LDV Co-Editor Mark Pack – who has written here and here about the Channel 4 News reports of MPs allegedly stretching their election exenses – has been interviewed by the channel about the complex rules.
You can watch one clip here:
There’s a transcript of the interview – and a further four (count ‘em) videos – here.
Mark’s conclusion:
Elections are a competitive process. In any constituency you’ll have only one winner and all the other candidates will lose. So it’s quite understandable and quite natural that people look to use the rules, as much as they can, to try and maximise their chances of winning. But what that means is, it’s important that the rules are robust and that the rules are properly enforced, because otherwise, if you turn a blind eye to things, things get, you know, go from bad to worse.
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5 Comments
isn’t a very simple solution for all campaign material to be sourced centrally from one supplier and each constituency given equal amounts of material and money ?
would stop the parties trying overspend so much on marginals and force the to use doorstep and local campaigning.
But central sourcing can also cause problems because voters are put off by not using local firms for printing materials
Old Agent once told me you really don’t want to be setting case law and it looks as though Zac Goldsmith and this is what he and some others from all parties are doing. The general public will regard this as the expenses scandal revisited.
The full cost of buying an item should be bourne at one election at least with big budget things like full-colour plastic posters.
yes Kevin, that is the way to do it, would stop big donors of all parties getting an influence and ensure fairness
@ianrobo
I also doubt that there are suppliers with the capacity to supply everything one party would need on the timescales needed.
The legislative problem is that this is one area where MPs have a clear “personal and prejudicial” interest in producing legislation with loopholes in for them to exploit.
With the creation of “national campaign expenditure” the idea of election expense limits has broadly been abandoned.