[pp.int.general] Pirate Party UK Critism

[Pasi Palmulehto]

On Sat, 2009-10-03 at 20:50 +0100, Eric Priezkalns wrote:
> On 3 Oct 2009, at 19:17, Kai Mast wrote:
> 
> > I don't know about England. What do you mean with you need money to
> > place a candidate? In Germany we just need signatures... do I get
> > something wrong here?
> 
> Erm... I mean we in the UK need money in order to offer a candidate in  
> every seat in every election.  Not every country has the same  
> democratic procedures.  In the UK, if we get enough votes, the party  
> gets its money back.  If we don't get enough votes, we don't get the  
> money back.  Currently the threshold for the general election is 5%,  
> so every seat where we get less than 5% of votes, we lose our deposit  
> of GBP500.  That means that if we matched the German result of 2%  
> overall, 3% in some places, it would cost us around 350,000 Euros if  
> we had a candidate standing for every seat, and we would need that  
> money to begin with, just to be allowed to compete in every seat.   
> That is why I don't feel bad that raising money is central to the  
> strategy for PPUK.

If you need to deposit such amount for just participating into
elections, the member fee sounds very reasonable. For example in Finland
we do not need to deposit any money for the elections, but we also do
not receive any funds from the government for promoting our candidates.

We don't have member fees, we will raise the funds for elections by
donations and selling support stuff (PP shirts and such). Also if we get
seats or not, no money will be paid back, but after we have at least one
seat, we will be receiving support money from the government as long as
we have at least one seat on parliament.


-- 
Pasi "Scoffa" Palmulehto
Leader of Finnish Pirate Party