He shouldn’t be. I don’t think that non-doms should be allowed to sit in Parliament, in either Chamber. Hence my pleasure when Zac Goldsmith give it up. But the sheer hypocrisy of Labor over non-doms is astounding.
The Guardian has published the amounts received by Labour and the Conservatives from non-doms since 2001. Using some Excel formulas, the following stats emerge:

CONSERVATIVES
Lord Ashcroft personally donated £77,930
Bearwood Corporate Services donated £5,086,185.15
In cash: £1,626,365.69
Non-cash: £3,537,749.46
Conservative total: £5,164,115.15
LABOUR
Lakshmi Mittal donated £4,125,000
Sir Ronald Cohen donated £2,550,000
Caparo Industries PLC donated £45,000
Cash: £6,720,000
Labour total: £6,720,000

So Labour have received …

A few Lib Dem bloggers have worked out the the “cost effectiveness” of the three main parties 2005 general election campaigns, by dividing the money spent by the votes gained. The results being:

And so Lib Dems are claiming this to be some sort of moral and financial victory. But it really ignores the reason people vote for a particular party. However much the Lib Dems many choose to deny it, much of their support is simply because they are the third party, because of what they are not – as …

In the first quarter of 2009, money was still pouring in to political parties.

Conservatives got £4m
Labour got £2.8m
Lib Dems got £825k

Quite a larger amount for the Conservatives – which becomes even larger if you consider how much of Labour’s donations come from the unions
However, this was obviously all before the MPs expenses claims scandal broke. Will this quarter’s donation levels be anywhere near that level – which was already quite significantly lower than the second quarter last year? Somehow, I doubt it.

What’s the point when no action is ever taken? Both Jack Straw and Peter Hain have been “cleared”, despite obviously breaking the rules by declaring donations extremely late.
Jack Straw declared a £3,000 donation four years late, yet the Electoral Commission said that it would not be “appropriate nor proportionate” to take further action, which is plainly ridiculous since Straw has blatantly breached the rules. He should be required to forfeit the money he was given.
Peter Hain was not charged over the late declaration of £103,000 – not an easy amount …

The credit crunch/recession/”downturn”, whatever you want to call it, is now directly affecting politics. More than 10% of the staff at CCHQ is to be made redundant and a pay and hiring freeze is to be introduced as the income stream slows down.
What has happened is that the Conservatives failed to use the donations they were being given in the good times most efficiently, but instead needlessly wasted money. And the Conservatives are affected more than Labour because they rely on individuals donating money, rather than bankrolling by the unions.
It …

I wrote a post a week or so ago asking whether the Lib Dems would go bankrupt after Michael Brown was convicted of being a bogus businessman, thus making his donation of £2.4 million through his company illegal. However, I was just being facetious, and never expected it to be a real possibility since I thought they were bound to be able to persuade donor(s) of some form to step in.
But with the resignation* from the party of their biggest long-term donor, it actually seems like it could actually happen. …

Michael Brown, the Lib Dems largest donor ever, has been convicted of being a bogus businessman. He donated £2.4 million to them in 2005, but it has now been revealed that his company, 5th Avenue Partners – through which he donated the money – was “just a sham”.
Political parties are only allowed to accept donations from companies that are actually “carrying on business”. Which 5th Avuenue Partners was not. And not only that, the money Michael Brown donated to the Lib Dems wasn’t his to give away in the first …

For the first time in ten quarters – 2 and a half years or, to put it another way, since Gordon Brown became leader – Labour raised more money than the Conservatives.
Between July and September this year, Labour raised £5 million and the Conservatives raised £4 million. In contrast, between April and June, the Conservatives were donated £5.6 million and Labour £3.8 million.
Labour’s increase in donations come through the million-pound donation by JK Rowling, the conversion of loans to donations, and the continued bankrolling of the trade unions:

Britain’s biggest …

JK Rowling, millionairess author of the Harry Potter books, has given Gordon Brown his one piece of good news in weeks: she has donated £1 million to the Labour Party.
And her reasons for this? Because Labour has, she claims, “reversed the long-term trend in child poverty, and is one of the leading EU countries in combating child poverty.” Yet that’s actually a load of complete bollocks:

Gordon Brown’s flagship anti-poverty campaign [has] received a triple blow… with news that a rise in both child and pensioner poverty had left Britain a …

Lord Ashcroft is exploiting a loophole in the political donations laws in order to fund the Conservative Party. He is sending his money from a tax haven in Central America through one of his British-registered companies.
This money is entirely legal for the Conservatives to accept.
However, it does appear to break the spirit of the law over political donations. Whilst no-one can blame Ashcroft or the Conservatives for doing this – especially not the Labour Party, with their own actually illegal donations – that doesn’t mean that it should be allowed …