It’s around this time of year that we always enjoy a delve in the impenetrable enigma that is the membership of Scottish Labour. (As gathered together in the picture below during Jeremy Corbyn’s last trip to Edinburgh.)

Last year, for example, we noted that the North British branch office claimed to have 30,000 members, according to a piece in the Guardian:

But all those members somehow only produced membership income for the 2017 financial year of £103,000 – meaning that if the claimed figures were accurate, each member was only contributing an average of £3.43 a year.

For some perspective, if SNP members only paid £3.43 a year each then their 2017 membership would have been an impressive 689,477 people – more than the whole of the UK Labour and Conservative parties put together.

But that’s only scratching the surface of the weirdness.

Because just six months earlier, Kezia Dugdale had told the BBC’s Gary Robertson that the Scottish membership was a rather more plausible 20,000 – including both full members and temporary “registered supporters” who paid a one-off fee to vote in leadership elections, suggesting “real” membership was significantly lower than that.

So let’s try to get all these claims in a line. (The party’s accounts are published to the end of the calendar year, ie 1 January to 31 December.)

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mid December 2014: 14,000 (Source: Labour)

late December 2014: 20,000 (Source: Jim Murphy)

– 2014 membership income: £117,000

– Annual income per member: £8.36 or £5.85

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May 2015: 15,000 (Source: The Financial Times)

October 2015: 29,000 (Source: The Scotsman)

December 2015: 19,000 (Source: The Financial Times)

– 2015 membership income: £120,000

– Annual income per member: £8 or £4.14 or £6.32

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April 2016: 13,000 (Source: The Times)

August 2016: 23,000 (Source: Kezia Dugdale)

– 2016 membership income: £108,000

– Annual income per member: £8.31 or £4.70

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February 2017: 20,000* (Source: Kezia Dugdale)

August 2017: 30,000 (Source: The Guardian)

September 2017: 21,500** (Source: The Herald)

* including registered supporters

** plus 9,500 registered supporters

– 2017 membership income: £103,000

– Annual income per member: £5.15 or £3.43 or almost any other number

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The 2017 figures in particular are an epic mess. We know (or are told) that a total of 21,985 votes were cast in the leadership election towards the end of the year, of which 17,664 were from full members and 4,321 from registered/affiliated supporters.

(Just 79 people paid the £12 fee to be registered supporters – affiliates are people with voting rights due to membership of certain trade unions – in dramatic contrast to the 180,000 who paid twice as much for the right to vote for Jeremy Corbyn in 2016.)

Those numbers can be made to tally roughly with ANY of the four 2017 figures above, depending on the level of turnout, which the party didn’t reveal, so we’re none the wiser. All we can say for sure is that membership is at least 17,664, which would give a per-head income of £5.83.

According to the Scottish Labour joining page, membership costs “as little as £3 per year”, but it also claims that “most members pay our standard rate of £4.17 a month [£50 a year] and many choose to pay more to support our campaigns”.

That last sentence can only possibly be a colossal lie. Even at the smallest possible membership figure we have, if 51% of them were paying the standard rate that’d be £450,792 a year from them alone (plus £26,496 from the others, assuming they were all paying the minimum £3). That’s getting on for FIVE TIMES the actual membership income the party has declared.

The only way to split 17,664 members to produce anywhere even roughly in the region of £103,000 from the available membership rates is something like this:

£50 full rate: 664 (£33,200)

£25 reduced rate: 1,000 (£25,000)

£3 young person/student rate: 16,000 (£48,000)

TOTAL: £106,200

So we’re still terribly interested to know where the hundreds of thousands of pounds in seemingly-missing Scottish Labour membership fees are going, because we’re fairly sure 91% of the branch office’s membership can’t be students or teenagers.

But really, if you want to know how many members Tricky Dicky Leonard’s branch office actually has, just think of a number, any number.

You’ll be as right as anyone else is.