Police have been monitoring the political activities of a candidate while he has been seeking to be elected to parliament.

Ian Driver is standing for the Green party in the Kent constituency of South Thanet which the Ukip leader, Nigel Farage, is hoping to win next Thursday.

Official documents show that police have been monitoring Driver’s political activities since at least June 2011, recording his appearances at public meetings and demonstrations.

One of the entries notes that Driver is a “Green party councillor and parliamentary candidate for South Thanet”.

The records on Driver, 49, have been stored in a secretive database set up by police to track campaigners deemed to be “domestic extremists”.

The publication of the records comes as there are mounting questions over the police’s monitoring of elected politicians.

Driver said the monitoring of his “entirely lawful protest” was “highly inappropriate”, as the police knew that he was a parliamentary candidate and a councillor. He added that it “could impact on my rights as candidate in an election to speak openly and frankly on policy matters”.

Driver, who has no criminal record, was selected in January last year by the Green party to contest South Thanet. That month, police logged that he was one of the people at a protest outside a Margate hotel where Farage was addressing his supporters.

Driver told a local paper at the time that a number of groups attended the demonstration, protesting about different things such as Farage’s stance on immigration, and animal welfare. It was at this protest that police noted that Driver, 49, was a Green parliamentary candidate and councillor.

More recent entries recorded that last year, on 29 November, Driver, described as a “local councillor”, was one of the speakers at an animal rights march in Ramsgate and that on 6 May, he attended a demonstration against the export of animals.

Driver has obtained details of the recent monitoring from the Metropolitan police after submitting a request under the data protection act.

Two years ago, he had used the same act to obtain details of how police had logged him at 22 protests about animal exports and gay marriage between June 2011 and June 2013. The monitoring reports regularly noted that he was a Thanet councillor.

Jenny Jones, the Green party peer, discovered that police kept a log of her political movements for 11 years while she sat on the official committee scrutinising the Metropolitan police and stood to be London’s mayor. (See this here for her criticism of this surveillance).

The Metropolitan police said last year that it did not know how many elected politicians it was monitoring.

Police have argued that its “domestic extremism” unit needs to carry out surveillance on political campaigners to identify those who have committed, or may commit, crime to further their political aims.

The police say they have deleted a large number of files on individuals from the “domestic extremism” database after an internal inspectorate found there was no justification for keeping them.

Peter Francis, the former undercover police officer who has blown the whistle on the covert infiltration of political groups, has revealed that police monitored Labour politicians in the 1990s, even after they had been elected to the House of Commons.

He said he read secret files on 10 MPs during his 11 years working for the Metropolitan police’s special branch. They include Labour’s current deputy leader, Harriet Harman, the former cabinet minister Peter Hain and the former home secretary Jack Straw. “When you become an MP, the files don’t stop,” Francis has said.

See this here for more details, and here and here on how the politicians are seeking to call the police to account.