A CROWDFUNDING campaign set up to raise £50,000 for lying LibDem MP Alistair Carmichael’s legal fees has closed four days after it was launched and raised only a fraction of its target.
Visitors to the GoFundMe page set up by Sheila Ritchie, a fellow lawyer and friend of the MP, are greeted with a pop-up box stating “the organiser has stopped donations” should they try to contribute.
GoFundMe receivedcould have become NoFundMe after a number of complaints that the fundraiser was based on the false premise that legal action being taken by the People v Carmichael was being mounted by the SNP.
Tim Morrison, one of the four constituents involved in the petition for a re-run of the poll in Orkney and Shetland, said: “Ms Ritchie cast Mr Carmichael as a hero who was being punished by a totalitarian regime for a simple mistake. They claimed that my colleagues and I are part of an SNP attempt to crush any opposition to one party rule.
“We are not. Our politics are well known now and our party affiliations are all in the public domain. This inflammatory language provoked considerable outrage.”
Some who complained on the GoFundMe website said the Carmichael campaign was a breach of the owners’ own terms and conditions.
GoFundMe amended these to disallow “campaigns in defence of formal charges or claims of heinous crimes, violent, hateful, sexual or discriminatory acts”, following two high-profile cases.
One involved the owners of an Oregon bakery who refused to bake a wedding cake for a lesbian couple. The other was a bid to raise cash to defend Kim Davis, a Kentucky clerk who was jailed for refusing to issue marriage licences to same-sex couples.
In that instance GoFundMe paid out the money raised up to the date the fundraiser was closed down. It is unclear what will happen to the £5,470 raised by Carmichael’s friend.
The National has repeatedly sought responses from Carmichael, Ritchie and GoFundMe, but emails to them and the Scottish Liberal Democrats have gone unanswered.
If it has been banned and Ritchie attempts to take the Carmichael fundraiser to another site, which might also prove fruitless since it would almost certainly be followed by a stream of complaints similar to the first attempt.
Many of the donations for Carmichael’s cause come from councillors, ex-MPs and peers, including one who claimed to be Jill Stephenson – the unionist academic who described SNP MP Mhairi Black as a “slut”.
Also on the list is a woman claiming to be Baroness Sarah Ludford – a former LibDem MEP – and a man identifying himself as Eric Holford, the Tory candidate for Airdrie and Shotts in May’s General Election.
Morrison saidadded: “As we have been attacked consistently for our support being both partisan and outside the constituency, we could have assumed that our opponents would have been careful to demonstrate widespread local support from a range of political backgrounds.
“On the contrary, it showed how little actually does exist for Mr Carmichael both within the constituency, within his own party and nationally.”
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