Craig Mackinlay MP in court over election fraud allegations

South Thanet MP, Craig Mackinlay, is due in court today alongside his agent and a Conservative Party activist to answer charges of electoral fraud relating to the 2015 general election.

Mackinlay was found by a Channel 4 investigation to have declared a considerable amount of election expenditure as belonging to his party's national campaign when it should allegedly have been declared as local spending. Adding this expenditure to his expenses return would have put him a long way over the legal spending limit.

During the election campaign Nigel Farage and his team warned that Mackinlay was spending more money than he was allowed and we will soon find out if a judge agrees. Many other Conservative MPs were found in the Channel 4 investigation to have done the same thing but the CPS only brought a case again Mackinlay which suggests either a show trial given the importance of that election or that Mackinlay and his team were doing more than just following advice from the party.

Even if he is found to have cheated the 2015 election a judge would have no power to remove Mackinlay from his post as there has been another election unless he is sentenced to more than 3 months in prison.

Craig Mackinley MP interviewed under caution for 6 hours over election fraud allegations

Conservative MP, Craig Mackinlay, has been interviewed by Kent Police under caution for 6 hours as part of their investigation into alleged overspending in the last election.

Mackinlay is believed to be one of six Conservative MPs who face possible criminal charges and having their election result declared void for alleged fraudulent expenditure after Channel 4 found what it believed to be significant amounts of missing expenditure and expenditure wrongly declared against national campaigns rather than local.

The upshot of this is that several MPs are believed to have overspent by a considerable amount, breaking electoral law and giving themselves an unfair advantage. The South Thanet seat won by Mackinley was contested by Nigel Farage and the Conservatives threw the kitchen sink at it to stop him winning but in doing so it is alleged they overspent by as much as double the legal limit and hid the illegal expenses by claiming that people bussed in to the constituency or sent to work there full time on the campaign were actually working on their national campaign.

UKIP win back majority in South Thanet by-elections

UKIP candidates took another two seats on South Thanet District Council in by-elections yesterday to secure a working majority again.

The council has been UKIP-controlled since last year's local elections although infighting over Manston Airport saw some UKIP councillors form an independent group, losing UKIP's overall majority. Last night's victories means 29 out of 56 councillors are UKIP, giving the party back its working majority.

As well as the district council wins, UKIP candidates won two vacant seats on UKIP-controlled Ramsgate Town Council which now has 11 UKIP councillors out of a total of 16.

Did the Conservatives break legal spending limits in South Thanet?

A Channel 4 investigation into the Conservatives' election spending in the South Thanet constituency that Nigel Farage contested last year has raised some serious questions about the legality of the campaign there.

The Conservatives spent a huge amount of money in South Thanet to fight Nigel Farage and ultimately won the election. One of their press officers was in south Thanet full time working on their campaign there and along with other Conservative Party staffers rented rooms for the duration of the campaign in a local hotel.

There is no rule against paying for accommodation but there are rules about how you apportion the costs to election campaigns and this is where the questions are being asked. The Conservatives have apportioned the whole £14,213 bill for hotel accommodation to their national campaign and none of it for the South Thanet campaign but the Electoral Commission's rules say that if staff are working on campaigns in multiple constituencies - as the Conservatives have said - then it has to be split between the campaigns they were working for.

This leaves the Conservatives with a problem because they've already attributed £14,837 to the South Thanet campaign which had a spending limit of £15,016.38. With just £179 to play with, they would need to spread the hotel bill over 80 constituencies to stay within the legal spending limit for South Thanet.

The Electoral Commission makes the rules and the Electoral Commission is responsible for making sure that the rules are followed. If they don't investigate this dubious spending and take action if it turns out to be illegal then there's no point having an Electoral Commission.

They're all in this together

How scared of UKIP must Labour and the Conservatives be to be campaigning together in South Thanet with Hate not Hope? Could it be anything to do with Nigel Farage's 7% lead in the polls?

UKIP winning in Thurrock and South Thanet, rogue poll in Rochester & Strood

Two separate polls have put UKIP ahead in Thurrock and South Thanet.

A Lord Ashcroft poll predicts a victory for Tim Aker who, if he wins, will have become a councillor, MEP and then an MP in just 12 months.

Party	Poll %
UKIP	35%
Labour	30%
Conservative	28%

A Survation poll predicts a whopping 7% majority for Nigel Farage in South Thanet. The poll also found that a third of residents in the constituency have talked to a UKIP activist on the doorstep and 1 in 5 have spoken to Nigel Farage.

Party	Poll %
UKIP	39%
Conservative	32%
Labour	26%

Meanwhile, the Daily Mail are claiming that a secret opinion poll commissioned by UKIP shows Mark Reckless losing his seat to the Tories but the party says it hasn't commissioned such a poll. Reckless tweeted:

Why does @LordAshcroft assume that "don't knows" who voted for me in 2010 as Conservative and in 2014 as UKIP will now vote for my opponent?
— Mark Reckless (@MarkReckless) April 25, 2015

Survation has Nigel Farage 11% clear in South Thanet

Constituency polling by Survation in South Thanet puts Nigel Farage 11% in front of Labour, 12% in front of the Conservatives and on course to win the seat in May.

Survation has the best record of predicting UKIP success (or otherwise) in elections which is presumably why Alan Bown chose them to perform all his constituency polling. If Survation are calling it for Farage then Labour and the Tories should be very worried.

The Tories are going into the election with a respectable 6.6% majority which translates into what should be a comfortable 7,617 votes clear of the opposition but UKIP is decimating the Tory vote and taking chunks out of Labour too.

Voting Conservative in South Thanet will only split the UKIP vote and let Labour win.

Nigel Farage selected for South Thanet

Nigel Farage has been selected to contest South Thanet at next year's general election.

It was largely a foregone conclusion that Farage would be selected at last night's hustings in Ramsgate but there have been upsets of this sort in the past with candidate selection which, unlike other parties, is a matter for local branches to decide. ITV News was certainly spinning that it was a done deal last night because of the amount of press at the hustings not realising that even if Farage hadn't been selected it would be a positive media story for UKIP - there would have been ten times as much coverage and it would have proven that UKIP is a party so committed to democracy that its leader can be rejected for a target seat by ordinary members. Farage's selection in South Thanet was a foregone conclusion because he is the candidate most likely to secure a victory by a country mile and because the members want him, not because it was engineered by head office.

South Thanet experienced a purple revolution at the local elections this year and that electoral success was followed with a by-election victory for the district council. People in Thanet are on the frontier of the battle against unfettered immigration and are fed up of the waste and incompetence of their Labour and Tory councillors. Only UKIP can beat Labour in Thanet.

Survation poll shows that only UKIP can beat Labour in South Thanet

A Survation poll on voting intentions in the South Thanet constituency published today makes interesting reading.

The poll shows that only UKIP can challenge Labour in South Thanet and only 22% of UKIP voters would consider voting Conservative if there was no UKIP candidate. Almost two thirds of people who said they intended to vote for UKIP said so because they like UKIP policies whereas most Conservative and Labour voters said they would vote for those parties simply out of habit.

The timing of the poll is perfect because the europhile Tory MP for South Thanet, Laura Sandys, announced this week that she would be standing down at the next election which immediately sparked rumours that Nigel Farage would pick it as his constituency for the 2015 general election.

Predictably, Tory propagandist Harry Cole has tried to spin this poll as evidence that voting UKIP lets Labour win on the Guido Fawkes blog despite the evidence showing that actually, voting Conservative in South Thanet will split the UKIP vote and let Labour win.  If UKIP didn't put up a candidate in South Thanet, the Tories still couldn't win because whilst 22% of UKIP voters said they would vote Conservative if there was no UKIP candidate, 19% said they would vote Labour and 52% of UKIP voters said they would still vote UKIP even if it meant Ed Miliband would become prime minster against just 27% who said they would vote "tactically" for the Tories to stop him.

The Tories have been busily promoting the party line that voting UKIP lets Labour win all over the country and here we have the evidence to back up what we've been telling people all along which is that a vote for UKIP is a vote for UKIP and in many cases voting Tory splits the UKIP vote and lets Labour or the Lib Dems win.

In 2015 we will see UKIP's first MPs elected and Labour getting the most MPs elected. The extent to which Labour will win depends entirely on how much the Tories split the UKIP vote. UKIP attracts votes from all three of the old parties so if they're clever, the Tories will step aside in marginal seats like South Thanet that they just can't win and negotiate with UKIP for support to form a minority government (but no coalition) to keep Labour out of power.

The voters of South Thanet have made it very clear: vote blue, get red.