IS ASHCROFT TRYING TO BUY SOUTH DORSET ? THESE QUESTIONS NEED ANSWERING

Should elections be bought ? If the Conservatives in South Dorset only received £29,000 from their non-dom party vice-chairman billionaire donor Lord Ashcroft in 2005, and as they claim, that was only 2% of their funding, then did they really spend £1.45 million on the last general election campaign here ?

I wonder how much they are planning to spend this time ?

A number of issues arise from this scandal – and it is a scandal in the real sense of the word – because it raises very ugly questions about how politics works in this country, that a political party can promise that its major donor will become resident in the UK in order for him to be given a peerage, and then, once he has become a law-maker he evades complying with the conditions on which the peerage was given, avoiding paying tax as a consequence. An ugly question therefore is – does this mean that the British taxpayer is now bankrolling the Conservative campaign ?

But more alarming even than this is the lack of transparency shown by party leaders. It would appear that William Hague, Shadow Foreign Secretary , the man who might be responsible in a few months for taking us into future wars, firstly avoided asking the relevant questions, then was prepared to give an assurance based merely on supposition, and when he did find out the truth three months ago, persisted in evasive denials in a series of public interviews in which he assured the questioner that there was nothing untoward about Lord Ashcroft’s behaviour. If we thought there were problems about WMD, we have, I fear, far more of a treat in store for us.
His party leader appears to have taken the view that ‘what I don’t know won’t hurt me’ & that it is perfectly acceptable for his party to be in receipt of millions from a non dom resident of Belize, who has also failed to pay tax there & whose income the president of the country estimates is more than its gross domestic product . Someone who is prepared to bankroll a party that claims it cares about the poor in this country, yet who pays nothing towards the upkeep by the state in an impoverished Caribbean tax haven, despite it being in the lowest quartile on the poverty scale of international