making it harder for the app-based company to do business.
Addison Lee did not immediately respond to requests for comment. A Tory spokesman said: “All donations to the Conservative party are fully and transparently declared to the electoral commission and published on their website.”
The disclosure of the donations also shed light on the finances of some of the UK’s other political parties.
The Scottish National party’s landslide election victory in Scotland, where it won 56 out of 59 seats, was funded almost exclusively in the first quarter of the year by Colin and Christine Weir, the independence-supporting lottery winners.
Mr and Mrs Weir — who won £161m on the EuroMillions lottery in 2011 — gave the party £500,000 each during the quarter. This helped it overcome a funding crunch it had suffered in the wake of the independence referendum.
Labour brought in £9.3m in the first quarter of the year, over a third of which came from the Unite union, run by Len McCluskey.
Mr McCluskey has regularly threatened to pull funding from Labour if the party did not move to the left, but the commission figures show the union continued donating right up until the election.
The opposition party remained heavily reliant on trade unions throughout the quarter, with GMB giving £700,000, Unison donating £570,000 and Usdaw, the shopworkers’ union, handing over £450,000. In total, nearly two-thirds of Labour money during the quarter came from unions, a dependency that several of the party’s leadership candidates have said should be reduced.
Meanwhile the Liberal Democrats received just over £3m, the biggest portion of which came through a bequest from former party member George Watson — although the money did not prevent the party’s crushing election defeat.
Just over £70,000 of that money was directly donated to aid Nick Clegg, the party leader, who clung on to his Sheffield Hallam seat with a much reduced majority.
The UK Independence party pulled in just under £1m, mostly from Arron Banks, the colourful insurance tycoon who defected from the Conservatives last year. Mr Banks gave just over £700,000 during the period, bringing his total Ukip donations to just under the £1m he promised last October.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/8cc345e4-052b ... z3bVRjkxOy
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Maybe theres a challenge being formulated there ??