Pretty good rebuttal

Trixy manages a pretty fair fist of a rebuttal to the Sunday Telegraph story denouncing UKIP for the temerity of raising most of their money through small donations that come under the wire of the Electoral Commission.

2) Most of the financing for UKIP, particularly during elections, comes from individials. As the paper admits, a party does not have to register donations from individuals to the party if they are under £5000 or to regional offices if they are under £1000. UKIP is a grass roots party. People give us whatever they can afford, whether it be £5 or £100 or £10000. They do this because they genuinely believe in what the party stands for. The only personal gain they stand to make that there will be a political party in this country who believes in Independence.

There is the incentive in larger parties for people to give huge amounts of money because, as we have seen with the 'loans for peerages', they could stand to benefit on a personal level. That is not a view people take with UKIP. They give what they can to free Britain from the constraints of the EU and our statist government. The journalists should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves for attacking those well meaning people for doing something they believe in.

For instance, Ukip's south-east office received donations of £291,000 in 2004, more than twice as much as the party's head office. Yet some £280,000 did not need to be declared because it consisted of individual donations of less than £1,000 each.

Notice that? They didn't need to. That's not UKIP making up the rules, or breaking the rules. That's the party following the rules and being different from others because it has the support of normal, everyday people.

Well quite. Tim Worstall makes a similar comment.

Two short independent thoughts. Firstly I note that from being one of the three stories on its front page, now by this evening, it has been relegated to story to story twelve, with only one new story from today being introduced. This suggests that even the Sunday Cameron recognises that it was a pretty poor hatchet job.

Seecondly the final quotation is in my mind a disgrace,
One former Tory minister attended a Ukip meeting and was unimpressed by him.

"He harangued us," the grandee said. "He speaks to people like they are all idiots. In fact, on listening to him, I was reminded of Hitler."

Second hand unattributed allusion to Nazi's...surely even the ST can do better than bringing Godwin's law down on its head?

There again, I heard that Davd Cameron speaking once, you know he reminded me of Quisling.