The Tories: committing electoral fraud?

“In poor democracies, votes are bought directly,” said The Guardian. “In rich ones, money is spent to secure votes.” Instead of being bribed, voters are subjected to a “deluge” of adverts and door-knocking. That is why election spending in the UK is tightly controlled by law, to ensure a relatively level playing field. Last week, the Electoral Commission found that the Conservative Party had broken those laws, and fined it £70,000. The Tories had failed to accurately report how much they had spent on the 2015 general election campaign, and three by-elections in 2014. The party was essentially accused of using the muscle of its national party to get local candidates elected – breaching strict limits on spending in individual constituencies.

I first noticed something fishy when I was looking at the Tories’ spending receipts for the last election, said Michael Crick, the Channel 4 journalist who exposed the scandal, in The Guardian. The party declared a bill for £14,213 at the Royal Harbour Hotel in Ramsgate – in South Thanet, the constituency where the Tory candidate Craig Mackinlay ran against UKIP’S Nigel Farage. This money, nearly equalling the entire cash limit for the seat, was recorded as Tory national spending. “Who runs a national campaign from a hotel in Ramsgate?” It emerged that several senior advisers, including Theresa May’s chief of staff, Nick Timothy, had been drafted in to help win the seat. We uncovered similar bits of “creative accounting” during by-elections in 2014, and found out that the Tories had spent £40,000 bussing activists to marginal seats on its “battlebuses” in 2015 – which was never declared at all. The Conservatives tried to spin the story away, said The Independent. David Cameron dismissed the failures exposed as minor accounting errors. Yet they “couldn’t disguise the scale of the scandal that is engulfing them”. A dozen police forces have now passed files to the Crown Prosecution Service over allegations that as many as 20 Tory MPS breached electoral laws.

There is speculation in “the more excitable quarters of the Left” that these MPS could lose their seats, said Patrick Maguire in the New Statesman – slashing the Tory majority and toppling May. But prosecutions are unlikely, unless candidates can be proven to have acted dishonestly; and most mistakes seem to have been made by Conservative HQ. As the Tories noted, Labour and the Lib Dems also broke the spending rules in 2015, said The Times. And it’s true that the official guidelines lack clarity. But exploiting these “blurred lines” is clearly standard practice. That must stop if public faith in democracy is to be protected.