UUP hesitant about naming donors despite openness pledge

The party told the News Letter that it is now time to be more open about how politics is funded, and that it is calling for the government to demand that records of all parties’ political donations from April 2017 onwards are published.

However, it is far from clear that the government will actually reform the law, and the UUP has failed to say if it will actively take the step of publishing donor names itself instead of waiting for the law to be changed.

Northern Ireland is the only part of the UK where it is possible to give large-scale political donations in secret.

Ongoing security concerns have been cited as the reason for the rules being different to Great Britain’s.

At the moment, those who give £7,500-plus to parties – or £1,500-plus to candidates or branch offices – have their donations recorded by the Electoral Commission, but it does not publish them.

The law says the identities of all who gave money before 2014 will remain secret forever, but the Northern Ireland Secretary has the power to reveal details of those who have contributed since then.

Following the eruption of the RHI debacle, which brought with it allegations of possible corruption, the Secretary of State announced he was consulting over the idea of finally doing this.

The Green Party and Alliance already publish donors.

The DUP has recently written into its manifesto that it wants to see the law changed, and has previously voiced an intention to publish donation details voluntarily (see story on left).

The News Letter had asked the UUP, which has a record of backing donor secrecy, what its own stance is on publishing donors.

It said: “The time is right to introduce transparency in political donations.

“The public want openness at the heart of government... We have written to the Secretary of State proposing that records of donations to political parties are published from the start of the 2017/2018 financial year.”

The party’s economy spokesman Steve Aiken then went on William Crawley’s show on Friday, and was asked why the party has not published donations already.

He said “we need to see what the DUP and Sinn Fein are going to do – we should all do it together... I’d like to see all parties publishing it”.

The Green Party and Alliance already publish donor details. The SDLP said it has called on the Secretary of State to “set a date after which party donations should be published”, whilst Sinn Fein has also asked him to “end to the practice of keeping the identity of donors secret, and that the threshold for reporting donations be lowered to £500”.

However, neither the SDLP or Sinn Fein directly answered the News Letter’s question of whether they would publish their donors themselves.